Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Life dates: 1772 AD — 1834 AD

Coleridge’s narrative poetry asks readers to hear a speaker within a story. Follow the mariner’s experience and its effect on his listener before extracting a final statement as detached advice.

▷ Play this voice Search these words ↗Place in time ↗life death love faith truth friendship work mind

Life and writing

The Poetry Foundation describes Coleridge as both a poet and a critic and gives his lifetime as 1772–1834. Its discussion places literary imagination and the relationship with Wordsworth among the concerns of his career. This profile uses that account as life and writing context, without equating biography with every narrative voice. The linked Lyrical Ballads volume belongs to their joint project; the two authors retain separate archive identities and separate selected poems.

The selected prayer-and-love passages appear near the end of The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere in the linked 1798 text. Both selected English extracts match under limited punctuation, spacing and case comparison. The second continues into two further lines about God, while the narrative then returns to the wedding guest’s changed state. Reading the address and its aftermath together keeps the statements inside the religious and dramatic setting of the poem. The profile neither rewrites the anthology nor treats a short matching extract as verification of every associated record.

Reading this voice

Begin near the conclusion of The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, but continue beyond both selected extracts: the next lines and the wedding guest’s response are part of their setting. Both excerpts match under limited English normalization. Read the wider account of the mariner’s actions and experience before turning his words into a universal maxim. This link preserves the anthology wording and does not establish the exact edition its compiler used.

Subjects to explore

kindness faith nature responsibility

Words to begin with

Profile sources and editorial notes

Agent-assisted editorial profile, updated 2026-10-05. A human reviewer is not recorded. Biographical context does not independently authenticate every quotation attributed to this person.

Poetry Foundation — Samuel Taylor Coleridge ↗
Limited original factual paraphrase and separately documented lifetime context; modern biography text/images are not copied. No whole-associated-corpus authentication. Checked 2026-10-05.
Checked related reading — Lyrical Ballads, With a Few Other Poems (1798) ↗
Catalogue US-public-domain basis and complete selected passage counterparts checked, with surrounding speakers/context and wording differences preserved. Checked 2026-10-05.

Quotations and sayings

01c. 1803 AD

IIA grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief, Which finds no natural outlet, no relief, In word, or sigh, or tear — O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood,To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo'd, All this long eve, so balmy and serene,Have I been gazing on the western sky, And its peculiar tint of yellow green:And still I gaze — and with how blank an eye!And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,That give away their motion to the stars;Those stars, that glide behind them or between,Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen:Yon crescent Moon as fixed as if it grewIn its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;I see them all so excellently fair,I see, not feel how beautiful they are!III My genial spirits fail; And what can these availTo lift the smothering weight from off my breast? It were a vain endeavour, Though I should gaze for everOn that green light that lingers in the west:I may not hope from outward forms to winThe passion and the life, whose fountains are within.