No choice: He must hear this person’s story. On his way to a wedding, at the very door of the banquet hall, a man is buttonholed by a haggard and compelling stranger. Six hundred and twenty-six lines of customized Coleridgean English, a strange and wildly flexible hybrid idiom in which the long strains of the King James Bible are looped around a kind of loping, hacked-off folk doggerel, the “Rime” is … What is it? The last epic. You might say further: It’s the dream-poem of right now.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” first published in 1798, is-you might say-the archetypal archetypal journey. To be at sea, mid-story storm-threatened or becalmed to be adrift, disoriented, at the mercy of incomprehensibly avenging forces that somehow (and you know this, you know this) contain the secret of who you are … We’ve got a poem for that. If such a character exists in the coronavirus story, it is not an individual, but the entire modern world.” Wrapping up one of his recent panoramically authoritative surveys of our altered landscape, inner and outer, my Atlantic colleague Ed Yong put it like this: “In the classic hero’s journey-the archetypal plot structure of myths and movies-the protagonist reluctantly departs from normal life, enters the unknown, endures successive trials, and eventually returns home, having been transformed.
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