Portrait at age 42Samuel Cousins, after Washington Allston · Public domain270 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.
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
Words to begin with
Profile sources and editorial notes
Agent-assisted editorial profile, updated 2026-10-05. A human reviewer is not recorded. Biographical context does not independently authenticate every quotation attributed to this person.
