"
"And straight the Sun was flecked with bars,
(Heaven's Mother send us grace!)
As if through a dungeon-grate he peered
With broad and burning face."
"Still as a slave before his lord,
The ocean hath no blast;
His great bright eye most silently
Up to the Moon is cast--
"If he may know which way to go;
For she guides him smooth or grim.
See, brother, see! how graciously
She looketh down on him."
This is the most noticeable of the "modifying colours of imagination"
in "The Ancient Mariner." The practice might be classed as a sort of
personification; but how utterly different in its effect from the
conventional "literary" personifications of the eighteenth century--of
Gray in the "Elegy," for instance! Grandeur, and Envy, and Honour, in
that admirable poem, are not real persons to the imagination; the
abstraction remains an abstraction. But in Coleridge's poem all nature
is alive with the life of men. Other elements of "that synthetic and
magical power to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of
imagination," and which blends "the idea with the image" and "the sense
of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects" will be felt as
the poem is studied.
Wordsworth related in after years that the suggestion for the poem came
from a dream of a phantom ship told to Coleridge by a friend, and that
he (Wordsworth) proposed the shooting of the albatross, the revenge of
the "tutelary spirits," and the "navigation of the ship by the dead
men," and contributed the fourth stanza of the poem and the last two
lines of the first stanza of Part IV.
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