This semester, we looked at two particularly long poems - Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Eliot's The Waste Land. Just by looking at the printed text of each, it's fairly obvious how different they are, but a closer examination can reveal how British approaches to longer narrative poetry changed in the almost 100 years separating the texts.
Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the more traditional of the two in form; it sticks more or less to the ballad form, with regular rhyme that is only broken with purpose (as in rhyming 'thus' with 'albatross' when the Mariner shoots the albatross) and stanza lengths that begin to stray more frequently from 4 lines as the supernatural elements of the poem drift more into focus. It also has much more solid exposition, establishing the narrative frame of the Mariner telling his story to the wedding guest clearly at the beginning and referring back to him to re-establish the frame as the wedding guest's mood changes ("I fear thee, ancient Mariner!"). The narration itself is loftier than the diction of the 'common man' espoused by the same book in which this poem appeared, Lyrical Ballads, but remains stylistically grounded by its straightforward, chronological narrative that only breaks to maintain the framing device.
The Waste Land, on the other hand, is a much less straightforward poem. It contains fragments of narrative interspersed with meditations and image-based sections that come together to form more of a collage than a plot (I imagine this poem would translate well into a film - maybe even a music video). There is no regularity at all in this poem; though some images and ideas are repeatedly referenced, they appear in different capacities each time they appear (see my previous post on water for one example). There is no exposition to speak of; in section 2 of the poem, several scenes play out without introducing characters or settings, and when scenes are sketched out, as at the beginning of section 3, the point seems to be a meditation on the images presented rather than to set up any action there. The narration is hard to pinpoint, being comprised of both casual ("He'll want to know what you done with that money he gave you") and more typically 'poetic' English ("And I Teiresias have foresuffered all/Enacted on this same divan or bed"), multiple languages in addition, and allusions to religion, literature, and culture woven throughout.
An interesting commonality between the texts is that both were at some point published with notes from their respective authors. Coleridge included a gloss to provide interpretations of the text, potentially in response to criticism of Rime's lofty style. Eliot's footnotes to The Waste Land translate some of the lines in languages other than English, and refer to other works in cases where Eliot lifted lines ("To Carthage then I came" being from Augustine of Hippo). Only in The Waste Land are the notes truly necessary to make sense of some parts of the text, as The Waste Land is so fragmented that no one reader could reasonably hope to read all the languages and get all the allusions on their first reading.
Going from Rime to The Waste Land, we see some adoption of more common diction, but overall The Waste Land is more difficult to make sense of. Its resistance to poetic and narrative convention is purposeful in helping communicate its themes of fragmentation and a loss of beauty and truth in the post-WWI world. Gone is the linear structure, regular rhyme and stanza length, and exposition of Rime; indeed, gone is its comprehensibility. Even the idea that a work of literature could 'teach' us something, as the Mariner teaches the wedding guest to love all of God's creations, is gone, lost to a meditation on death, pollution, and famine, brought on by the earth-shattering reality of the 'Great War.'
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