THE FOG
PART ONE
Section 2
Did they really sound uproariously jolly?
Or were merely making fun of my folly?
They awakened the startled echoes of my heart.
Of the sounds, did they also want to be a part?
Disembodied voices started floating in the air.
This murky and spooky world gave me such a scare.
My heart was struck by an absolutely numb feeling.
The river turned over, the boulders started reeling.
Piercing the fog, there was a sudden crimson light.
It headed toward me, I jumped up in total fright.
Out of the shadows suddenly came a weird voice.
The trees started whispering, making a loud noise.
"Wait, please listen to me," someone shouted.
In this fog festooned forest, my sanity I doubted.
In the voice there was a desperately urgent ring.
Yet, I ran blindly, my heart not wanting to sing.
Did the voice have the moist tang of the sea in it?
My legs started shaking, my teeth I started to grit.
Did his face bear the stamp of heavy toll?
I shuddered at the atmosphere so frighteningly droll.
By a sense of having lost something, haunted,
To flee from the scene I desperately wanted.
Behind my back someone hurled a cone of pine
Quickly followed by a cold finger up my spine.
A confusing concoction of chaotic communication
Followed me, filling me with intense trepidation!
It was a fractured, discordant collage of words.
In the trees suddenly restive had become the birds.
Was it some grey bearded mariner heading nigh
To clasp my hand, fixing me with a glittering eye?
I almost blurted, “now wherefore stopp’st thou me?"
Shaking the centennial dust, was he near the tree?
Summer Fog Rising -- Karen Parsons
William Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy, and their friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge were discussing literature while on a walking tour in the Quantock Hills in Somerset, England. Wordsworth was reading George Shelvocke’s 1726 narrative, “A Voyage Round The World by Way of the Great South Sea,” in which the captain related how his first mate shot a black albatross, and said to Coleridge, "Suppose you represent him as having killed one of these birds on entering the south sea, and the tutelary spirits of these regions take upon them to avenge the crime." When Wordsworth published his “Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems” in 1798, it contained four poems by Coleridge, including “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,” which began,
ReplyDeleteIt is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
“By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?”
Coleridge later described the origin of the book which launched English Romanticism: “The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural, and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life… In this idea originated the plan of the 'Lyrical Ballads'; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least Romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”