With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;

COMPOSED UPON WESTMINSTER
BRIDGE, SEPTEMBER 3, 1802

Earth has not anything to show more fair: 160 Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty:

Venice threw off the yoke of the Eastern Empire as early as 809 and remained a republic or an oligarchy until conquered by Napoleon in 1797. At one time she had extensive possessions and colonies in the Levant. The ancient Doges annually, on Ascension Day, threw a ring into the Adriatic in formal token of this espousal, or of perpetual do- § The conclusion of a series of sonnets to the minion.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

(1772-1834)

KUBLA KHAN*

In Xanadu1 did Kubla Khan2
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:

Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,

To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; | And drunk the milk of Paradise.
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which
slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

10

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

50

THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER†

IN SEVEN PARTS

ARGUMENT

How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by Storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole and how from thence she made her course to the Tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came back

As if this earth in fast thick pants were to his own Country.

breathing,

20

A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,

30

40

And on her dulcimer she played, Coleridge says this poem was composed when he had fallen asleep just after reading from Marco Polo in Purchas's Pilgrimage how "In Xandu did Cublai Can build a stately palace," etc. There were more lines which he failed to record. Charles Lamb spoke of the poem as "a vision which he [Coleridge] repeats so enchantingly that it irradiates and brings heaven and elysian bowers into my parlour when he sings or says it."

1 A region in Tartary. 2 Kubla the Cham, or Emperor.

PART I.

It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
"By thy long gray beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?

1-12. An ancient Mariner meeteth three Gallants bidden to a wedding-feast, and detaineth one.

From the publication, in 1798, of the Lyrical Ballads, the joint production of Coleridge and Wordsworth, may be dated very definitely the recognition of the new spirit in English literature which is commonly spoken of as the Romantic Revival. See Eng. Lit.. pp. 232-235. Coleridge, in the fourteenth chapter of his Biographia Literaria, writes of the occasion of the Lyrical Ballads as follows: "During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of the imagination. The sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset, diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. the one, the incidents and agents were to be. in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations. supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed

In

For

Out of the sea came he!

And he shone bright, and on the right
Went down into the sea.

Higher and higher every day,

Till over the mast at noon-'

The Wedding-Guest here beat his breast,
For he heard the loud bassoon.

The bride hath paced into the hall,

Red as a rose is she;

20 Nodding their heads before her goes
The merry minstrelsy.

the

himself under supernatural agency.
second class, subjects were to be chosen from
ordinary life; the characters and incidents were The Wedding-Guest he beat his breast,
to be such as will be found in every village and Yet he cannot choose but hear;
its vicinity where there is a meditative and feel-
ing mind to seek after them, or to notice them And thus spake on that ancient man,
when they present themselves.
The bright-eyed Mariner.

"In this idea originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads; in which it was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to

procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity

and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not,

ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand. With this view I wrote The Ancient Mariner."

66

"And now the Storm-blast came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong:

He struck with his o'ertaking wings,
And chased us south along.

With sloping masts and dipping prow,
As who pursued with yell and blow
Still treads the shadow of his foe,
And forward bends his head,

The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,
And southward aye we fled.

And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:

The poem is here given in the revised text of 1829.
As first printed in the Lyrical Ballads, the
diction and spelling were considerably more
archaic, as the Argument, which was not
retained in the later edition, shows. Words- And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
worth gives the following information: As green as emerald.

"Much the greatest part of the story was
Mr. Coleridge's invention, but certain parts
I suggested; for example, some crime was
to be committed which should bring upon
the Old Navigator, as Coleridge afterward de-
lighted to call him, the spectral persecution,
as a consequence of that crime and his own
wanderings. I had been reading in Shel-
Vocke's Voyages a day or two before, that,
while doubling Cape Horn, they frequently
saw albatrosses in that latitude, the largest
sort of sea-fowl,
their
some extending
wings twelve or thirteen feet. Suppose,' said
I. 'you represent him as having killed one
of these birds on entering the South Sea,
and that the tutelary spirits of these re-
gions take upon them to avenge the crime."
The incident was thought fit for the purpose
and adopted accordingly." Wordsworth also
furnished several lines of the poem, espe-
cially 15-16, 226-227.

1 at once

And through the drifts the snowy clifts
Did send a dismal sheen:

Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken-
The ice was all between.

30

40

50

The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,

70 The furrow followed free;

We were the first that ever burst

Into that silent sea.

Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white, All in a hot and copper sky,

3 "The marineres gave it biscuit-worms" (1798 ed.) They are very numerous, and there is no climate