Form, structure & language
Ballad form
What is it?
Ballads:
The ballad is a narrative meant to be sung, usually composed in the ballad stanza.
Although some ballads are carefully crafted poems written by literate authors and meant
to be read silently (such as the Lyrical Ballads!), the folk ballad (also known as popular
or traditional ballad) is derived from the oral tradition.
The ballad stanza, named for its frequent use in traditional ballads, is quatrains of
alternating tetrameter and trimeter, rhyming either abab or abcb. For example:
Oh, I forbid ye maidens all
That wear gold in your hair
To come or go by Carterhaugh
For young Tam Lin is there.
In folk ballads, the meter is often irregular and the rhymes are often approximate.
Why does Coleridge employ a
ballad form in the poem?
 Creating the impression that we undergo a narrative
journey – which leaves us, like the wedding guest at the end
of Part VII, transformed by the experience of the tale.
 Self-consciously reworking an ancient literary form, adding
authenticity to the tale, or making it seem timeless like a
legend or folk-tale (also narratives which have traditionally
been passed on through history in oral ways).
 Ballads often mix the natural or everyday with the
supernatural, uncanny or mythical in their narratives
Form
 Coleridge also uses examples of the following:
 Internal rhyme (eg. “With throats unslaked, with black lips
baked” or “The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew”) which
adds pace or emphasis to the action or emotion the mariner
describes.
 Repetition – spot whole verses, lines and words which are
repeated for dramatic effect. For example: find a verse in part
1 which is echoed almost word for word in part VI – why? See
if you can spot lines which have been repeated, or lines in
which the first and second half of the line are almost identical
(eg. “For the sky and the sea and the sea and the sky”). Why?
Other aspects of form worth
thinking about:
 Descriptive techniques (the use of colour, simple
repetition, striking images)
for example:
“Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold;
Her skin was as white as leprosy”
Find examples of descriptive verses which you
think are striking or unusual and explain which
descriptive techniques Coleridge uses and why.
Structure of the poem
 A tale within a tale – the overarching narrative frame
concerns the Mariner himself as the narrator of the
story and the wedding guest to whom the tale is told.
This frame contains the central narrative story: the
journey undertaken by the mariner which he is
compelled to narrate.
 The seven parts of the poem allow Coleridge to create
suspense (the cliff-hanger moment at the end of Part
1), or dramatic shifts from one scene to the next.
The gloss
Upon its release, the poem was criticised for being obscure and difficult
to read. It was also criticised for using archaic words (such as?), not in keeping
with Romanticism. In 1815–16, Coleridge added to the poem marginal notes
(still deliberately written in an archaic style) that gloss the text, ostensibly
explaining the meaning of verses.
The gloss describes the poem as an account of sin and restoration. While some
critics see the gloss as spelling out clearly the moral of the tale, others point to
the inaccuracies and illogicalities of the gloss and interpret it as the voice of a
dramatized character that only serves to highlight the poem's cruel
meaninglessness.[7] In particular, Charles Lamb, who had deeply admired the
original for its attention to "Human Feeling", claimed that the gloss distanced
the audience from the narrative, weakening the poem's effects.
What do you think is the purpose of the gloss?
A few points about meter and
rhyme
See the handout.
Main points:
A point about the verse structure
 Notice the shifts in the length of the verses – at
moments of great tension (for example, look at Part 3
when the death ship approaches), the structure of the
verse is irregular. Coleridge relates the inexplicable
nature of the mariner’s experience and his emotional
intensity through subtle shifts in the verse.
5 part narrative structure
In pairs: pick out the turning points between
the five main narrative stages
Equilibrium (starting points) –
Complication
Development
Crisis
Resolution
Key questions to ask yourself about
the narrative structure
Next week...
 The role of the narrator (and the ghost narrator /
authorial commentary provided by the gloss); the role
of alternative narrative voices and characters (the two
daemon voices, the Hermit, the wedding guest)
 The different settings used in the poem – the open sea
and the extremities of the polar landscape versus the
familiar harbour and the shared celebration of the
wedding.