Gothic Themes, Settings, and Figures | Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Poem Date 1809)
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (POEM DATE 1809)
SOURCE: Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. "The Three Graves: A Fragment of a Sexton's Tale." In Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Selected Poems, edited with an introduction and notes by Richard Holmes, pp. 69-80. New York: Penguin Group, 1994.
The following poem was composed by Coleridge in 1797, and first published in the journal The Friend in 1809. Coleridge explains in his preface that his own fragment of this ballad is based upon a poem (which Coleridge summarizes) written by William Wordsworth.
"The Author has published the following humble fragment, encouraged by the decisive recommendation of more than one of our most celebrated living Poets. The language was intended to be dramatic; that is, suited to the narrator; and the metre corresponds to the homeliness of the diction. It is therefore presented as the fragment, not of a Poem, but of a common Ballad-tale....
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