doubt Coleridge was remembering, with the apologies of a later time, the period of intense interest in the German tale of wonder and horror, as it became known to him through the Taylor translations. Incidentally, too, the stanza structure of the Three Graves and the earliest form of the Ancient Mariner are the same, only two variations of the ballad measure occurring in each.[1]
One may reasonably suggest another likeness between the Three Graves and Bürger's Lenore. Coleridge closes his introduction to the fragment when printed in the Friend by the following paragraph:
The tale is supposed to be narrated by an old sexton, in a country churchyard, to a traveller whose curiosity had been awakened by the appearance of three graves close by each other, to two only of which there were grave-stones. On the first of these was the name and dates, as usual; on the second no name, but only the date, and the words, "The Mercy of God is infinite."
There is thus a direct parallelism between the punishment for blasphemy in Lenore and in the Three Graves, together with the same emphasis of the divine mercy.
The line of Kubla Khan cited by Brandl may be a reminiscence of Bürger. Certainly the extravagance of the poem connects it closely with the other poems of this period. Yet the influence of Taylor's translation of Lenore is most marked upon the next poem which Coleridge wrote, the much greater Ancient Mariner. Here, too, it is important to remember that both poems were considerably altered in later versions, so that comparison must be made with the first forms of both. In this poem Brandl pointed only to the sinking of the ship, an alteration of the story of Paulinus in which the ship came into the harbor safely, as due to direct Lenore influence. The wedding-guest he thought taken from Lewis's Alonzo the Brave, and therefore only indirectly from Bürger.
Besides these, however, there are several important likenesses between Coleridge and Taylor. Not only is Coleridge's use of the ballad meter apparently due to Taylor's use of that form in so serious and effective a manner, but the archaic spelling of the first form of the Ancient Mariner is probably directly due to Taylor's
- ↑ These are the five-line stanza with the third and fourth lines riming as in Wordsworth's Peter Bell, and the six-line stanza with alternate rime. Compare the reprint of the first form of the Ancient Mariner, as in Appendix E of Dykes Campbell's Poetical Works of Coleridge, or the reprint of the Lyrical Ballads by Dowden. In the earlier version of the Ancient Mariner and in the Three Graves these variations are indented in the same way, while the later form of the Mariner has a greater number of stanza variations with no indentation to mark the varied rime.
