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STSamuel Taylor Coleridge

270 collected words

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Life dates: 1772 AD — 1834 AD

Coleridge’s narrative poetry asks readers to hear a speaker within a story. Follow the mariner’s experience and its effect on his listener before extracting a final statement as detached advice.

▷ Play this voiceSearch these words ↗Place in time ↗lifedeathlovefaithtruthfriendshipworkmind

Life and writing

The Poetry Foundation describes Coleridge as both a poet and a critic and gives his lifetime as 1772–1834. Its discussion places literary imagination and the relationship with Wordsworth among the concerns of his career. This profile uses that account as life and writing context, without equating biography with every narrative voice. The linked Lyrical Ballads volume belongs to their joint project; the two authors retain separate archive identities and separate selected poems.

The selected prayer-and-love passages appear near the end of The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere in the linked 1798 text. Both selected English extracts match under limited punctuation, spacing and case comparison. The second continues into two further lines about God, while the narrative then returns to the wedding guest’s changed state. Reading the address and its aftermath together keeps the statements inside the religious and dramatic setting of the poem. The profile neither rewrites the anthology nor treats a short matching extract as verification of every associated record.

Reading this voice

Begin near the conclusion of The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, but continue beyond both selected extracts: the next lines and the wedding guest’s response are part of their setting. Both excerpts match under limited English normalization. Read the wider account of the mariner’s actions and experience before turning his words into a universal maxim. This link preserves the anthology wording and does not establish the exact edition its compiler used.

Subjects to explore

kindnessfaithnatureresponsibility

Words to begin with

Quotations and sayings

02c. 1803 AD
Secure from actual warfare, we have loved To swell the war-whoop, passionate for war! Alas! for ages ignorant of all Its ghastlier workings, famine, or blue plague, Battle or siege, or flight through wintry snows! We, this whole people, have been clamorous For war and bloodshed; animating sports, The which we pay for as a thing to talk of; Spectators and not combatants! No guess Anticipative of a wrong unfelt, No speculation or contingency, However dim and vague, too vague and dim To yield a justifying cause; and forth, Stuffed out with big preamble, holy names And adjurations of the God in heaven, We send our mandates for the certain death Of thousands and ten thousands! Boys and girls, And women that would groan to see a child Pull off an insect’s leg, all read of war, The best amusement for our morning’s meal! The poor wretch who has learnt his only prayer From curses, who knows scarcely words enough To ask a blessing from his heavenly Father, Becomes a fluent phraseman, absolute And technical in victories and defeats, And all our dainty terms for fratricide; Terms which we trundle smoothly o’er our tongues Like mere abstractions, empty sounds, to which We join no feeling, and attach no form! As if the soldier died without a wound; As if the fibres of this godlike frame Were gored without a pang; as if the wretch Who fell in battle, doing bloody deeds, Passed off to heaven, translated, and not killed; As though he had no wife to pine for him, No God to judge him.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge / quote
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