The Ballad Inheritance in "The Thorn" and "The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere"

Abstract

The ballad is a distinctive genre inherited by the Romantic poets. As part of the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth’s “The Thorn” and Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” represent their inheritance of ballad tradition. This paper argues that both poems apply two quintessential characteristics of the ballad—the conversational tone in narration, and the musicality in repetitive structure—to establish an oral-literate medium as part of their efforts to give voice to the marginalized people and invoke empathetic emotions. However, the deviation in the two poems’ ultimate presentations —one distances Martha’s image and the other objectifies the mariner’s character— suggests and conforms to the oscillation between two poles in representing minstrelsy, in McLane’s words, between “dispersal” and “reification” (152). Firstly, this essay explores how the conversational tone and the oral musicality are displayed in the two poems. An analysis of how the Gothic elements contributes to their ballad inheritance is also included. It then delves into how the two poems’ ultimate presentations differ from each other in the effectiveness of enabling the vocalization of the marginalized people. Eventually, it links such a difference to Maureen McLane’s argument about the fluctuation between “dispersal” and “reification” in the reconstruction of ballad tradition. Such variances effectively demonstrate Romantic poets’ mediation between the preservation of contemporary poetic style and a complete return to the primitive traditions of the earlier ballads.