Sara Coleridge the "Essays on his Own Times, by S. T. Coleridge", and the Introduction to the "Biographia Literaria". In 1850, Coleridge discovered a lump in her breast. Her physician decided not to operate, prescribing cod liver oil and opium. Knowing there was no cure, she waited for the disease to take its course. "I live in constant fear," Coleridge wrote, "like the Ancient Mariner with the Albatross hung about his neck, I have a weight always upon me." Shortly before she died she amused herself by writing a little autobiography for her daughter. This, which reaches only to her ninth year,
Stylistics poetic effects in understanding a poem's meaning. Widdowson points out that in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798), the mystery of the Mariner's abrupt appearance is sustained by an idiosyncratic use of tense. (Widdowson. 1992, 40) For instance, the Mariner 'holds' the wedding-guest with his 'skinny hand' in the present tense, but releases it in the past tense ('...his hands dropt he.'); only to hold him again, this time with his 'glittering eye', in the present (Widdowson. 1992, 41). Widdowson notices that when the content of poetry is summarised, it often refers to very general