The Poetry of Coleridge - 1 - IanMcKellen

All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink...


Readings of 1.The Rime of the Ancient Mariner 2.This Lime-tree Bower my Prison 3.Frost at Midnight and 4.Kubla Khan recorded by Ian McKellen at Wordsworth's home at Grasmere to which Coleridge was a frequent visitor. Go to - http://www.wordsworth.org.uk/home

McKellen's manner of reading is matter of fact, always lucid and delivered with great art. This is the most poetically effective performance though some may prefer the romantic tradition of performance which persisted until about a generation ago, or the regionally accented 'common man' style presently favoured by the B.B.C. The more I listened the more enthusiastic I became and so will you too.

To follow over the next year will be Christopher Plummer, Ralph Richardson, Richard Burton, Michael Redgrave and half a dozen (or a dozen) other performances.

The Ancient Mariner itself is, amongst other things, a story of the burdens of selfhood and the weight of conscience, a tale of a crazed and monomanic voyage impelled by puritan psychology . A generation or two later, Ahab would threaten to tear down the sun itself if it offended him (the text read here is that of 1798, as published famously in 'Lyrical Ballads'.


Eliot - Four Quartets et alia - AlecGuinness
Eliot - Four Quartets et alia - T.S.Eliot
T.S.Eliot - The Wasteland - 1 – Eliot&Speaight
T.S.Eliot - The Wasteland - 2 – Guinness&Shaw
T.S.Eliot - The Wasteland – 3 -Scofield&Tomlinson
The Poetry of Auden 1-3
The Poetry of Shelley 1-7
The Poetry of Tennyson 1-9