A ballad in literature is a narrative poem that usually tells a dramatic story. Early ballads in English and Irish literature that were handed down orally are folk ballads; their authors are unknown. Ballads that are composed as literary works by identified authors are literary ballads. "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is a literary ballad by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one that tells a very enthralling story of supernatural events on a ship at sea.

Traditionally, ballads are composed in four-line stanzas. They follow a set pattern of rhythm.

• The first and third lines are iambic tetrameter, meaning they follow a weak/strong pattern of rhythm; each line has four strong beats as the syllables of the words are pronounced.
• The second and fourth lines are iambic trimeter, meaning they follow the weak/strong pattern of rhythm, but each line has three strong beats.

Coleridge's poem follows this ballad structure with few exceptions. Here is the poem's third stanza with the strong beats underlined:

(1) He holds him with his skinny hand.
(2) "There was a ship," quoth he.
(3) "Hold off! unhand me, graybeard loon!"
(4) Eftsoons his hand dropped he.

When you read the lines aloud, it is easy to hear the rhythm in them, like beats on a drum: four beats in lines 1 and 3; 3 beats in lines 2 and 4.

Also, ballads have a definite rhyme scheme with the second and fourth lines rhyming. In the stanza above, the second and fourth lines both end in "he," but that counts! Other stanzas show perfect rhymes in the second and fourth lines: three/me; kin/din; still/will, for example, the pairs of rhymes from the first, second, and fourth stanzas of the poem.

Coleridge's poem doesn't follow perfect ballad structure. Some stanzas have six lines, but they do follow the same pattern of alternating lines in the rhythm pattern. Overall, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is an excellent example of a literary ballad: It tells a very dramatic story and closely conforms to the patterns of rhyme and rhythm.

There is, however, something unusual about it. It is an example of a lyrical ballad, a new literary form created by Coleridge and English poet William Wordsworth. As a lyrical ballad, the speaker (in this case the old mariner) expresses his feelings and shares his thoughts as the story is told.

How does Coleridge use ballad features in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"?

In "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" Coleridge draws on both the typical style and content of the English ballad to create an appropriate and unique atmosphere for the timeless message he imparts.

One of the first things a reader notices is Coleridge's use of words that had become archaic long before his own time, such as "eftsoons," and the unusual spellings and capitalizations, in the "Argument" ("Ancyent Marinere," for example) and in the poem itself. The impression is one of a poem that is, like the Mariner himself, "ancient." It's instructive to compare the metrical form with that of an actual folk ballad, such as "True Thomas." Coleridge uses the same rhyme scheme, A-B-C-B, with quatrains in iambic tetrameter. In both, the effect is what we would expect if someone were telling us a story, without artifice. In spite of the archaic usages, Coleridge's language is simple and appears deliberately childlike at times, with repetitions and statements of obvious things poets of his time normally would have avoided as less than sophisticated:

The sun came up upon the left,
Out of the sea came he!
And he shone bright, and on the right
Went down into the sea.

At the start of part 2 the quatrain is repeated almost verbatim but with the direction of the sun's rising and setting reversed. Prior to this, at the close of part 1, the revelation of the Mariner's having shot the albatross occurs without preparation, in the artless and matter-of-fact way typical of the ballad form. It is not unlike the abrupt statement at the end of "True Thomas":

And until seven years were gone and past
True Thomas on earth was never seen.

The balladeer presents this fact unemotionally, as if it is part of the normal, unsurprising process of life. The same is true in the ballad "Edward," where at the very start the abrupt question "Why does your brand sae drip wi' blood, / Edward, Edward?" reveals in an instant the tragedy being enacted.

Coleridge, however, does not wish merely to replicate the form and style of the folk ballad. His poem is, rather, a self-conscious reimagining of an artless kind of verse. The great length of the poem, and the fact that it concludes with its famous, explicit moral, "He prayeth best, who loveth best, / All things both great and small" separate it from the folk ballads Coleridge so obviously has in mind as models.

Just as his friend Wordsworth, in spearheading the new movement we call Romanticism, sought to use simple, everyday language in his verse and to avoid "poetic diction," Coleridge takes a similar but individual path of his own in creating a kind of super ballad. This work derives from the poetry of the people but transforms into a work unique in style, form, and content in the history of English poetry.