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Daily · Classics

Lyrical Ballads

William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge · poetry collection, 1798·2 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
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  • The preface admits these poems are experiments. The Advertisement calls the poems experiments, written to test how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure. It warns readers they may struggle with feelings of strangeness and aukwardness before they get used to it.
  • The Mariner kills the albatross for no reason. The Mariner shoots the albatross that had followed the ship for luck, and the crew hangs the dead bird around his neck as punishment. No motive is given for the killing; the guilt is worn as an object: "Instead of the Cross the Albatross About my neck was hung."
  • Life-in-Death wins the crew in a dice game. A spectre-woman named Life-in-Death wins the crew in a dice game against Death itself. She whistles three times and calls "The Game is done! I've won, I've won!"; two hundred men drop dead one by one while the Mariner, whom she has won, stays alive.
  • The moral, not the ghost ship, closes the poem. The poem does not end on the ghost ship, it ends on a rule: "He prayeth best who loveth best, All things both great and small." The wedding-guest never gets to the wedding; he turns away and rises the next morning "a sadder and a wiser man."
  • An eight-year-old girl refuses to subtract her dead siblings. In "We are Seven," a cottage girl insists she has seven siblings even though two are buried twelve steps from her mother's door. She knits her stockings and eats supper sitting on their graves, and no amount of arithmetic from the narrator moves her off the number seven.
  • The collection ends on a riverbank, not a ship. The book closes not with Coleridge but with Wordsworth standing on a riverbank he last saw five years earlier: "Five years have passed; five summers, with the length Of five long winters!" He turns the poem into a private address to his sister, calling her "my dear, dear Friend, my dear, dear Sister."
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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: it is the 1798 pamphlet where two poets deliberately traded classical diction for plain speech, and that decision is still the working definition of modern poetry.

Two young poets publish anonymously, betting that a cursed sailor's ghost story and a girl who refuses to subtract her dead siblings can prove ordinary speech is enough for poetry.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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