While I did enjoy the rhyme scheme and rhythm to Coleridge's
The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere and Wordsworth's
Goody Blake, and Harry Gill, I found the topics of the poems to be a little confusing. From what I could tell, Coleridge's poem seemed to have a very mystical, almost Gothic feel to it toward the middle and end of it. Wordsworth's poem on the other hand seemed to be a tale about a young man and an old woman. It seems to me that the old woman (Goody Blake) was poor and stole some sticks from the young man (Harry Gills), but the end of the poem was lost to me. Did Harry Gills go crazy after seeing Goody taking his sticks? I don't know...but I feel as if I might have missed something.
As I mentioned before, both of these poems had great rhyme and rhythm. I especially liked the following lines from The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere because of the way the words roll off the tongue when reading them aloud:
The Ice was here, the Ice was there,
the Ice was all around:
It crack'd and growl'd, and roar'd and howl'd--
Like noises of a swound
When Harry Gill caught Goody Blake, she kneels and prays to God, "God! who art never out of hearing,/O may he never more be warm!" How I read it was she pretty much cursed him, making it the supernatural element of the poem. This scene is at lines 89-104.
ReplyDeleteI liked that this curse, if it is so, is in God's name, it's not an act of witchcraft per say, but a feeling of "judgement" on Harry Gill for his cruelty.
I got the same reading that Calliope did about Goody Blake and Harry Gill. It sounds like some old fable. I wish we could read some famous fables and fairy tales since they were largely created in this time period.
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