Poetry
Lyrical Ballads
Opening lines
It is an ancyent Marinere,
And he stoppeth one of three:
“By thy long grey beard and thy glittering eye
“Now wherefore stoppest me?
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Twenty-three poems, nineteen by Wordsworth and four by Coleridge. An old mariner holds back a wedding guest and tells him how he shot an albatross. A shivering old woman takes wood from a farmer's hedge, and he catches her; on her knees, she prays to God that he may never be warm again. A mother sends her feeble-minded son out at night, on a pony, to fetch the doctor. A little girl counts her brothers and sisters and names seven, two of whom lie in the churchyard. A man returns, five years later, to the banks of the Wye, above Tintern Abbey.
Context
The collection appeared without an author's name in the autumn of 1798, in five hundred copies, printed by a Bristol bookseller who almost immediately ceded most of it to a London colleague. Twenty-three pieces, four of them by the second author, to whom the supernatural fell while the first took the everyday. Probably to preserve anonymity, a piece already published in a newspaper under a pseudonym was withdrawn at the last moment and replaced by another: leaves had to be added, and two pages bear a duplicate number. The preface that made the book's fortune is not in this edition: it came with the second, dated 1800, under the sole name of the first author, the second being referred to there only as a friend.
Who it is for
A collection of short poems, to be read separately; the preface to the second edition, in which the author sets out his doctrine, is read apart.
Prizes and reception
A reserved reception, hostile in Southey's case; Wordsworth blamed Coleridge's long poem for it, and had it modernised and placed towards the end of the first volume in 1800.
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