English Assignment

ENGLISH ASSIGNMENT

Content:

Small Biography of Coleridge.

His Literacy contribution.

Critical appreciation of “the Rime of the Ancient Mariner”.

Introduction of the poem “the Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Summary of the poem.

Themes present in the poem.

Poetic devices used.

1)Biography of Coleridge:

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English Poet,literary critic and philosopher who was the founder of the Romantic Movement(along with his friend Wordsworth) in England and a member of the Lake Poets.Coleridge was born on 21 October,1772 in the town of Ottery St mary in Devon,England.Coleridge wrote some of the most famous poems such as the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Kubla Khan”,as well as the major prose work Biographia Literaria.Coleridge’s father was the Reverend John Coleridge(1718-1781),who was a well respected vicar of st Mary’s Church,Ottery St Mary and headmaster of the King’s School(England).Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the youngest of ten children by the Reverend Mr. John Coleridge’s second wife ,Anne Bowden.Coleridge took no pleasure in boyish sports but instead read “incessantly” and played by himself.He spent his childhood in a charity School studying and writing poetry.Throughout his life,Coleridge idealised his father as pious and innocent,while his relationship with his mother was more problematic.He was rarely allowed to return home during the school term,and this distance from his family proved emotionally damaging.He felt very lonely and expressed his loneliness in his school poems “Frost at Midnight”:”With unclosed lids,already had I dreamt of my sweet Birthplace.From 1791 until 1794,Coleridge attended Jesus College,Cambridge.In 1792,for an ode that he wrote on the slave trade he was rewarded with the Browne Gold Medal.In 1795,Coleridge met the poet Wordsworth who later became his friend and in 1798 both of them together published a joint volume of poetry,Lyrical Ballads,which proved to be the starting point for the English Romantic Age.In 1804,Coleridge travelled to Sicily and Matla working for a time as acting public Secretary of Matla under the Commissioner,Alexander Ball.He performed this task quite successfully.He resided in St Anton’s Palacein the village of Attard.However he gave this up and returned to England in 1806.At his return many people along with Wordsworth was shocked at his condition.Coleridge left Britain in the hope that leaving Britain’s damp climate would improve his health and thus enable him to reduce his consumption of opium but instead Coleridge became a full blown opium addict,using the drugs as a substitute for the lost vigour and creativity of his youth.His opium addiction now began to take over his life,he separated from his wife Sarah in 1808,quarreled with wordsworth in 1810,lost part of his annuity in 1811 and finally put himself under the care of Dr.Daniel in 1814.His addiction caused him many problems which he had to face with lot of troubles.Between 1810 and 1820 ,Coleridge gave a series of lectures in London and Bristol those on Shakespeare renewed interest in the playwright as a model for contemporary writers.But most of Coleridge’s lectures were plagued with problems of delays and a general irregularity of quality from one lecture to another due to coleridges ill health opium addiction problems.As a result of these factors,he often failed to prepare anything but the loosest set of notes for his lectures and regularly entered into extremely long digressions which his audiences found difficult to follow.However,it was the lectures on Hamlet given on 2nd January,1812 that was considered the best and has influenced Hamlet Studies ever since. In august 1814 Coleridge was approached by lord Byron’s publisher,John murray,about the possibility of translating Goethe’s Classic Faust (1808).Coleridge was considered as a great writer of the time and he accepted the commission,only to abandon work on it after six weeks.Until recently,scholars were in agreement that Coleridge never returned to the project,despite Goethe;s own belief in the 1820’s that he had in fact completed a long translation of the work.In September 2007,Oxford University Press sparked a heated scholarly controversy by publishing an English translation of Goethe’s work that purported to be coleridge’s long lost masterpiece.Coleridge opium addiction was constant and more worsening.In April 1816,with his worsening addiction his spirits depressed and his family alienated,he took residence in the Highgate homes,then just north of London,of the physician James Gillman,first at South Grove and later at the nearby 3 The Grove.It is unclear whether his growing use of opium (and the brandy in which it was dissolved)was a symptom or a cause of his growing depressions.Gillman tried to reduce coleridge’s use of opium and was partially successful in it.Coleridge remained in Highgate for the rest of his life,and the house became a place of literary pilgrimage for writers including Carlyle and Emerson.In Gillman’s home,Coleridge finished his major prose work,the “Biographia literaria”which was drafted in 1815 and finished in 1817,a volume composed of 23 chapters of autobiographical notes and dissertations on various subjects,including some incisive literary theory and criticism.He published many other writings while he was living at Gillman homes,notably the Lay Sermons of 1816 and 1817,Sibylline Leaves(1817),Hush(1820),Aids to Reflection(1825),and On the Constitution of the church and state(1830).He also produced essays which were published shortly after his death,such as Essay on Faith(1838) and Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit(1840).Coleridge also worked extensively on the various manuscripts which form his “Opus Maximum”,a work which was in part intended as a post-Kantian work of philosophical synthesis but the work was never published in his lifetime.

Unfortunately,Coleridge met his death on 25th july 1834.He died in Highgate,London on 25 July 1834 as result of heart failure compounded by an unknown lung disorder ,possibly linked to his use of opium.Coleridge had spent 18 years under the roof of the Gillman Family,who built an addition onto their home to accommodate the poet.

2)His Literacy contribution:

Coleridge is one of the most important figures in English poetry.His critical work,especially on Shakespeare,was highly influential,and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture.Coleridge coined many familiar words and phrases,including suspension of disbelief.He was a major influence on Emerson and American transcendentalism.Much of Coleridge’s reputation as a literary critic is founded on the lectures that he undertook in the winter of 1810-11,which were sponsored by the philosophical Institution and given at Scot’s corporation hall off fetter lane , Fleet street.Coleridge poems directly and deeply influenced all the major poets of the age,He was known by his contemporaries as a meticulous craftsman who was more rigorous in his carefull reworking of his poems than any other poet,and poets like Southey and Wordsworth were dependent on his professional advice.As important as Coleridge was to poetry as a poet,he was equally important to poetry as a critic.

His philosophy of poetry which he developed over many years has been deeply influential in the field of literary criticism.This Influence can be seen in such critics as A.O.Lovejoy and I.A.Richards.

3)Critical Appreciation of the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”:

Coleridge was known for his long poems.Coleridge's first version of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It was the longest work and drew more praise and attention than anything else in the volume.Coleridge is probably best known for his poems, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel. Even those who have never read the Rime have come under its influence,its words have given the English language the metaphor of an albatross around one's neck, the quotation of "water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink" (almost always rendered as "but not a drop to drink"), and the phrase "a sadder and a wiser man" (again, usually rendered as "a sadder but wiser man"). The phrase "All creatures great and small" may have been inspired by The Rime: "He prayeth best, who loveth best; All things both great and small;For the dear God who loveth us;He made and loveth all." Coleridge has expressed many feelings in the poem itself.

a)Introduction about the poem “The Rime Of the Ancient Mariner”:

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is the longest major poem by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The Poem was written in 1797–98 and published in 1798 in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner "is an influential poem but it’s a doozy of confusing read. The poem relates the experiences of a sailor who has returned from a long sea voyage. The mariner stops a man who is on the way to a wedding ceremony and begins to narrate a story. The wedding-guest's reaction puzzled or bemusement to impatience to fear to fascination as the mariner's story progresses, as can be seen in the language style. Coleridge uses narrative techniques such as personification and repetition and many.

b)Summary of the Poem:

Three guys on their way to a wedding celebration when an old sailor i.e. the Mariner stops one of them at the door i.e. one of the wedding guest.The Mariner with his hypnotic eyes draws the attention of the guest and he starts telling a story about a disastrous journey he took. The Wedding Guest really wants to go party, but he can't let himself go away from this grizzled old mariner. The Mariner begins his story. They left port, and the ship sailed down near Antarctica to get away from a bad storm, but then they get caught in a dangerous, foggy ice field. An albatross shows up to steer them through the fog and provide good winds, but then the Mariner decides to shoot it.Pretty soon the sailors lose their wind, and it gets really hot. They run out of water, and everyone blames the Mariner. The ship seems to be haunted by a bad spirit, and weird stuff starts appearing, like slimy creatures that walk on the ocean. The Mariner's crewmates decide to hang the dead albatross around his neck to remind him of his big mistake.Everyone is literally dying of thirst. The Mariner sees another ship's sail at a distance. He wants to yell out, but his mouth is too dry, so he sucks some of his own blood to moisten his lips.The time he saw the ship he was very happy and says- "A ship! We're saved." Sadly, the ship is a ghost ship piloted by two spirits, Death and Life-in-Death, who have to be the last people you'd want to meet on a journey. Everyone on the Mariner's ship dies.The wedding guest realizes, "Ah! You're a ghost!" But the Mariner says, "Well, actually, I was the only one who didn't die." He continues his story, he's on a boat with a lot of dead bodies, surrounded by an ocean full of slimy things. Worse, these slimy things are nasty water snakes. But the Mariner escapes his curse by unconsciously blessing the hideous snakes, and the albatross drops off his neck into the ocean.The Mariner falls into a sweet sleep, and it finally rains when he wakes up. A storm strikes up in the distance, and all the dead sailors rise like zombies to pilot the ship. The sailors don't actually come back to life. Instead, angels fill their bodies, and another supernatural spirit under the ocean seems to push the boat. The Mariner faints and hears two voices talking about how he killed the albatross and still has more self punishment to do. These two mysterious voices explain how the ship is moving.After a speedy journey, the ship ends up back in port again. The Mariner sees angels standing next to the bodies of all his crewmates. Then a rescue boat shows up to take him back to shore. The Mariner is happy that a guy called "the hermit" is on the rescue boat. The hermit is in a good mood. All of a sudden there's a loud noise, and the Mariner's ship sinks. The hermit's boat picks up the Mariner.When they get on shore, the Mariner is desperate to tell his story to the hermit. He feels a terrible pain until the story had been told. In fact, the Mariner says that he still has the same painful need to tell his story, which is why he stopped the Wedding Guest on this occasion. Wrapping up, the Mariner tells the Wedding Guest that he needs to learn how to say his prayers and love other people and things. Then the Mariner leaves, and the Wedding Guest no longer wants to enter the wedding. He goes home and wakes up the next day, as the famous last lines go, "a sadder and a wiser man."

c)Themes Present in the Poem:

1)The Spiritual World: The Metaphysical: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" occurs in the natural, physical world-the land and ocean. However, the work has popularly been interpreted as an allegory of man's connection to the spiritual, metaphysical world.

2)The Natural World: The Physical spirit, whether God or a pagan one, dominates the physical world in order to punish and inspire reverence in the Ancient Mariner. At the poem's end, the Ancient Mariner preaches respect for the natural world as a way to remain in good standing with the spiritual world, because in order to respect God, one must respect all of his creations.

3) Imprisonment:"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is in many ways a portrait of imprisonment and its inherent loneliness and torment. The first instance of imprisonment occurs when the sailors are swept by a storm into the "rime." The ice is "mast-high", and the captain cannot steer the ship through it.

4) Religion: Although Christian and pagan themes are confounded at times in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", many readers and critics have insisted on a Christian interpretation. Coleridge claimed that he did not intend for the poem to have a moral, but it is difficult not to find one in Part 7.The Ancient Mariner essentially preaches closeness to God through prayer and the willingness to show respect to all of God's creatures.

5) Liminality: In the Ancient Mariner's story, liminal spaces are bewildering and cause pain.(A liminal space is defined as a place on the edge of a realm or between two realms, whether a forest and a field, or reason and imagination. A liminal space often signifies a liminal state of mind, such as the threshold of the imagination's wonders.

6) The Act of Storytelling:In "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Coleridge draws our attention not only to the Ancient Mariner's story, but to the act of storytelling itself. The Ancient Mariner's tale comprises so much of the poem that moments that occur outside of it often seem like interruptions.

d)Poetic devices used:

Alliteration

Example:The Wedding Guest BEAT his BREAST for he heard the loud BASSOON

Repetition

Example:The ice was here the ice was here the ice was all around

Assonance

Example:Yet HE cannot choose but HEAR

Internal Rhyme

Example:The ship drove FAST, lous roared the BLAST

Consonance

Example:And a good south WIND sprung up from BEHIND.

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