Taylor Colerridge's Poem Analysis

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The whole poem is written in mediaeval ballad form. However, it is not as short as those ballads. Poem consist of seven parts and each of them at least 20 stanzas length. In 1797, three friends, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy, decided to write a poem in some monthly magazines to afford a trip together. Coleridge and Wordsworth’s first intention was to write together, but shortly Wordsworth realized that their styles are not matching so well. Most of the poems written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge explore a mystical and supernatural world. Unlike William Wordsworth, who collaborated with Coleridge and concentrated on the everyday world of the present, Coleridge turned out to the romance and mystery of the past. At the end, Wordsworth only contributed to the poem with the recommendation of killing the albatross to change old sailor’s fate and Coleridge wrote an allegory in which sinister and grotesque images form a distant past have on everyday reality. Day after day, day after day, / We stuck, nor breath nor motion; / As idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean / Water, water, every where / And all the boards did shrink; / Water, water, every where / Nor any drop to drink. It is possible to see the allegorical and symbolic power of the poem even from these few lines. The lack of water represents the dryness of the spirit and the becalmed ship symbolizes the aimless soul of a man who has sinned and who awaits eventual redemption. The moral seems to be

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