Customer Reviews

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Other Poems

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This review refers to "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Other Poems" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge....

Get swept away to a world of dreams in this beautiful collection of Coleridge's best poetry.Open this book to any poem and you will immediatly be transported to fantastick worlds and mysterious voyages.You will find no need to get caught up in trying to anaylze, you'll just be caught up in his words.The reader can identify their own experiences within his works, and make their own interpertations.

Coleridge will stir your imagination with such great works as the adventurous and ghostly voyage of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"(in the entire 7 parts),the dream land of "Kubla Khan", and my personal favorite,the sadly unfinished other worldly fairy tale of "Christabel".

You'll find many others of his classic poetry that emcompasses both worlds of dreams and reality. "The Pain of Sleep", ""The Fruit Plucker" and "Time, Real and Imaginary" are examples of these.Other works included are "If I Had But Two Little Wings","Songs from 'Zapolya'", "Youth and Age", and the beautiful "Frost at Midnight", all stories of love and life.

There are many more wonderful writings to be found here and they are both ageless and to be enjoyed by any age. There are poems to be read aloud almost as songs.There are poems to read to yourself as well.

"He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all."...
From"The Ancient Marnier"

A great gift for yourself or the poetry lover in your life...enjoy..Laurie

The Ancient Mariner is a story with a message. A truly modern message. It is a conservation story. But if it were written today it would be published by the MBS (Mind Body Spirit )section of the publishing world. It is all about the consequences of unnecessarily harming one of Nature's creatures. The Mariner kills an albatross for no reason whatever. He suffers physical, spiritual and mental (MBS again) anguish as his punishment.
All the other crew members on the ship are allowed to die just for condoning what he did, but death is an easier punishment than the 'life-in-death' the mariner himself is doomed to endure.
The message is stressed in the lines at the end, 'He prayeth best, who loveth best all things both great and small; for the dear God who loveth us he made and loveth all.'

The Mariner's deliverance from the most intense part of his physical suffering does not begin until the moment he learns to love the loathsome slimy creatures he sees crawling 'with legs upon the slimy sea'
His punishment is life-long since he must spend the rest of his days roaming the earth and spreading his conservation message to the world.
This is my favourite poem. I learned it by heart and remember reciting it during long night watches when I was a young sailor exploring the Pacific. It takes half an hour to recite the whole poem, but the language is pure joy on the tongue. The poem has influenced my life. One of my favourite verses is:

'The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew
The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.'

I know what it feels like to sail like that in the Pacific. They must have struck the south-east trades.

But there is another verse which is a study in perfect suspense writing. It begins . . .
"We listened and looked sideways up!
Fear at my heart as at a cup,
My life-blood seemed to sip!

I recommend you read and re-red this story and that we all take its message on board. It is more relevant and important today than ever before with mankind killing off hundreds of species every year.

Coleridge is the only English Romantic poet I like, and Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the main reason. However, this collection also contains another long poem that is often overlooked--Christabel. This a very haunting poem which was unfortunately unfinished when Coleridge died. As for the rest of the selections, Kubla Khan is really the only short poem of the same quality as Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

If you want a decent copy of this classic poem, avoid this version. The words are all there, but the formatting resembles prose paragraphs. This is a common problem with free versions of classic poetry, so beware.

Note: this review pertains only to the free version Kindle version.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge produced nearly all of his best poetry in a two year period, 1797-1798, including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan. After writing Ode to Dejection (1802), his farewell to the Muse of Poetry, he wrote few poems and concentrated almost exclusively on literary criticism and political, philosophical, and theological essays.

This short, inexpensive Dover publication offers a broad sampling of the poetry of Coleridge - imaginative poems, lyrical ballads, witty poems, and more serious poetry on literary topics and political events. I expected more fantastical poems like Kubla Khan and I was unprepared for his serious, contemplative, and somewhat difficult poetry. Coleridge was more like Keats and Wordsworth than I had realized.

I was surprised by Coleridge in another way. He confronted political and social issues that are just as relevant and controversial today. Fears in Solitude, written in 1798 during the alarm of a possible invasion by France, criticizes the public's naïve willingness to undertake military conflict, while arguing that Coleridge's criticism was neither unpatriotic nor mistimed. "I have told most bitter truth, but without bitterness."

Similarly, in France: An Ode he tells of his unbridled enthusiasm for the revolution in France, followed by his bitter disappointment as the cause of liberty was betrayed by a revolution gone awry. In his short poem The Dungeon Coleridge challenges the practice of incarcerating prisoners in dark, dismal dungeons. He questions whether more humane treatment might be more curative.

His short, witty poem Cologne should earn him honorary membership in the Sierra Club. In observing how the Rhine River washes away the sewage of Cologne, he asks a question not fully answered today: But tell me, Nymphs, what power divine shall henceforth wash the River Rhine?

After reading his better known poetry, I suggest that you skip around to other poems of interest. But do come back to the more challenging poems. They will likely require multiple readings, but the effort will be rewarded.

Folks, we have a horrible mix-up here as to the reviews on this work. I just scanned them and it would seem that Amazon, in all of its wisdom, has included several editions of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in Seven Parts," along with reviews of several collections of poetry, some by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and other not. It has mixed up at lease seven or eight different editions of this same work.

I wanted a copy of this poem, one of my favorites from when I was a kid, on my Kindle. I wanted just the poem; no whistle, no bells, no commentary, not introduction...no nothing...just the poem. I would have gladly paid money for it, but hey, free is better if I can get what I want. I did in his case. I downloaded the free version of this poem from this site:

[...]

It was precisely what I wanted. This one was produced by Judy Boss. It is, for Kindle, well formatted for a poem. Kindle has had troubles with their formats of poetry on Kindle and while this is not perfect, it is most certainly workable and readable. Boss, who ever she is, did a very nice job on this one.

Whole the formatting is not the same as you would find in a traditional hard copy; it is still of the quality that you can keep the rhythm of the poem going which is extremely important for this particular work. I had no problems with it what-so-ever.

Keep in mind; this is just the poem. It is not one of a collection of poems. It is not a work with an introduction. It has not been footnoted nor have comments been added. It is JUST the poem.

This is not the only work that has been messed up as far as the reviews go. Someone at the Amazon head-shed does not realize that the different editions of different books and music can make all the difference in the world and that a rose is not always a rose when it comes to stuff like this.

Hope this was a help.

Don Blankenship
The Ozarks

I assume because there are so many items that fall under the search terms of 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' + Richard Burton that there was bound to be some confusion, but apparently I'm the first person to post a review here that actually matches the item in question, with all of the others being for books and other types of items that don't match the specifics in question, as far as I can tell. Anyway...

The actual item in question here is a 2-cassette audio book from Newman Books-on-Cassette, put out in 1978 and featuring Richard Burton reading Samuel Coleridge Taylor's 'Rime' (with additional voice work from John Neville and Robert Hardy), as well as works by Dylan Thomas (like 'Fern Hill' and 'Do not go gentle...' among others), Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christopher Fry, John Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh, Ernest Dowson, James Elroy Flecker, Robert Graves, Bishop Henry King, William Dunbar, Edward Thomas, John Clare, R.S. Thomas, William Shakespeare (yeah, that guy), John Betjeman and Francis Thompson.

And, of course, since it's Richard Burton doing the reading, you know it's that much more amazing. Great, great readings.

This collection of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's work is a fantastic snapshot of the great romantic poet. Included in it are his two great poems, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan." Additionally, my two favorites, "Lewti" and "Love" are in the collection. Coleridge builds amazing worlds from his education and his opium habit that still astound the reader. Anyone who is looking to read some Coleridge should pick this one up.

'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' is a haunting and strange poem. The great memorable lines of the opening , ' It is an ancient mariner / and he stoppeth one of three/ by the long grey beard and thy glittering eye / wherefore thou stoppest thou me?/ lead us to a kind of enchanted and impossible world. The tale itself of the slaying of the albatross of the cosmic coordination in response to the evil of Man has a certain Biblical flavor which connects the story with Jonah . The work as a whole I have always found perplexing in its ultimate meaning, but strong in its great poetic lines. (Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink)
In another great poem in this collection ' In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree ' Coleridge 's great musical power and mystical sense is again felt .This scattered man of ideas this long- suffering lonely genius the incredible master of the mind's digression, this supreme talker and goer- on- and -on did in his youth also write great poetry .
There is much much beauty here amid the musings and meanderings of this great wandering and wondering mind.

This has been a favorite story for over twenty years. I love to read and re-read it occasionally. I manage to find some new adventure or feeling to consider nearly every time I open it. What a wonderful reminder, that we are the caretakers of our wild world and the ability to preserve or destroy it rests largely, if not solely with the human race. Don't misunderstand, it's more of an adventure than anything else, but the undertones of environmental responsibility are subtly there occasionally as well.