Narrative Poetry In 'The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner'

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Narrative Poetry According to Von Martina (2003) the narrative poem, is one that tells a story or details action that leads to a climax. The poems range from very simple stories of a few stanzas, telling of one incident in the life of some person, to long tales of heroes, their hopes, beliefs, and adventures. Narrative poetry actions and speech of characters are presented through a narrator who describes certain events happening to someone else in a similar way as prose narrator. Major narrative poems in English literature appeared including: Spenser 's Faerie Queene, Marlowe 's Hero and Leander, Dryton 's England 's Heroical Epistles, Milton 's Paradise Lost, Pope 's " The Rape of the Lock " , Coleridge 's " The Rime of the Ancient Mariner …show more content…

The tales of the ballad are usually of love, war, adventure, death, and the supernatural. As in the epic, there are two main types of the ballad, namely: the folk ballad (also referred to as the popular or traditional ballad) and the art or literary ballad. These terms equally intimate the origins and nature of this type of poetry similar to the distinctions we have seen in the epic genre. Accordingly, a folk ballad is nameless but we can safely infer that there must have been a poet since all poems are mostly composed by individual poets. According to Hugh Holman (ibid) debate still furies as to whether the ballad originates with an individual composer or as a group or communal activity. Whether as individual or group composition, the personal emotions of the composer or poet do not manifest in his work. There is no first person singular (I), but where it strays in, it is always found in the context of the speech by identifiable characters in the poem to whom it refers. In studying the folk ballad, we are studying the poetry of the traditional people as different from the poetry of art as in the art ballad whose writer, who may modify and use folk materials, is known. Thus, oral transmission is the medium of spreading the song of the folk

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