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English 252: Introduction to Poetry Samuel Taylor Coleridge Study Questions Alfred J. Drake. Hours: Cyber Cafe M/W 10-11 "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" 1. What power enables the Mariner to stop the wedding guest in his tracks? What is the value of "superstition" in this poem"? 2. Why should it matter that the man stopped was on his way to a wedding? 3. Why does the Mariner shoot the Albatross? Is any reason given in the poem? 4. How is the albatross more than a plain old albatross -- what is its spiritual significance, if any? What do you make of the "breeze" that blows through the poem -- i.e. that at certain points the Mariner's ship is becalmed or takes sail? 5. What event or process leads the Mariner to bless the sea-snakes unawares? Why does the Albatross then fall from his neck? 6. Why must the Mariner continue with his penance -- why must he repeat his tale to everyone he can fix with his gaze? "Kubla Khan" 7. What allows the speaker to compose this poem? How does the enabling factor or power differ from memory, which is especially important to Wordsworth and often to Coleridge as well? 8. If you agree that Kubla Khan is a poet-figure, how does he compose his "poetry"? What significance does the descriptive imagery of his poem hold? In what sense might this poem be said to delve into what we would now call "the Unconscious"? 9. "I would build that dome in air" (46), declares the speaker -- why can't he do it? Or is that what the fragmentary poem we have amounts to -- the dome he would like to build in air? "Frost at Midnight" 10. How is the child (i.e. the speaker when he was a child) the "father of the man" in this poem, to borrow a phrase from Wordsworth? 11. What is the "stranger"? What effect did it have upon the speaker as a child, and what effect does it have upon him now, as he utters the poem? 12. What is "the eternal language that thy god utters" (60-61)? How is God a poet? 13. What is the speaker's hope for his child as that child grows up? How should the child's growing up differ from the speaker's? 14. What is the "secret ministry of Frost," and why is it "quietly shining to the quiet moon"? "Dejection: an Ode" 15. What relationship between mind and nature does this poem posit -- that is, what is the relationship between the speaker's mind and nature at present, and what should it be? How do the speaker's ideas concerning this relationship invoke the basic claim of Kant's philosophical idealism, as we shall discuss it in class? 16. What is the significance of the stormy weather in this poem? 17. Meyer Abrams divides the "Greater Romantic Lyric" into three stages -- a description of the natural scene, an analysis of that scene and the problem about which it reminds the speaker, and an emotional or "affective" resolution of the problem. Does the speaker resolve his problem in this poem? Explain. Edition: Ferguson, Margaret et al. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 4th ed. New York: Norton, 1996.
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