I bought this book as a present to myself for memorizing Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s magnificent old poem. The first thing you should know is that most of the verses can be sung to the tune of ‘Puff, the Magic Dragon.’ I memorized ‘Ancient Mariner’ while swimming laps, which seemed appropriate. A gallon Ziploc bag will protect your poem from the splashier swimmers in the pool, if you decide to do the same.
I had always loved the wood engravings of Gustave Doré, and the writings of Martin Gardner, and here they were combined in one book. The original copy of ‘Ancient Mariner’ that I had downloaded from the internet had textual errors, although there is possibly one in this book’s version, too, at line 243—Gardner’s version has ‘lay like a load on my weary eye’ whereas the two other versions I consulted had ‘lay dead like a load on my weary eye.’ The latter version scans a bit more nicely.
My 2003 copy of ‘The Annotated Ancient Mariner’ contains a preface to the Second Edition by Martin Gardner, an introduction, and the following five parts:
I. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (a biography)
II. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner from Coleridge’s ‘Poetical Works,’ 1834
III. The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere as first printed in ‘Lyrical Ballads,’ 1798
IV. Interpretations
V. Selected References
As it turned out, I had memorized the 1834 version, and this is the edition that Gardner annotates. His explanations are detailed and wonderfully lucid. There was a line—‘All stood together on the deck/ for a charnel-dungeon fitter’—that had me totally puzzled until I read Gardner’s annotation: “The bodies were more fit for a charnel-dungeon (the place where bodies, in the Middle Ages, were put before burial) than the deck of the ship.” In my defense, I thought 'fitter' was some sort of nautical noun.
If you love this poem, you will love this book.
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