Coleridge’s Rime takes the reader on an epic journey from the Marinere’s country to the South Pole, through seas filled with “a million million slimy things”, and back again(Lyrical Ballads 1800, pg. 30). During this journey through the unknown, supernatural occurrences and superstition lull the reader into belief that anything could happen next. The story’s structure is broken into seven parts so that we are always left with a desire to trudge along and survive the tale along with the Marinere. Analysis of Coleridge’s use of repetition and tetrameter structure reveal the author’s intention to archaize this lyrical ballad.
The ballad’s tetrameter structure is based on the structure of classical Greek poetry, “in which an `iamb` consisted of a short syllable followed by a long syllable”(http://www.encyclo.co.uk/define/iambic%20tetrameter). The English basically borrowed the term to describe a way in which they patterned their own syllables in language and poetry. Coleridge also uses repetition in several instances, for example early on in the journey when the Mariner says, “Merrily did we drop, below the kirk, below the hill, below the lighthouse top”(Lyrical Ballads 1800, pg. 24). Such configuring of language hearkens back even to the extremely ancient tradition of orally passing stories to generation after generation. No one can put a date on when humans first started telling each other stories, and bringing us into this mindset was part of the author’s intentions. Writing Rime in this way helps frame communication the way it was when men were in the state of nature1. The way Coleridge merely organized his words reveals his true intentions of thrusting the reader into some primitive state in which the impossible becomes possible.
[1] In order to clarify, by state of nature I am referring to the hypothetical condition (presumably in the far distant past) before men were organized into political systems. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_nature).
Nicely focused on the formal features that give a sense of a story told from the perspective of a "state of nature." You might have saved a few sentences for what this does to our reading of the tale.
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