Rime of the Ancient Mariner

A lot of times reading something that is turgid or in a form different than I usually read makes it difficult for me to understand a piece. For instance, a while back I was reading The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock and it wasn’t until I saw a webcomic about the poem that I was really able to see what Eliot was going for. Along the same vein, Rime of the Ancient Mariner can be confusing. Though I wouldn’t consider myself a metalhead by any means, I remembered recently that Iron Maiden had a song of the same title. After looking into the lyrics, I noticed that it wasn’t simply an allusory title, but rather a reworking of the poem. This link takes you to those lyrics. If like me, you have problems envisioning certain works, perhaps looking at it from a different perspective will help you grasp the concepts and meaning as well.

Dorothy Wordsworth

The “insane” sister of William was the underappreciated writer of the family. Most of her life was spent with her brother and his writing counterpart Coleridge. She lived with them in Germany and wrote many great poems that most of the time were over looked because she was a female and because her brother was always in the spotlight as the established writer of the family. Furthermore, there were many historians that believed that the two of them had a slightly unuasual attraction that a brother and sister should not have for eachother. However, the work by both of them do not shine any light on the matter.

Much of her work was based off of her life in her journals that she kept while living with her brother and Coleridge. The Alfoxden Journal of her’s was a published journal of the accounts that took place while in that area. Her work was later given the respect that it deserved in the later half of her life but could be considered to have come a little too late.

The Prelude

The Prelude to me was very dry and boring and because I had already done research on Wordsworth for my presentation it was a lot of knowledge that I had already attained from other sources. However, from the research that I had done for my presentation I found that he was a very self-obsorbed type of writer and that he really thought somewhat highly of himself and his position in life which he had a great passion for. His writing in The Prelude also showed that he believe that the many trips that he took to various places were very interesting in the sense that he believed that he was the only person doing this type of traveling. In his own mind he was very famous and he had already arrived as a poet and that there was not much else that he thought he had to do in order for people to believe that he was an influencial artist during his time period.