THE FLOWER OF THE MIND
Page: 29

likeness to "some poor nigh-related guest" with the three lines
that follow is too squalid for poetry, or prose, or thought.


THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER


This poem is surely more full of a certain quality of extreme
poetry--the simplest "flower of the mind," the most single magic--
than any other in our language. But the reader must be permitted
to call the story silly.

Page 265 (Are those her ribs through which the Sun)

Coleridge used the sun, moon, and stars as a great dream uses them
when the sleeping imagination is obscurely threatened with illness.
All through The Ancient Mariner we see them like apparitions. It
is a pity that he followed the pranks also of a dream when he
impossibly placed a star WITHIN the tip of the crescent.

Page 266 (I feer thee, ancient Mariner!)

The likeness of "the ribbed sea sand" is said to be the one passage
actually composed by Wordsworth,--who according to the first plan
should have written The Ancient Mariner with Coleridge--"and
perhaps the most beautiful passage in the poem," adds one critic
after another. It is no more than a good likeness, and has nothing
whatever of the indescribable Coleridge quality.

Coleridge reveals, throughout this poem, an exaltation of the
senses, which is the most poetical thing that can befall a simple
poet. It is necessary only to refer, for sight, to the stanza on
"the moving Moon" at the bottom of page 267; for hearing, to the
supernatural stanzas on page 271; and, for touch, to the line -

"And still my body drank."


ROSE AYLMER


Never was a human name more exquisitely sung than in these perfect
stanzas.


THE ISLES OF GREECE


One really fine and poetic stanza--of course, the third; three
stanzas that are good eloquence--the fourth, fifth, and seventh;
and one that is a fair bit of argument--the tenth--may together
perhaps carry the rest.


HELLAS


The profounder spirit of Shelley's poem yet leaves it a careless
piece of work in comparison with Byron's. The two false rhymes at
the outset may not be of great importance, but there is something
annoying in the dissyllabic rhymes of the second stanza.