Showing posts with label the rime of the ancient mariner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the rime of the ancient mariner. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Can YOU spot the difference?




And now it's time for one of my infamous "spot the difference" games. Try to work up a little enthusiasm, please.


Yesterday I got into Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, reading great swaths of it out loud (with no audience, which was maybe just as well). Then I went looking for illustrations and found a plethora of pen-and-ink drawings. Apparently the good Mariner didn't lend himself to colour pictures.


I was stunned to find one called Life-in-Death, drawn in the 1940s by illustrator Mervyn Peake. It looks as if it were done 200 years earlier, but even spookier than that is its resemblance to a certain macabre figure of the 21s century.


Does the word propofol mean anything to you?










Are those her ribs through which the sun
Did peer, as through a grate?


And is that Woman all her crew?
Is that a Death? and are there two?


Is Death that Woman's mate?



Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:











                                                                    Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold.



http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html