its being; that it should be formulated at the close is
quite in accord with the simplicity which marked the whole conception of
the "Lyrical Ballads," and is moreover perfectly harmonious with the
spirit of the poem itself. There have been poets who seemed to be
without the moral sense, and who have written poetry quite free from any
moral, like Poe and his landscape visions, but wonderful as they are,
they are abnormal, and are less great as they are less completely human.
It may be that Wordsworth, as one infers from recollections of the
composition of the poem, suggested the moral plot; but if so it entered
at once and completely into Coleridge's imagination and governed the
shaping of the poem from the start. In all the very considerable changes
and omissions that the poem underwent after it was first printed, there
was none that either retrenched from or added to the moral
interpretation of the tale.

Of its imagery the most evident characteristic is what may be called the
anthropomorphic treatment of nature. This, although in accord with
modern conceptions of primitive culture, is not at all a mark of the
popular ballad. Sun, and moon, and storm-wind, and ocean are in
folk-song sun and moon and wind and water and nothing more; but in "The
Ancient Mariner" they are living beings.

"And now the Storm-blast came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong:
He struck with his o'ertaking wings,
And chased us south along."

"And straight the Sun was flecked with bars,
(Heaven's Mother send us grace!)
As if through a dungeon-grate he peered
With broad and burning face."

"Still as a slave before his lord,
The ocean hath no blast;
His great bright eye most silently
Up to the Moon is cast--

"If he may know which way to go;
For she guides him smooth or grim.
See, brother, see! how graciously
She looketh down on him."

This is the most noticeable of the "modifying colours of imagination"
in "The Ancient Mariner." The practice might be classed as a sort of
personification; but how utterly different in its effect from the
conventional "literary" personifications of the eighteenth century--of
Gray in the "Elegy," for instance! Grandeur, and Envy, and Honour, in
that admirable poem, are not real persons to the imagination; the
abstraction remains an abstraction. But in Coleridge's poem all nature
is alive with the life of men. Other elements of "that synthetic and
magical power to which we hav