“O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been
  Alone on a wide wide sea: 
  So lonely ’t was, that God himself
  Scarce seemed there to be. 600

  “O sweeter than the marriage feast,
  ’T is sweeter far to me,
  To walk together to the kirk
  With a goodly company!—­

  “To walk together to the kirk, 605
  And all together pray,
  While each to his great Father bends,
  Old men, and babes, and loving friends,
  And youths and maidens gay!

  “Farewell, farewell! but this I tell 610
  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; 615
  For the dear God who loveth us,
  He made and loveth all.”

  The Mariner, whose eye is bright,
  Whose beard with age is hoar,
  Is gone:  and now the Wedding-Guest 620
  Turned from the Bridegroom’s door.

  He went like one that hath been stunned,
  And is of sense forlorn:[64]
  A sadder and a wiser man
  He rose the morrow morn. 625

NOTE.—­The Ancient Mariner was written in 1797.  The plot was suggested by a dream related to Coleridge by one of his friends.  While the story is his own invention, he took several points from Shelvocke’s Voyages and accepted a few hints from Wordsworth, who furnished also two or three lines of verse.  In the beginning the two poets intended to work together, but this plan was found impracticable, and Coleridge proceeded by himself.  It is easy to believe that the plot originated in a dream, for the completed poem is one of the strangest, most fantastic dreams that ever formed themselves in a poet’s brain.  So far as its moral import is concerned, the production will hardly bear close scrutiny, although it teaches the duty of loving all God’s creatures, both great and small.  The prolonged suffering of the Mariner is a punishment far too severe for his thoughtless act, while his four times fifty comrades, who endure horrible tortures before dying, have been guilty of no crime whatsoever.  Still it is not necessary that every piece of literature should teach a consistent moral lesson, and The Ancient Mariner can be enjoyed for its marvelous pictures and its weird melody.

The form chosen by Coleridge for his production, that of the mediaeval ballad, is peculiarly adapted to story-telling on account of the freedom which it allows, and it has never been more artistically used than in this instance.  In harmony with the ballad form the poet uses certain old words, such as “trow,” “wist,” and “countree.”  It will be seen that the stanzas vary in length, and that there are occasional irregularities in metre.  In general the first and third lines of a stanza have four feet each, while the second and fourth lines have three feet.  Only the second and fourth lines rhyme, unless the stanza consists of more than four lines.