Hello, ladies and gentlemen and welcome back to Chronicles, where today we're going to be

carrying on or really just beginning the full analysis of Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.

I hope that you all enjoyed the reading of the poem last time.

I certainly had fun regaling you with it.

And also with me this time, I brought with me something that's been an absolutely invaluable companion as I've read and done my research,

which is a voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mariner by Malcolm Gite,

one of, I think, one of the greatest contemporary minds right now, one of the most interesting people to listen to.

And he has such a rich writing style it's so

enchanting to read and this is kind of both biography of Coleridge and also

analysis and exploration of rhyme of the ancient mariner in particular but as

well as ideas and musings that he has about other

poems by Coleridge as well. So I thoroughly recommend it as a read. And also just to say

openly with you, to be transparent, that a lot of what I am going to present to you now,

a lot of my ideas about it and the way that I'll be framing it find

their genesis in Malcolm's book. So I just want to be clear with you that he has done a wonderful

amount of heavy lifting for me in this and I shall reference it as we go on because it's really

wonderful. But let's begin with part one then of the poem.

So when the poem begins, we have, of course, the famous, it is an ancient mariner and a stop of

one or three. The entire thing is first of all set at a wedding. And this is all grounded very

much in the intentional archaic medieval language that Coleridge employs.

So he in fact sort of dilutes this through various versions he went through as time went on.

But still nonetheless, that medieval weight to it, this is really unambiguously stated when later on in the story, the mariner and his crew

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