Oh god, this collection of poems was such a delight, and I can’t believe it took me this long to finally read it. I had read some of the poems here for various courses in high school and university, but never read the collection as a whole.

The collection is book-ended by “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” and “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” and these are probably the two greatest poems in the collection, but the contents–as a whole–are so good. I read the whole collection out loud, as I feared that I would miss the rhythm, pacing, and tempo if I had read it internally as I normally do. I’m so glad I did, the poems are essentially music.

The bulk of the poems are written in iambic tetrameter, although there is some deviation: “The Convict,” for example, is made up of unusual anapests, which gives the poem additional weight, given that it inverts the classical Greek dactyl. The sound is something like duh-duh-DAH duh-duh-DAH duh-duh-DAH. Even so, the preponderance of poems rely heavily on iambs: duh-DAH duh-DAH duh-DAH duh-DAH.

Wordsworth and Coleridge make the point in the introduction that it was supposed to speak to the everyday experiences of the English people through poetry, which had until then been the territory of wealthy and so-called “sophisticated” people. As a result, the poems paint tableaux of the English countryside, tell the stories of women whose husbands have left them or have–according to rumor–killed their child, share the grief of sailors lost at sea, and recount narratives about shepherds who were wealthy in sheep but lost them all.

Many of the poems here have a darker side, although not all of them do. In spite of the trials and tribulations portrayed in the poems, they seem to impart a sense of inner peace.

To date, this is probably my favorite poetry collection of all time.