Thursday, January 15, 2004

Poem for Thursday

A small fragment, with an offsite link to a glorious illustrated version:


The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
By Samuel Taylor Coleridge


THERE passed a weary time. Each throat
Was parched, and glazed each eye.
A weary time! a weary time!
How glazed each weary eye,
When looking westward, I beheld
A something in the sky.

At first it seemed a little speck,
And then it seemed a mist:
It moved and moved, and took at last
A certain shape, I wist.

A speck, a mist, a shape, I wist!
And still it neared and neared:
As if it dodged a water-sprite,
It plunged and tacked and veered.

With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
We could not laugh nor wail;
Through utter drought all dumb we stood!
I bit my arm, I sucked the blood,
And cried, A sail! a sail!

--------

Here is the full poem at the University of Virginia's Electronic Text Center. Don't miss the illustrations. I even made one into an icon. Speaking of which...




Now I have an Amelia Earhart icon, too. Am I missing anything? Good, because I need to go write up the Enterprise trailer! 11 a.m. already and no hate mail, my review must have been boring. West Wing kind of bored me so maybe that rubbed off while I was writing; for some reason it's not holding my interest much this season even when it's good. And I can't watch Smallville until tonight -- drat! *skips lots of Flist entries*

No comments: