The beating of the breast by the wedding guest in his impatience is paralleled by the same action of Lenore in her grief for the lost William. The roaring of the on-coming wind as heard by the mariner is like the blasts that "athwart the hawthorne hiss" in the Taylor poem. Most of the action, especially the coming of the spectre ship and the dream of the two voices, takes place in the moonlight, which is seven times mentioned, as it is three times by Taylor. The black bones of the woman's "fleshless pheere," save "the rust
may be placed over against
The "ghastly crew" of the ship, which the mariner saw, and the "ghostly crew" seen by Lenore in the air are not unlike. Finally, in addition to the sinking of the ship, which Brandl had first mentioned, it may be noted that this action seems to take place in the Mariner at or near the dawn, for this is implied by the mariner's clearer sight of the "wood which slopes down to the sea," the home of the hermit, and the action of rescuing the mariner after his many adventures.
Quite apart from similarities in form and phrasing, it will be remembered that in the composition of the Lyrical Ballads the development of the supernatural element was especially left to Coleridge. As he tells us in his Biographia Literaria,
It was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic. . . . With this view I wrote The Ancient Mariner, and was preparing among other poems the Dark Ladie, and the Christabel, in which I should have more nearly realized my ideal than I had done in my first attempt.[1]
It could not be asserted that Coleridge had now for the first time conceived the idea of using the supernatural. He had already written the Songs of the Pixies. Yet no one can compare the supernatural of that poem with that of the Ancient Mariner without perceiving the new spirit pervading the latter. That spirit, it seems not unreasonable to refer mainly to the influence of German romanticism as exhibited in Taylor's Lenora, and the new stimulus to the imagination resulting from it. Something of the same spirit
- ↑ Chap. XIV, Coleridge's Works (Shedd) III, 365.
