Paige Lollie: Why Kill It?

I am unsure why the Albatross was shot. At first it seems like there was a connection to the Albatross, like a kinship. It give the Mariners a sense of friendship it felt to me (like how they would feed it biscuit-worms and hailed it in God's name).  Was this suppose to be a moment of human paranoia? Because it doesn't sound like an accident. I'm just trying to understand the idea or the reason of shooting the bird. I guess the language made it difficult for me to grasp on to a reason.

I am also curious, if anyone might know, if this was the poem that started the legendary curse of the Albatross or was this something that was well known during the time or discussed beforehand. Though I haven't read this in a long time, I couldn't remember if this was the first written or oral account of what happens should the Albatross be shot. If anyone knows, I am very interested in hearing about that!

Channeling Ahab and Ishmael

I couldn’t help but draw parallels between Moby Dick and the The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. What was the significance of killing the albatross? There was something eerie and terrible about Captain Ahab. He looked into the face of God and survived. Ahab was unlike the other shipmates; only he was possessed to kill Moby Dick. Ahab had pushed against the outer limits of what man is allowed to know, and paid for it, both by losing his leg and by having his life taken and ship destroyed at the end of the novel. I get the same vibe from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Killing the Albatross violated some cosmic order, something mortals aren’t allowed to do. And like Ahab, the Mariner paid the price.

It’s also interesting because this comes up a lot in modern literature and attitudes with things like stem cell research and synthetic biology. “Humans shouldn’t play God," people say a lot. 

I liked all the cool stuff in the poem, but I had to read a summary before I could figure out what was going on. 

Indian trying to stay strong

I believe that the Indian woman was trying to stay strong in this poem, but she really feared her death. The same idea of her being ready to die by herself, but she keeps relating herself back to her tribe and child. I feel like this connection of her talking about herself and her people is a way of saying that she is not ready to die. The reason why she mentions her loneliness is to perhaps show that she shouldn't be afraid to die because there is noone around to witness her death or her fear. It kind of reminds me of whenever I feel sad and don't want to believe it, but when I'm alone I should not be afraid to be sad or cry just like she should not be afraid to die, for she is alone.

Urban legend like

I believe that the thorn in Wordsworth's The Thorn represents Martha Ray's never-ending sorrow. Like a stiff thorn that is not easily broken the sorrow of mourning her baby remains strong within her. I felt the rhyme to be one of spoken poetry versus the song like poems we have been reading, almost like telling a old urban legend. In The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman we can see the same theme of despair like many of Wordsworth other works and also of having to mourn a child however, in this poem the woman mourns because she will die and leave her child in another woman's care. Very interesting twist of portraying how women suffer in different ways when they become separated from their children. Like The Thorn, this story also reminds me of an old urban legend. 

Coleridge.

I love the rhyme of the ancient mariner. Someone else posted on here that they felt like they were reading Doctor Seuss, I can certainly see that comparison. The poem flows really well and definitely feels like a ballad. It is easy to get into the rhythm when reading it. I also like how the piece suggests that one should love and respect not just man but nature as well. This poem puts into context that there are always consequences to our actions and our choices. And I love how this peace uses the preservation of nature to make that point. I also love the supernatural elements of the poem. These following stanzas sum up that point quite well: Farewell, farewell! but this I tell To thee, thou Wedding-Guest! He prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast. He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all."

Lines written at a small distance from my house

I was a little apprehensive when we were assigned to read more Wordsworth. I had a difficult time when we had to Tinturn Abbey because it was so difficult to understand. So when we had to read 100 pages of Wordsworth and Coleridge I was very nervous. However, I found that most of the poems we had to read were not that difficult to understand. Most did not have a strange metrical form, rhyme scheme, and were not   extremely convoluted. I do not mean to say that the poems did not make me think, or were simple. The Rime Ancyent  Marinere was, to say the least, a very interesting and thought provoking poem, and also a very good poem to read on Halloween. It is almost as good as reading Poe. After reading it, one of the things that  stuck in my mind was the thought of why Coleridge would choose a bird as the source for everyone's misery in the poem. Why is the act of killing the albatross so horrendous that the Marinere has to roam the world for eternity telling his tale. Also I did enjoy the poems that we were supposed  to pay attention to (Goody Blake, The thorn etc) but the poem I enjoyed the most was "Lines written at a small distance from my house". It is my favorite poem because even though it is a very simple poem it seems to reveal the most about Wordsworth. It almost seems as if this poem were private letter written by Wordsworth to his sister. I especially loved the lines:
"Love, now a universal birth,
From heart to heart is stealing,
From earth to man, from man to earth,
-It is the hour of feeling."
It seems that Wordsworth wants only to celebrate a simple moment of joy for one day.

The Indian Woman

I truly loved the flow of this poem and the portion of the story that was very blatant but I feel as though there was another story underneath that I just can't seem to put my finger on.

Coleridge and Wordsworth

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

Connections to the thorn

After reading The Thorn, I was lost when it came to how Martha Ray and the baby relate to a thorn. I'm uncertain of what the thorn symbolizes. Although, I didn't fully grasp the importance of the "thorn", I enjoyed the poem and wondered if Martha was crazy or dead...or both.

I don't know what to think about "The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere." I think what I found most perplexing was the odd juxtaposition between style and theme. Truly reflective of the title, the piece was very lyrical and sing-songy. It felt like I was reading Shel Silverstein at times, but with much more complicated themes. I think this can be attributed to the ABAB quatrains and the slight variances on repetition of lines. I found it interesting that there were some stanzas that moved away from this format, and many of them were characterized by repeating lines (like in II and III). But unlike Lewis's repetition, which seemed to cause more drama and add thematic tension to the work, I feel like this repetition acts differently. It seems to be adding to the speaker's character, like in section II where he repeats "fog and mist"; it seems like the speaker is trying to convince himself that it happened? Speaking of, why? Regardless, that's what it feels like to me. The tension does not seem to originate from the repeating lines, but from the breaks in style and the stark contrast between style and subject. 

Collecting in The Complaint

Going into The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman, I had the mindset of trying to decide what was being collected here. After brief review, I came to the conclusion that the speaker herself was not collecting anything (as much as I enjoy such poems), but if she wasn't, then who was? It's not as though Wordsworth is able to collect the thoughts and memories of his speaker and use them to his advantage, nor is he of the culture where the collection of the memory of the woman would be particularly significant.

Overall, I think Wordsworth was collecting an entirely new perspective, if he could. I would not put it past him to attempt to sort of collect the different view points of those around them and work from there in order to produce some of his best poetry and thought processes. Someone of a different culture would have been fascinating to Wordsworth, and after a little research on any traditional practices, putting a speaker in a culture-specific position would allow him to expand upon his own perceptions.

Wordsworth and Coleridge: Psychological connotations

I believe that Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere and Wordsworth's Goody Blake and Harry Gill employ very dark interpretations of situations that relate to perception and the way humans construct morbid images/ideas under unfortunate circumstances. Feeling constant despair pushes the boundaries of the mind's ability to think reasonably. In turn this consistent pressure results in impulse reactions that lead to careless acts or acting without a thorough thought process. On multiple occasions the speaker in, The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, locks eyes with the dead amongst the ship as if they can actually see him. This is brought about by the progression of fatigue having been lost on the ship for so long.  In Goody Blake and Harry Gill, Harry shook Goody as a result of the progression of anger from knowing that Goody consistently stole his lumber. I believe that more than sharing a story; these poems have deep psychological connotations.

Significance of the Thorn

After reading, I found my thoughts kept coming back to why the thorn was important to the poem. I had a lot of speculation about whether it was a bigger symbol or if perhaps it was just the remnants of a rose that had been stuck into the ground-its thorns and blossom having fallen off, itself just a dead shell of what once was. This lead me to thinking that Martha Ray was also dead. What people were seeing is her ghost.
I also liked finding out through the foot notes that said Martha Ray was his friend's mother.

A Baby and a Thorn

So, I'm sitting in Starbucks reading "The Thorn" and I come across this line "So fresh in all its beauteous dyes/Is like an infant's grave in size/As like as like can be:/But never, never any where/An infant's grave was half so fair".  I haven't completely decided what that means, but what an interesting metaphor!

Oooh. That's because it actually is an infant's grave.

It's interesting that the poem has quotation marks and there are two speakers, but I can't figure out who exactly is speaking.  I am guessing one is a man who recently moved to the town near the weeping woman and the other is someone just listening to him.  The poem is still sort of centered around this thorn next to what is supposed to be the infant's grave.  It seems to a protector of the secret the weeping woman is keeping. Or it could be something evil that keeps the Martha Ray coming back to that spot.  Or it is the prickly love she fell prey to.

I have a lot of "or"s for this post.

A Little Bit Gothic

I read "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" when I was a senior in high school. I loved it then and I still love it now. Although it is very long and some of the vocabulary is difficult, the overall tale is intriguing and fun. I love the element of horror involving the dead crew, a cursed sea, a female spirit and mythical creatures. I also think Coleridge made the tale more interesting by splitting it into the present of the mariner relating his story, and the actual event. I have never tried to analyze the poem for political, religious, or cultural undertones mainly because unless I am writing a paper on my subject, I prefer to simply enjoy it. Therefore I really do not see any political statement throughout the poem and I am interested in Dr. Porter's statement from Tuesdays class.

Wordsworth's poetry was enjoyable, especially "The Thorn". Once the mound of grassy moss was compared to the size of a baby's grave I knew that the poem would have some type of supernatural element. Sure enough a woman is described as having lost her baby and most people believe it to be buried under the mound. I felt sorry for the woman but I did not know if I should considering she may have killed her own child. Nature played a large part in the poem with the many descriptions of the thorn, the mound, and the lake. Each element of nature tied back into the possible death of the baby and the misery of the woman. I thought the connection between nature and the personal was well done by Wordsworth.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is important

Reading The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, I kept getting a mythological feel from the whole poem. The use of repetition in wording and meter gave the whole poem a more Homeric structure. Coleridge builds up the drama and suspense throughout his poem using these features. This poem seems like an important piece of literature. Coleridge, (as well as Wordsworth and Lavin, for that matter) using very basic elements of storytelling, sets up a plethora of subtexts for this piece to be read about. Many interpretations have arisen from this poem, including Christian allegories, man vs. nature, psychological horrors of the human psyche, and one critic citing this as an autobiographical piece about Coleridge himself. This poem allows for all of these interpretations to be accurate, and to me, that is a sign of good storytelling. Stories that are singular in theme and ideas are never as positively cerebral as the ones that sit with you for awhile. They should encourage you want to learn more about what you just read, and this piece did that for me.

Oh, and also this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4ZMaz14Psw

Vengeance in wordsworth

I had fun reading "Goody Blake and Harry Gill" because it was easier to understand versus "The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere". In "Goody Blake and Harry Gill" I thought it was very gothic and mysterious. I found it very intriguing to know that after a guy got mad at an old woman for taking wood for a fire, he wound up in the same position as she was. He will remain the rest of his life constantly cold. This story is dark and full of the act of vengeance on a helpless old woman. I know it wasn't right for her to trespass, but she wasn't causing any harm to him. In return, she actually got revenge on him.

The gothic and the soul

Throughout each of the readings, I keep finding myself asking what the authors and readers thought of death and the soul. Of course a phantom is not going to come snatch us away in the night (fingers crossed!) but these works deal with the idea of death and an afterlife in an interesting way. In Alonzo the Brave and its parody, the unfaithful female is swept off by the returned groom. This brings up questions of a soul returning to earth and a soul being kept on earth, which seems different than the typical "heaven or hell" question. The story of The Old Woman of Berkeley asks a similar question in, how long does a soul inhabit a body after death? The woman is in her coffin, supposedly dead, and yet the demon is able to take her away. Even in the  Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the crew's bodies are possessed by good spirits. There seems to be an emphasis on superstition and twisting religious thought to some degree in the gothic.

Well hello stranger ;)

     As someone who loves Gothic literature and poetry I was delighted to discover Matthew Lewis! I am unsure how I had never heard of him before but am glad that I own this book. As soon as I have less homework I expect to be reading all of the rest! When first reading Bothwell's Bonny Jane I couldn't help but think of Romeo and Juliet. I imagined these young lovers who go to great lengths to be together making fools of themselves and dying by their own hands. I never imagined the outcome we got! Holy moly...it was a shock! I love a good surprise and Matthew Lewis gave it to me.

Wordsworth preferred over Coleridge

While reading the first 100 pages of Lyrical Ballads I felt like I was reading a book of Wordsworth with Coleridge occasionally jumping in.  I counted actually and we read 19 Wordsworth poems and 4 Coleridge, so I guess it kind of is that way.  I've previously read the two poems we were told to focus on, 'The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere" and "Goody Blake, and Harry Gill, A True Story", and I found it interesting that my opinion of the poems has switched.  I loved "Ancyent Marinere" and wasn't a fan of "Goody Blake" the first time.  I think I had idealized the former and distanced myself from the latter.  It may be that I dont' feel I learned as much the second time around in Marinere; whereas, in Goody Blake I feel that I had simply read it wrong the first time.  I wasn't a huge fan of Coleridge, but it is hard to say if I prefer Wordsworth, because there were at least 4 poems that didn't draw me in, much like Coleridge.  I think what I really enjoy is Wordsworth conversational style, like in "Lines written at a small distance from my House, and sent by my little Boy to the person whom they are addressed" which feels very light and carefree, or in" Simon Lee" which makes the point in a rather straightforward manner.  I'm interested to see if the class discussion shifts my opinion, as it normally does.