In leaving its reader so "struggl[ing] with feelings of strangeness and aukwardness," The Rime of the Ancient Mariner achieves one of the revolutionary goals of Lyrical Ballads. Deriding the "mere artifices of connection" that characterize the "falsity in the poetic style" of the day, Coleridge points to Wordsworth's contributions to their volume and praises the way such poems reveal compelling "resemblances between that state into which the reader's mind is thrown" by the "confusion of thought front an unaccustomed train of words and images" and "that state which is induced by the . . . language of empassioned feeling." The reader's "confusion" in the presence of such language is the note on which The Thorn begins, and Wordsworth even supplies an interlocutor to give voice to the inevitable protests. The ballad opens plainly enough, with an unspecified speaker reporting a simple fact: "There is a thorn." But as in...