“The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
    The furrow followed free: 
  We were the first that ever burst
    Into that silent sea”;

varied and prolonged, moreover, by the introduction of additional lines with alternate riming, with couplets and sometimes with triplets.  There are many five-lined and six-lined stanzas, and one—­the longest in the poem—­of nine lines.  But these metric variations are used with temperance.  The stanza form is never complex; it is built up naturally from the ballad stanza upon which it rests and to which it constantly returns as its norm and type.  Of the one hundred and forty-two stanzas in the poem, one hundred and six are the ordinary four-lined stanzas of popular poetry.  The language, too, is not obtrusively archaic as it is in Chatterton and some of the Spenserians; at most an occasional “wist” or “eftsoons”; now and then a light accent, in ballad fashion, on the final syllable of a rime-word like mariner or countrie.  There is no definite burden, which would have been out of place in a poem that is narrative and not lyrical; but the ballad habits of phrase repetition and question and answer are sparingly employed.[18] In reproducing the homely diction of old popular minstrelsy, Coleridge’s art was nicer than Scott’s and more perfect at every point.  How skilfully studied, e.g. is the simplicity of the following: 

  “The moving moon went up the sky
  And nowhere did abide: 
  Softly she was going up.”

    “Day after day, day after day
    We stuck.”

“The naive artlessness of the Middle Ages,” says Brandl, “became in the hands of the Romantic school, an intentional form of art.”  The impression of antiquity is heightened by the marginal gloss which the poet added in later editions, composed in a prose that has a quaint beauty of its own, in its mention of “the creatures of the calm”; its citation of “the learned Jew Josephus and the Platonic Constantinopilitan, Michael Psellus,” as authorities on invisible spirits; and in passages like that Dantesque one which tells how the mariner “in his loneliness and fixedness yearneth towards the journeying moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onwards; and everywhere the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country, and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected, and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.”

In “The Ancient Mariner” there are present in the highest degree the mystery, indefiniteness, and strangeness which are the marks of romantic art.  The period is not strictly mediaeval, for mariners in the Middle Ages did not sail to the south polar regions or lie becalmed in the equatorial seas.  But the whole atmosphere of the poem is mediaeval.  The Catholic idea of penance or expiation is the moral theme enwrought with the story.  The hermit who shrives the mariner, and the little vesper bell which biddeth him to prayer are Catholic touches, and so are the numerous pious oaths and ejaculations;