ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses 'The Ancient Mariner' represents the double vision more plainly than any other. There are three principal texts of the 'Ancient Mariner', representing the original poem and its two main revisions. In the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, or 1798, the poem appeared at the head of the collection, in mock-medieval spelling and headed by a brief prose argument in modern English. For the second edition, or 1800, perhaps feeling he had carried the joke too far, Coleridge modernized the spelling of the entire poem as well as the choice of some thirty or forty words, deleting forty-six lines and adding seven. But of course, in a significant sense, It is not Coleridge's language at all: it is the Ancient Mariner's. The ghostly return of the shipmates to another life as a seraph-band echoes Coleridge's fascination with memory and the tricks it plays to reveal change in oneself.
