An Episodic Plot and an Unhappy Ending

Abstract

Pleasant sounds (phonemes) within Coleridge’s 1798 Rime of the Ancyent Marinere were employed to study the poem’s structure in terms of the Aristotelean concepts of fortune (many pleasant emotions/phonemes) and misfortune (few) and to address questions as to how the poem doubled in length shortly before publication. The distribution of emotionally pleasant phonemes such as long e (i), l, v, and th (θ) indicated the presence of a (likely original) poem with a pleasant ending where the albatross drops from the mariner’s neck. Three episodes of threat and escape were probably added to the albatross episode later, along with an unhappy ending. Significant differences in the proportion of pleasant phonemes employed in various sections support these conclusions.