Knowing words with multiple vowels proves useful when you’re faced with a rack of mostly, or all, vowels. Here’s a list of the first twenty-two playable four-letter words with three vowels:
aeon: a long period of time (also eon)
agee: to one side (also ajee)
agio: a surcharge applied when exchanging currency
ague: a sickness associated with malaria
ajee: to one side (also agee)
akee: a tropical tree
alae: wings (pl. of ala)
alee: on the side shielded from wind
amia: a freshwater fish
amoa: a kind of small buffalo
awee: a little while
eaux: waters (pl. of eau)
eide: distinctive appearances of things (pl. of eidos)
emeu: an emu
etui: an ornamental case
euro: an Australian marsupial, also known as wallaroo, for being like the kangaroo and the wallaby; also a unified currency of much of Europe
ilea: the terminal portions of small intestines (pl. of ileum)
ilia: pelvic bones (pl. of ilium)
jiao: a Chinese currency (also chiao)
luau: a large Hawaiian feast
meou: to meow
moue: a pouting expression
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website. Also review the posts on my blog devoted to Scrabble tips, including this one.
As one of the preliminary steps in your research and writing process, you will conduct a short personal interview that will serve as one of the sources for your project. If you decide that you do not want to use the interview that you conduct today, you are welcome to include another one in your project. Keep in mind, however, that the interview you include in your project must be conducted with a student currently enrolled in section 20 or 21, and the subject of the interview must be the subject of your project.
Questions to Ask Your Interviewee Include the Following:
What experience, if any, did you have with the subject (the reading or the aspect of the course) before you encountered it in English 1103?
Has it changed your perspective on reading and/or writing? If so, how?
Will you continue to pursue the subject (read more work by the author, continue the classroom practice or activity) after the conclusion of the semester?
Introducing an Interview Quotation
After you conduct your interview, compose on the worksheet provided a sentence in which you introduce a quotation with a signal phrase, such as “According to First Name Last Name,” or “First Name Last Name notes or observes or points out that . . . .” Your quotation will not be followed by a parenthetical citation because it is a form of oral communication (without page or paragraph numbers).
Composing a Work Cited Entry for Your Interview
Follow your quotation with a work cited entry that follows this format:
Work Cited
Last Name, First Name. Interview. Conducted by First Name Last Name. Day Month Year.
Note that your work cited entry should include a hanging indent.
The complete final essay and annotated bibliography assignment is included below.
Final Essay and Annotated Bibliography Assignment
OVERVIEW
An annotated bibliography is a list of sources on a subject that includes a summary of each source. Some bibliographies include additional information, such as the authors’ credentials. That is the type of bibliography that you will compose along with your final essay for the course.
KEY FEATURES
An introductory essay of three or more paragraphs that (1) presents the subject of your bibliography, and (2) addresses your purpose for compiling it. In other words: What drives your research? What interests you about the subject, and what question/s do you seek to answer about your subject?
A complete MLA-style bibliographic entry for each source.
A one-paragraph summary of each source followed by a shorter second paragraph that presents the writer’s credentials and addresses the purpose that the source might serve in a larger project. Would it serve as a point of comparison or contrast to another source? Would it support or challenge an idea presented in another source? Is it a secondary source that sheds light on the meaning of a primary source? The last question pertains primarily to bibliographies that focus on one of the writers studied in the course.
PRELIMINARY WORK—What to Complete in Class Today
Personal Interview
Your final essay and annotated bibliography will focus on one of the authors we have studied or one of elements of the course, including (1) blogging in the classroom, (2) limiting screen time, (3) writing longhand, and (4) playing Scrabble. As a starting point, you will conduct a short personal interview that will serve as one of the sources for your project. If you decide that you do not want to use the interview that you conduct today, you are welcome to include another one in your project. Keep in mind, however, that the interview you include in your project must be conducted with a student currently enrolled in section 20 or 21, and the subject of the interview must be the subject of your project.
Questions to ask your interviewee include the following:
What experience, if any, did you have with the subject (the reading or the aspect of the course) before you encountered it in English 1103?
Has it changed your perspective on reading and/or writing? If so, how?
Will you continue to pursue the subject (read more work by the author, continue the classroom practice or activity) after the conclusion of the semester?
After you conduct your interview, compose on the worksheet provided a sentence in which you introduce a quotation with a signal phrase, such as “According to First Name Last Name,” or “First Name Last Name notes or observes or points out that . . . .” Your quotation will not be followed by a parenthetical citation because it is a form of oral communication (without page or paragraph numbers).
Follow your quotation with a work cited entry in this format:
Work Cited*
Last Name, First Name. Interview. Conducted by First Name Last Name. Day Month Year.
*Note that you will use the header annotated bibliography, not works cited, in your final essay and annotated bibliography.
Annotated Bibliographic Entry
After you complete your personal interview, compose an annotated bibliographic entry for the text that serves as the starting point for your project. (See the list below.) Your annotated bibliographic entry consists of three parts: (1) the MLA-style work cited entry, as shown below, (2) a one-paragraph summary, and (3) a paragraph of commentary—see the third bullet point under the heading KEY FEATURES.
Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. “Writing on Computers vs. Writing on Paper.” Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 124-25.
Sedaris, David. “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” Me Talk Pretty One Day. Little, Brown, 2000. 166-73.
Begin by conducting a short personal interview and an annotated bibliographic entry for the appropriate source listed above, or on page two (the one that focuses on your subject), and complete the worksheet provided. For more information. See the paragraphs under the header PRELIMINARY WORK—What to Complete in Class Today.
Use the HPU Libraries site, https://www.highpoint.edu/library/, and Google Scholar to locate a minimum of three additional reliable and relevant print sources (articles, essays, and/or books) devoted to the same subject. Compose your summaries and commentaries in complete sentences, introduce any quotations with signal phrases, and include parenthetical citations where needed. Your bibliography must include five sources, four of which must be print. (Your personal interview is a nonprint source.) If you wish to include an additional non-print source, such as a video, you may include that as a sixth source.
After you have composed your annotated bibliographic entries, write an introductory essay that (1) presents the subject of your bibliography, and (2) addresses your purpose for compiling it. In other words: What drives your research? What question do you seek to answer about your subject? Also, (3) What larger project might develop from your bibliography? Would it be a project for a course in psychology, science, education, or another discipline? Address all five of your sources in your essay, and quote at least two of them.
Note: Though your introductory essay will precede your annotated bibliography, you will compose it last because you will need to re-read and summarize your sources before you will know how to address them in your essay.
DIRECTIONS FOR RESEARCHING, DRAFTING, REVISING, AND SUBMITTING
Devote today’s class primarily to conducting a personal interview and composing an annotated bibliographic entry for the text that serves as a starting point for your research. You will have two additional Wednesdays to work in class on your final essay and annotated bibliography before you post your revision to Blackboard and to your WordPress blog.
Before class on the due date: Post a copy of your revision to Blackboard and to your blog. In your blog post, omit the first-page information included in your file submitted to Blackboard (your name, professor’s name, course and section, and date). Add to your blog post an image that documents some part of your writing process away from the screen, such as the summary of your source in your journal, today’s worksheet, or a page of your draft. Also add an embedded link to a relevant web site. Even though your work for this assignment will take place primarily in front of the screen, your writing process still involves putting pen to paper, and photographic documentation of that on your blog is a requirement of the assignment.
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website. Also review the posts on my blog devoted to Scrabble tips
After your group presentations this morning, if time permits, you will compose a short reflection. Elements to address in your reflection include the following:
the introduction of your group members and opening remarks
the brief discussion of one or more points in the Check, Please! lesson
the close examination of one segment
the conclusion
optional element: observations about the relevance of the lesson to your other work in English 1103 and/or your other courses
poise, eye contact, and avoidance of filler words
Once you have completed your paragraph, or paragraphs, devoted to your own group’s presentation, you will compose an additional paragraph that addresses a presentation by one of the other groups. Choose the one that stands out the most to you. What element or elements of that presentation made it particularly effective (or not) and why?
If time does not permit the completion of your reflection in class today, you will submit the assignment at the beginning of class on Wednesday, October 25.
Next Up
Wednesday’s class will be devoted to preliminary work for your final essay and annotated bibliography. You will receive a handout with the assignment instructions at the beginning of class.
On a recent WordPlay day, a student remarked that he was unfamiliar with the word nth, which is used to describe an unspecified number. Learning nth and other all-consonant words that follow will enable you to continue the game when you’re faced with a rack without vowels.
brr: used to indicate that one is cold
crwth: an ancient stringed instrument (pl. -s)
cwm: a cirque (a deep, steepwalled basin on a mountain, pl. -s, prounounced to rhyme with “boom”)
hm: used to express thoughtful consideration (also “hmm“)
mm: used to express assent or satisfaction
nth: describing an unspecified number in a series
phpht: used as an expression of mild anger or annoyance (also “pht“)
psst: used to attract someone’s attention
sh: used to urge silence (also “shh” and “sha“)
tsk: to utter an exclamation of annoyance (-ed, -ing, -s)
tsktsk: to “tsk” (-ed, -ing, -s)
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website. Also review the posts on my blog devoted to Scrabble tips, including this one.
The assignments that I wrote as models for lessons one through five appear below. As you and your group members prepare for your presentation, you may find it helpful to review the sample assignment for your designated lesson.
Check, Please! Sample Assignment, Lesson One
In the first lesson of the Check, Please!, Starter Course, Mike Caulfield, author of the course and research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, introduces the four-step SIFT approach to determining the reliability of a source: (1) “Stop,” (2) “Investigate,” (3) “Find better coverage,” and (4) “Trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context.”
One of the most useful practices presented in lesson one is what the author terms the Wikipedia Trick. Deleting everything that follows a website’s URL (including the slash), adding a space, typing “Wikipedia,” and hitting “enter” will yield the site’s Wikipedia page. The Wikipedia entry that appears at the top of the screen may indicate the source’s reliability or lack thereof.
The most memorable segment of lesson one is the short, riveting video “The Miseducation of Dylann Roof,” which begins with the narrator asking the question, “How does a child become a killer?” Produced by the Southern Poverty Law Center, it documents how algorithms can lead unskilled web searchers down paths of disinformation. In the worst cases, such as Roof’s, algorithms can lead searchers to the extremist propaganda of radical conspiracy theorists.
In the second lesson of the Check, Please!, Starter Course, Mike Caulfield, author of the course and a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, focuses on investigating a source, the second step in the SIFT approach that he introduces in lesson one.
One of the most useful practices presented in lesson two is Caulfield’s follow-up to the Wikipedia strategy that he outlines in the previous lesson. After he reviews that strategy, Caulfield explains how to use the control-f keyboard shortcut (command-f on a Mac). Typing control-f (or command-f) will open a small textbox in the upper right of the screen. Typing a word you are searching for will highlight the first appearance of the word in the text. Hitting return will highlight each subsequent appearance of the word.
Lesson two introduced me to fauxtire, a term for websites such as World News Daily Report, based in Tel Aviv, that present themselves as satirical but in fact serve primarily to perpetuate disinformation.
Perhaps the most memorable portion of lesson two was the side-by-side comparison of the websites for the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Pediatricians. Though at first glance the two appear comparable, using the Wikipedia strategy reveals their profound differences. While AAP is the premiere authority on children’s health and well-being, ACP was founded to protest the adoption of children by single-sex couples and is widely viewed as a single-issue hate organization.
In the third lesson of the Check, Please!, Starter Course, Mike Caulfield, author of the course and a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, continues his instruction on the second step in four-step SIFT approach to determining the reliability of a source. Lesson three, “Further Investigation” covers these topics: (1) Just add Wikipedia for names and organizations, (2) Google Scholar searches for verifying expertise, (3) Google News searches for information about organizations and individuals, (4) the nature of state media and how to identify it, and (5) the difference between bias and agenda.
One of the most instructive parts of lesson three focuses on two news stories about MH17, Malyasia Airlines Flight 17, a passenger flight scheduled to land in Kuala Lumpur that was shot down over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014. While the second story, a television news segment, appears to present detailed investigative reporting challenging the conclusion of the Dutch Safety Board and Dutch-led joint investigation team–the conclusion that Russia was to blame–a quick just-add-Wikipedia check reveals that RT (formerly Russia Today) is a Russian state-controlled international TV network, a government propaganda tool rather than a source of fair and balanced news. The first video, the one produced by Business Insider, a financial and business news site, delivers accurate coverage of MH17.
Another notable segment of “Further Investigation” addresses the important distinction between “bias” and “agenda.” There, Caulfield observes that “[p]ersonal bias has real impacts. But bias isn’t agenda, and it’s agenda that should be your primary concern for quick checks,” adding that “[b]ias is about how people see things; agenda is about what a news or research organization is set up to do.”
In the fourth lesson of the Check, Please!, Starter Course, Mike Caulfield, author of the course and a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, focuses his instruction on the third step in the four-step SIFT approach to determining the reliability of a source. Lesson four, “Find Trusted Coverage,” addresses these topics: (1) scanning Google News for relevant stories, (2) using known fact-checking sites, and (3) conducting a reverse-image search to find a relevant source for an image.
One of the concepts Caulfield introduces in lesson four is click restraint, which was given its name by Sam Wineberg, Professor of History and Education at Stanford, and Sarah McGrew, Assistant Professor of Education at the University of Maryland. Click Restraint is an activity that fact checkers practice regularly, but average people do not. Fact checkers resist the impulse to click on the first result, opting instead to scan multiple results to find one that combines trustworthiness and relevance.
Caulfield also considers the issue of false frames and offers as an example the miscaptioned photo of a young woman that circulated widely after the 2017 London Bridge attack. In the photo, the woman, who is wearing a hijab, is looking down at her phone as she walks past one of the victims lying by the side of the road, surrounded by members of the rescue team. Because the woman’s face is blurred, viewers of the miscaptioned picture cannot see the look of shock that is visible in her face in another image taken by the same photographer. Subsequently, her apparent lack of concern for the victim seems to confirm the caption in the infamous tweet.
Choosing a general search term over a specific one is a useful and unexpected tip Caulfield includes in his discussion of image searches. He explains that the benefit of such a bland term as “letter” or “photo” will prevent the confirmation bias that can lead to the proliferation of disinformation through false frames.
In the fifth lesson of the Check, Please!, Starter Course, Mike Caulfield, author of the course and a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, covers the final step in the five-step SIFT approach: “Trace Claims, Quotes, and Media to Their Original Context.” Caulfield outlines the process of locating the original context as an antidote to the issues of accuracy that occur when information passes through intermediaries.
One of the most instructive portions of lesson five features a passage in which Caulfield cites a study of how stories evolve as gossip through the processes of leveling (stripping details), sharpening (adding or emphasizing details), and assimilating, which combines the two. In the process of assimilation “the details that were omitted and the details that were added or emphasized are chosen because they either fit what the speaker thinks is the main theme of the story, or what the speaker thinks the listener will be most interested in.” Similarly, leveling, sharpening, and assimilating all figure in the altered photographs and memes in lesson four. The abbreviated speech of the NRA’s CEO, Wayne LaPierre, which omits commentary, inaccurately indicates a contradiction in his stance on the presence of guns in schools.
The image of photographer Kawika Singson with flames at his feet serves as an example of leveling. Although the flames are real, they were not caused by the heat of the lava flow where Singson stands with his tripod. Instead, to create the image, a friend of his poured accelerant on the lava before Singson stepped into the frame. The deception wasn’t intentional; Singson simply wanted the image for his Facebook cover photo.
Unlike Singson’s photograph, the altered photograph of the Notorious B.I.G. with Kurt Cobain was created with the intent to deceive. Cropping and merging the two photographs illustrates the assimilation process adopted by Photoshop users to appeal to music fans eager to think that such fictional meetings of icons took place. Krist Novoselic, who founded Nirvana with Cobain, replied to the is-it-real question with his own fake photo, making the claim that the hand holding the cigarettes was Shakur’s, that he had been cropped from the right.
This morning in class you will plan and draft a short midterm reflection essay that documents your work in the first half of the semester, focusing on what you consider your most significant achievements and the feature or features of the course that have benefited your development as a writer and a student. Features to consider include the following:
Planning, drafting, and revising your literacy narrative or your analysis
Keeping a journal
Completing Check, Please! assignments
Studying one of the readings examined class, including “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” “The Day that Language Came into My Life,” “Back Story” (from The Blind Side), “The Falling Man,” “The School,” the sample literacy narrative (“A Bridge to Words”), or one of the sample analyses
Writing for an online audience beyond the classroom/creating and maintaining a WordPress blog
Collaborating with your classmates on in-class writing assignments
Playing Scrabble/Collaborating with your teammates on Wordplay Day
Writing longhand
Limiting screen time
Focus on two, three, or four features of the course (but no more than four), and include in your reflective essay the following elements:
A title that offers a window into your reflection
An opening paragraph that introduces your focus and presents your thesis
Body paragraphs that offer concrete details from your work to support your thesis.
A relevant quotation from Writing Analytically or a relevant quotation from one of the texts that we have studied in class. Introduce your quotation with a signal phrase and follow it with a parenthetical citation.
A conclusion that revisits the thesis without restating it verbatim
An MLA-style works cited entry for your source
Sample Works Cited Entries
Bartheleme, Donald. “The School.” The Best American Short Stories 1975, edited by Martha Foley, Houghton Mifflin, 1975. pp.8-11.
Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. “Analysis Does More than Break a Subject into Its Parts.” Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 4-5.
—. “Distinguishing Analysis from Summary, Expressive Writing, and Argument.” Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 5-8.
—. “Writing on Computers vs. Writing on Paper.” Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 124-25.
Sedaris, David. “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” Me Talk Pretty One Day. Little, Brown, 2000. 166-73.
Next Up
Wednesday’s class will be devoted to planning and preparing for your group presentations on the Check, Please! course. At the beginning of the class period, you will receive your group assignments, including which of the five lessons will be the focus of your presentation.
If your midterm grade isn’t as high as you hoped it would be, keep in mind that many additional assignments–including the analysis that you just submitted–will factor in your final grade for the course.
The lists that follow present the midterm grade distribution, the combined distribution for sections nineteen and twenty, followed by the distribution for each section individually.
ENG 1103.19 and 20 Midterm Grade Distribution
A 3
A- 13
B+ 5
B 7
B- 3
C+ 3
C 1
C- 1
D- 1
F 2
ENG 1103.19
A 1
A- 6
B+ 4
B 4
C+ 2
C 1
C- 1
F 1
ENG 1103.20
A 2
A- 7
B+ 1
B 3
B- 3
C+ 1
D- 1
F 1
Next Up
Fall break! I look forward to seeing you back in class on Monday, October 16.
Today’s blog post is the final installment in the series of posts devoted to playable two-letter words. Learning these two-letter words, as well as the other two-letter words in the alphabet, will enable you to see more options for play and increase the number of points you earn in a single turn.
qi: the central life force in Chinese culture (also ki)
re: a tone of the diatonic scale
sh: used to encourage silence
si: a tone of the diatonic scale (also ti)
so: a tone of the diatonic scale (also sol)
ta: an expression of thanks
ti: a tone of the diatonic scale
to: in the direction of
uh: used to express hesitation
um: used to express hesitation
un: one
up: to raise (-s, -ped, -ping)
us: a plural pronoun
ut: the musical tone C in the French solmization system, now replaced by do
we: a first-person plural pronoun
wo: woe
xi: a Greek letter
xu: a former monetary unit of Vietnam equal to one-hundreth of a dong (also sau pl. xu)
ya: you
ye: you
yo: an expression used to attract attention
za: pizza
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website. Also review the posts on my blog devoted to Scrabble tips, including this one.
This morning in class you will plan and draft a short reflective essay that documents your writing process and includes at least one relevant quotation from one of the sections of Writing Analytically devoted to analysis.
Sample Works Cited Entries for Writing Analytically
Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. “Analysis Does More than Break a Subject into Its Parts.” Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 4-5.
—. “Distinguishing Analysis from Summary, Expressive Writing, and Argument.” Writing Analytically, 8th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2019. pp. 5-8.
Questions to Consider in Your Reflection
What aspect of the writing seemed the most challenging? Choosing your topic? Deciding which text would serve as your subject? Determining your thesis? Identifying details to support your claims? Organizing the body of the essay? Composing the conclusion? Why did that aspect of the writing seem the most challenging?
Did the subject of your analysis change? If so, what was your original subject, and what did you change it to?
What do you consider the strongest element of your analysis?
At what point in the process did you decide on a title? Did you change the title during the writing process? If so, what was the original title?
What image that documents part of your writing process away from the screen did you include in your blog post? Why did you choose that particular image?
Up Next
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website. Also review the posts on my blog devoted to Scrabble tips.
Draft collage with Iron Maiden’s Steve Harris and Bruce Dickinson (L-R) and an illustration of Gustave Dore’s edition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
To offer you a second sample analysis, I have posted the essay that follows, one that I wrote as a model for my English literature students in 2020. “Rockin’ the Boat: Iron Maiden’s Metal Mariner” examines a heavy metal reimagining of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798, 1817).
Rockin the Boat: Iron Maiden’s Metal Mariner
A sailor kills a bird of good omen, his destructive act dooms his shipmates and curses him with retelling the tale over and over: So the story of the Ancient Mariner goes. Yet those plot details convey neither the epic nature of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem nor its influence on later writers. Only the poem itself places readers fully in the imaginative realm of the tale, but its late eighteenth-century diction creates a gulf between the poem and contemporary readers. Consequently, one of the challenges of introducing “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” to millennial students is bridging that gulf. Iron Maiden’s adaptation offers one solution. By eliminating the shifts in the narrative voice and updating the story with contemporary language, their heavy-metal version draws listeners into the story with emphatic rhythms that capture the spirit of the original lines.
Archaic words, such as “stoppeth” (line 2), have a way of stopping readers in their tracks, calling attention to their temporal distance from the poem. Along with the distancing effect of the language, the shifts from one speaker to another can pose problems for twenty-first century readers. Although the Mariner tells his own story, the first words that he speaks are in the fifth stanza. The four stanzas that precede his first words are voiced alternately by an unnamed narrator and the wedding guest who becomes the Mariner’s captive audience. In prose such shifts are easily navigated with paragraphing and dialogue tags. Most poems, however, lack such signals, and their absence in Coleridge’s poem compounds its difficulty. Not only are some of the words obstacles, it’s not always clear who is speaking them.
Iron Maiden’s adaptation eliminates those issues with updated diction and a consistent narrative voice. Rather than shifting speakers, Iron Maiden’s version presents the tale sung by a single storyteller, not the sailor himself, but a narrator who tells listeners to “[h]ear the rime of the ancient mariner” (1). Those first words of the song, penned by lead singer Bruce Dickinson, form an imperative sentence: a command with the understood subject “you”—“[You] hear the rime . . . ” (1). I am master and commander of this story, Dickinson seems to say, and you will hear it now. Such is the power of the imperative. Rather than leaving the reader questioning, as Coleridge’s first stanzas may, Iron Maiden’s song speaks directly to listeners, taking hold of them with the pull of a powerful tide, drawing them out to sea to witness the Mariner as he kills the albatross and seals his fate.
The nature of that fate, that the Mariner must tell his tale over and over, is effectively emphasized by the song’s repetition. The recurrence of the words “on and on,” which first appear to underscore the length of the voyage (17, 18) are repeated in the last line: “And the tale goes on and on and on” (89). That ending may be more fitting than the original. The “sadder and wiser” (624) listener at the end of Coleridge’s poem also appears in the last verse of the song. But by returning to the retelling of the story, the song’s ending shifts the focus from the wedding guest who hears the story only once to the teller who must tell it over and over.
Making the Mariner’s story more accessible through song is valuable not only as an introduction to the poem but also as a starting point for understanding its influence on later English writers, including Mary Shelley, the second-generation Romantic who featured both images and lines from the poem in her novel Frankenstein. Coleridge’s poem was one of Shelley’s favorites, one that she first encountered as a child when the poet recited it in her father’s study (Karbeiner xiii). Iron Maiden’s version captures the spirit of what Mary Shelley, Coleridge’s fan girl, heard: the epic ballad of an eighteenth-century rock star.
Works Cited
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” The Norton Anthology of British Literature: The Romantic Period. 10th ed. Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor. W. W. Norton, 2017. pp. 448-64.. EMI, 1984.
Iron Maiden. “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Power Slave. EMI, 1984.
Karbeiner, Karen. Introduction: “Cursed Tellers, Compelling Tales—The Endurance of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. 1818, 1831. Barnes and Noble, 2003.
Jane Lucas 