masterpiece, "The Ancient Mariner." This is the high-water mark of
romantic poetry; and, familiar as it is, cannot be dismissed here without
full examination. As to form, it is a long narrative ballad in seven
"fyts" or parts, and descends from that "Bible of the romantic
reformation," Bishop Percy's "Reliques." The verse is the common ballad
stanza--eights and sixes--enriched by a generous use of medial rhyme and
alliteration:

"The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free:
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea";

varied and prolonged, moreover, by the introduction of additional lines
with alternate riming, with couplets and sometimes with triplets. There
are many five-lined and six-lined stanzas, and one--the longest in the
poem--of nine lines. But these metric variations are used with
temperance. The stanza form is never complex; it is built up naturally
from the ballad stanza upon which it rests and to which it constantly
returns as its norm and type. Of the one hundred and forty-two stanzas
in the poem, one hundred and six are the ordinary four-lined stanzas of
popular poetry. The language, too, is not obtrusively archaic as it is
in Chatterton and some of the Spenserians; at most an occasional "wist"
or "eftsoons"; now and then a light accent, in ballad fashion, on the
final syllable of a rime-word like mariner or countrie. There is no
definite burden, which would have been out of place in a poem that is
narrative and not lyrical; but the ballad habits of phrase repetition and
question and answer are sparingly employed.[18] In reproducing the
homely diction of old popular minstrelsy, Coleridge's art was nicer than
Scott's and more perfect at every point. How skilfully studied, _e.g._