Being Disappointed By a Classic.

As someone who relishes and responds to the power of the written word, I often feel that I should read more poetry. Well, I’ve tried, but most of it leaves me either cold or confused. Tonight, however, I decided to read – and really try to read objectively – one of the longest and most highly regarded narrative poems in the canon of English poetry (or so I’m told) – Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

I’ve quoted some of it quite a lot down the years, you know. A few of the stanzas I can recite accurately (although how, why and when I learned them is a mystery):

‘As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.’ ‘Yea slimy things did crawl with legs upon a slimy sea.’ ‘Water, water everywhere and all the boards did shrink.’ ‘Like one that on a lonesome road doth walk in fear and dread.’ I know the stanzas from which those lines are taken by heart; they’re stanzas which flow elegantly and enrich my perceptions as language should and often does.

But therein lies the problem. In my naïve little way I expect all poetry to flow elegantly, and too much of Rime doesn’t. It totters about most inelegantly like Old Mother Hubbard after a night spent draining the gin bottle. Metrical horrors abound. Stresses are often in the wrong places. Many of the words are ill-conceived, being so ludicrously contrived and beyond the defence of artistic licence as to be seriously disturbing. The narrative in ‘narrative poetry’ is fine; it’s a damn good story. But the poetry part is bloody awful, or so it seems to me.

And now somebody will probably tell me what a Philistine I am. And they might well be right.