Analyze "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" as a narrative ballad with a message. How has Coleridge used the various features of a ballad in this poem?

Here is the answer and explanation to the question Analyze “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as a narrative ballad with a message. How has Coleridge used the various features of a ballad in this poem?

Analyze “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as a narrative ballad with a message. How has Coleridge used the various features of a ballad in this poem?

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In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” Coleridge draws on both the typical style and content of the English ballad to create an appropriate and unique atmosphere for the timeless message he imparts.

One of the first things a reader notices is Coleridge’s use of words that had become archaic long before his own time, such as “eftsoons,” and the unusual spellings and capitalizations, in the “Argument” (“Ancyent Marinere,” for example) and in the poem itself. The impression is one of a poem that is, like the Mariner himself, “ancient.” It’s instructive to compare the metrical form with that of an actual folk ballad, such as “True Thomas.” Coleridge uses the same rhyme scheme, A-B-C-B, with quatrains in iambic tetrameter. In both, the effect is what we would expect if someone were telling us a story, without artifice. In spite of the archaic usages, Coleridge’s language is simple and appears deliberately childlike at times, with repetitions and statements of obvious things poets of his time normally would have avoided as less than sophisticated:

The sun came up upon the left,

Out of the sea came he!

And he shone bright, and on the right

Went down into the sea.

At the start of part 2 the quatrain is repeated almost verbatim but with the direction of the sun’s rising and setting reversed. Prior to this, at the close of part 1, the revelation of the Mariner’s having shot the albatross occurs without preparation, in the artless and matter-of-fact way typical of the ballad form. It is not unlike the abrupt statement at the end of “True Thomas”:

And until seven years were gone and past

True Thomas on earth was never seen.

The balladeer presents this fact unemotionally, as if it is part of the normal, unsurprising process of life. The same is true in the ballad “Edward,” where at the very start the abrupt question “Why does your brand sae drip wi’ blood, / Edward, Edward?” reveals in an instant the tragedy being enacted.

Coleridge, however, does not wish merely to replicate the form and style of the folk ballad. His poem is, rather, a self-conscious reimagining of an artless kind of verse. The great length of the poem, and the fact that it concludes with its famous, explicit moral, “He prayeth best, who loveth best, / All things both great and small” separate it from the folk ballads Coleridge so obviously has in mind as models.

Just as his friend Wordsworth, in spearheading the new movement we call Romanticism, sought to use simple, everyday language in his verse and to avoid “poetic diction,” Coleridge takes a similar but individual path of his own in creating a kind of super ballad. This work derives from the poetry of the people but transforms into a work unique in style, form, and content in the history of English poetry.

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Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge is a part of the collection Lyrical Ballads (1798), which he wrote together with William Wordsworth.

A “ballad” is typically a poem/verse that narrates a story, and can be sung because of its rhyming pattern. The ballad scheme was quite popular amongst many Romantic poets.

Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a good example of literary ballad (the ballad tradition in literature, similar to the folk ballads). It is also a lyrical ballad (an innovation by Coleridge and Wordsworth that put together two earlier-distinct poetic genres), as the narrator tells his personal feelings while narrating the story. One of the simplest similarities is the use of simple and natural characters.

In the poem, a mariner or sailor narrates about a certain journey he made with other sailors into the sea, wherein some supernatural elements occurred on the ship, and hence, like a traditional ballad, there is a lot of action and drama in the story. Additionally, supernatural elements, like ghosts, were typical of early ballads.

Typically a ballad has four lines in one stanza with a rhyming pattern. In Rime of the Ancient Mariner, most of the stanzas have four lines, though we occasionally see more than 4 lines also (reaching 6 lines sometimes), maybe, because Coleridge doesn’t seem too keen to make a compromise on this to maintain this perfect ballad structure.

Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, like a ballad, has iambic tetrameter (4 syllables) in the first and third line, as well as iambic trimester (3 syllables) in the second and fourth line of the stanza. But again, there are exceptions to this. 

As mentioned earlier, a ballad can be sung because of its rhyming scheme. Rime of the Ancient Mariner follows a rhyming scheme ABCB, i.e. second and fourth lines rhyme. Besides the rhyming, we also see repetition and alliteration in the poem, much used literary techniques in a ballad.

Water, water, everywhere, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink

About, about, in reel and rout The death-fires danced at night; The water, like a witch’s oils, Burnt green, and blue and white.

Though Rime of the Ancient Mariner doesn’t strictly adhere to the perfect ballad structure, these slight technical manipulations at places, have created beautiful and miraculous effects, which adds to Coleridge’s achievement.

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