Welcome back to The Daily Poem, podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, April 2, 2025.

Today's poem from the Lyrical Ballads is by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

In many ways, he's very much the minority contributor to the

lyrical ballads with the overwhelming majority of the poems written by Wordsworth. But Coleridge

made a few notable contributions, most notable and memorable being his lengthy poem, the rhyme of the

ancient mariner. And in it, Coleridge accomplishes what he said was one of his goals in the new style of

poetry that he in Wordsworth were spearheading.

And that was to write a poem whose subject was entirely imaginative, a fantastical, even a supernatural,

preternatural kind of subject, and tie it back into their overall aim. Maybe this was an

added sort of challenge. Tie it back into their overall aim. Maybe this was an added sort of challenge.

Tie it back into their overall aim by making it relatable through a common human narrative

voice. And the rhyme of the ancient mariner is very much that kind of poem. It's told by a kind

of every man who we can sympathize with, and yet it tells an

unbelievable outlandish story. Today's poem is not that poem. It is called The Dungeon.

It's one of Coleridge's other contributions to the collection.

Here, the connection and sympathy to the common man comes through the content, not through

the narrative voice per se. It's very much a youthful activist sort of poem, both lamenting

man's treatment of his fellow man and also then advancing one of the

hallmarks of the romantic spirit, this firm conviction that there is a natural order to things,

or that there is an inherent order to nature itself that is capable of informing man's actions and healing him.

Here is the dungeon.

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