1. Putting it all in Context: Texts and Contexts
Barbara Bleiman
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‘If we emphasise context too exclusively […] then we will soon be doing History rather than English, in all but name, learning a great deal about the period but not very much about the text. Knowing about the context isn’t much use unless it illuminates the text.’
Peter Barry, University of Aberystwyth
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10. © EMC 2013 Disappointing Results at A Level Literature 19.11.13
And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong:
He struck with his o'ertaking wings,
And chased us south along.
With sloping masts and dipping prow,
As who pursued with yell and blow
Still treads the shadow of his foe,
And forward bends his head,
The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,
And southward aye we fled.
And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As green as emerald. 
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And through the drifts the snowy clifts
Did send a dismal sheen:
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken—
The ice was all between.
The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!
At length did cross an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God's name. 
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It ate the food it ne'er had eat,
And round and round it flew.
The ice did split with a thunder-fit;
The helmsman steered us through!
And a good south wind sprung up behind;
The Albatross did follow,
And every day, for food or play,
Came to the mariner's hollo!
In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,
It perched for vespers nine;
Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,
Glimmered the white Moon-shine.’
'God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus! –
Why look'st thou so?’ – With my cross-bow
I shot the ALBATROSS.
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In 1789 the French Revolution began with the call of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity
Romantic poets and writers often used language which was deliberately old-fashioned and archaic to give an otherworldy flavour to their writings. They used elements of language that harked back to the medieval period.
The sublime – a quality of greatness or grandeur that inspires awe, fear and wonder, specially in relation to nature. Ideas about the sublime influenced Romantic artists and poets.
The ballad is one of the most basic, ancient forms of storytelling enacting extraordinary events in the lives of ordinary people.
During the second half of the 18th century there emerged in the middle classes of a radical new political spirit, led by activists such as Tom Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, who argued for social justice, human rights and equality for all men and women.
The 18th century Enlightenment saw nature as something to be dominated, tamed and regularised. The Romantics rejected this view.
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Integrating contextual comment into your analysis
Nature in this section is presented as something wild and dramatic – frightening in its power – with the storm being personified as a violent figure who threatens the sailors. The use of active verbs is striking – the storm chases, pursues and roars, and the ice creaks, growls, roars and howls like a living creature. But although the predominant feeling is one of terror and threat, there is also a grandeur and majesty about the depiction of the seascape, a sense of the sublime. This is captured particularly in the idea of the storm striking ‘with his o’ertaking wings’, hinting at the idea of it being like an avenging angel, and in the depiction of the monumental, ‘mast-high’ drifts of ice and snow. The narrative certainly conjures up the terror of the scene but there also seems to be that awe for the power of untamed nature commonly associated with the Romantic poets.
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