Book I finished recently

Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner ~ edited by Ellen E. Garrigues, 1895 and 1910, ballad, 43 pages, 8/10

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the longest major poem by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, written in 1797–1798 and published in 1798 in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads.  Some modern editions use a revised version printed in 1817 that featured a gloss. Wikipedia

Those dates from Wikipedia differ from the actual book I have in hand, which shows 1895 and 1910.  My copy belonged to my Aunt Bonnie Reynolds, who was born in 1904 and was a sophomore at Central High School when she studied this book.  I found it interesting to see what she wrote in the book with pencil.  For example, she put wavy lines along the sides of these stanzas on page 22:

"Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, nor breath nor motion;

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.

"Water, water, everywhere,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, everywhere,

Nor any drop to drink.

I didn't include a closing quotation mark because it isn't the end of the quote in the book.  I paused there because I had to memorize  those lines of the poem in high school in the late 1950s and wondered if she marked them because she too had to memorize them.  Do students today still have to memorize poetry?

If you have read this poem, you know that the other sailors blamed the ancient mariner for their plight because he had shot and killed the albatross with his crossbow (page 20, in the last line of Part I).  Why?  Because it had been considered a bird of good luck:

'Ah, wretch!' said they, 'the bird to slay,

That made the wind to blow!' (p. 21).

I also had to memorize two other parts of the poem (the first below from p. 26 and the other from p. 40):

"Alone, alone, all, all alone,

Alone on a wide, wide sea!

And never a saint took pity on

My soul in agony,

"He prayeth best who loveth best

All things, both great and small;

For the dear God who loveth us,

He made and loveth all."