e omission of all but the vital incidents of the story, all belong to
the ballad style. The verse form is what is known as the ballad stanza
(stanza of four lines--a line of four accents followed by one of three,
the second and fourth lines riming) variously extended and modified to
suit the mood of the passage. The prose summary in the form of a
marginal gloss, first added in the edition of 1817, is a practice taken
from early printed books, but not from balladry, which is normally oral.

Of the literary qualities of the poem much might be said, but I call
attention here to but two: the organic structure of the story and the
character of the imagery, two important aspects of creative imagination.
The seven parts are seven stages of the narrative, each, except the
last, closing with a reference to the Mariner's sin. The story proceeds
like the successive acts of a play. In Part I. the deed is committed; in
Part II. the punishment begins; in Part III. the punishment reaches its
climax. Part IV. brings the "turn"; in the crisis of his sufferings
comes the consciousness of fellowship with other creatures and
repentance for his cruelty. Parts V. and VI. relate his penance begun,
and his return by supernatural agencies to the world of human
fellowship; and Part VII. brings us back to the opening scene, closing
the whole with a moral. The moral is so plainly set forth that one
wonders how Mrs. Barbauld could ever have complained, as Coleridge tells
us she did, that the poem "had no moral." His reply is worth recording:
"I told her that in my opinion the poem had too much; and that the only,
or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral
sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a
work of such pure imagination. It ought to have had no more moral than
the Arabian Nights' tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by
the side of a well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie
starts up, and says he _must_ kill the aforesaid merchant, because one
of the date shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son."
But the poet of 1798 knew better than the metaphysician of 1830. The
moral is as essential a part of the whole poem as moral consciousness is
of man; without it the poem would be without the coherence of human
interest which alone can secure for "these shadows of imagination"
"poetic faith." The moral, really, is suffused throughout the work, is
the blood of