Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Fall 2014 Annotation Assignment 2: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Sea Ballads
Due 9-29-2014 (30 points)

Create new annotations to help provide context on Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner . Your annotations should appear on the Rime, and may also appear on the related ballads in the list below.

Make at least three or four distinctly different annotations: Your annotations may take the form of suggestions or comments posted on earlier annotations on the text. Investigate contexts for the events in the Ancient Mariner's narrative and references in Coleridge's paratext gloss (the text running along the sides of the poem). Using web sources and the Pitt Library, look up, discuss, and link out to sea ballads, sea chanteys, sailor superstitions, supernatural experiences at sea (such as mermaid encounters), and other contexts. Link to relevant images, music or other media you find (such as in sources like this: Songs of the Sea: Tunes, Lyrics, Information. For words and references in traditional Scottish ballads, try the Dictionary of the Scots Language, and browse the resources on The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border Education site--which features pages on supernatural ballads and "The Wife of Usher's Well." Try looking up "spectre" and other phrases and references in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Seek out information in the Pitt Digital Library as you've done with the Word Log assignments, working with the Oxford English Dictionary and Credo Reference, but you may also wish to look for articles in the Pitt Digital Library to help build on the information given in the notes in our anthology. Write your own annotations based on what you're learning, in your own words, tuned to the style of the Lit Genius site. (For a reminder, please review A Student's Guide to Genius.)

The main text we're collectively annotating is:

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner In Seven Parts, from Sibylline Leaves" Note: Much of the content of this has not been annotated in any detail, and some of the annotations are problematic from last year: Can you improve on existing annotations and create some new notes of your own? You may annotate Coleridge's "gloss" by adding comments to these special notes.

You may also create annotations for one or more of the following: Your annotations may help explain references specific to the ballad, or tell us some background on how the ballad was collected/printed in Coleridge's time. Or you might suggest linkages between these and The Rime (either on these sites or the Rime site):

"The Wife of Usher's Well" (traditional ballad)

Sir Patrick Spens (traditional ballad)

The Daemon-lover (traditional ballad)

Mary Robinson, "The Haunted Beach" (Investigate: does this poem have any specific relationship to Coleridge's Ancient Mariner?)