Lake District:

The Lake District is a low mountainous region in North West England. The Lake District National Park is the central area and is one of the fifteen national parks in the United Kingdom and the largest national park in England. The highest peak is the Scafell Pike which stands at 978m. The area is home to a plethora of wildlife, including sundews and butterwort, two carnivorous plants native to Britain. England's only nesting pair of Golden Eagles can be found in the Lake District. As the name suggests, Lake District consist of numerous lakes, 14 to be precise. The lakes are: Bassenthwaite Lake, Brothers Water, Buttermere, Coniston Water, Crummock Water, Derwent Water, Ennerdale Water, Haweswater, Loweswater, Red Tarn, Thirlmere, Ullswater, Wast Water and Windermere.

Lake Windermere:

Windermere is England’s largest natural, ribbon lake (meaning that it is long, narrow and finger-like) with an elevation of around 39m above sea level and a length of around 17km. The word “Windermere” is commonly believed to have come from the Old Norse name “Vinandr”, and the Old English word “mere” which means lake. The lake has always been an important waterway for movement of heavy materials. This lake has 18 islands. Formation of the lake occurred 13,000 years ago during the last major ice age due to the melting of two glaciers.



Dove Cottage and Radal Mount (William Wordsworth’s homes):

Dove Cottage resides on the edge of the lovely village of Grasmere in Lake District. It is most well-known as the home of the famous poet Williams Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy Wordsworth during the time period between 1799 and 1808, where he wrote many of his famous poems which we remember him for today. It is widely believed that the Dove Cottage was probably built as a public house known as the “Dove and Olive Branch” and remained so until it closed down in 1793 and became a residential area. Wordsworth did, actually, refer to the history of the cottage in his 1806 poem, "The Waggoner", in which the protagonist passes by "Where once the Dove and Olive-bough offered a greeting of good ale to all who entered Grasmere Vale". The place has now been converted into a tourist attraction and a museum dedicated to Wordsworth and his works has been built adjacent to the cottage as an addition to serve educational and tourism purposes.

Rydal Mount is the other of William Wordsworth’s two homes where he moved to after he moved out of Dove Cottage in search of a larger residence to accommodate his expanding family. This is where he lived from then on till his death in 1850. Both the Grasmere and Windermere lakes can be seen from the hillside grounds of Rydal Mount. Wordsworth had a “Writing Hut” built at near the house where it overlooked the lakes and spent most of his time here completing his works. Though this place still remains in the ownership of Wordsworth’s descendents, it has been open to the public since the 1970s. Apart from the educational and cultural values it offers, this Rydal Mount also overlooks two of the largest lakes in the region, and it is no wonder why many tourists are attracted to this place.

Romantic Poets:

Romanticism largely began as a reaction against the prevailing Enlightenment ideals of the day. Inevitably, the characterization of a broad range of contemporaneous poets and poetry under the single unifying name can be viewed more as an exercise in historical compartmentalization than an attempt to capture the essence of the actual ‘movement’. Indeed, the term “Romanticism” did not arise until the Victorian period. Nonetheless, poets such as William Wordsworth were actively engaged in trying to create a new kind of poetry that emphasized intuition over reason and the pastoral over the urban, often eschewing modern forms and language in an effort to use ‘new’ language. An early exponent was Robert Burns, who is generally classified as a proto-Romantic poet and influenced Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Burns's Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect was published in April 1786 and included "The Two Dogs," "Address to the Deil," "To a Mountain Daisy," and the widely anthologized "To a Mouse."

Wordsworth himself in the Preface to his and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads defined good poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” though in the same sentence he goes on to clarify this statement by asserting that nonetheless any poem of value must still be composed by a man “possessed of more than usual organic sensibility [who has] also thought long and deeply”. Thus, though many people seize unfairly upon the notion of spontaneity in Romantic Poetry, one must realize that the movement was still greatly concerned with the pain of composition, of translating these emotive responses into the form of Poetry. Indeed, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, another prominent Romantic poet and critic in his On Poesy or Art sees art as “the mediatress between, and reconciler of nature and man”. Such an attitude reflects what might be called the dominant theme of Romantic Poetry: the filtering of natural emotion through the human mind in order to create art, coupled with an awareness of the duality created by such a process.

William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads.

Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semiautobiographical poem of his early years which the poet revised and expanded a number of times. The work was posthumously titled and published, prior to which it was generally known as the poem "to Coleridge". Wordsworth was England's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.

The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet's Mind is an autobiographical, "philosophical" poem in blank verse by the English poet William Wordsworth. Wordsworth wrote the first version of the poem when he was 28, and worked over the rest of it for his long life without publishing it. He never gave it a title; he called it the "Poem (title not yet fixed upon) to Coleridge" and in his letters to Dorothy Wordsworth referred to it as "the poem on the growth of my own mind." The poem was unknown to the general public until published three months after Wordsworth's death in 1850, its final name given to it by his wife Mary.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (21 October 1772 – 25 July 1834) was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England and one of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as for his major prose work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture. He coined many familiar words and phrases, including the celebrated suspension of disbelief. He was a major influence, via Emerson, on American transcendentalism.

Throughout his adult life, Coleridge suffered from crippling bouts of anxiety and depression (neuralgia); it has been speculated that Coleridge suffered from bipolar disorder, a mental disorder which was unknown during his life. Coleridge chose to treat these episodes with opium, becoming an addict in the process.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (originally The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere) is the longest major poem by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, written in 1797–98 and published in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1798. The modern editions use a later revised version printed in 1817 that featured a gloss. Along with other poems in Lyrical Ballads, it was a signal shift to modern poetry and the beginning of British Romantic literature.

'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' relates the events experienced by a mariner who has returned from a long sea voyage. The Mariner stops a man who is on the way to a wedding ceremony and begins to recite a story. The Wedding-Guest's reaction turns from bemusement to impatience and fear to fascination as the Mariner's story progresses, as can be seen in the language style: for example, Coleridge uses narrative techniques such as personification and repetition to create either a sense of danger, of the supernatural or of serenity, depending on the mood of each of the different parts of the poem.

The Mariner's tale begins with his ship departing on its journey. Despite initial good fortune, the ship is driven south off course by a storm and eventually reaches Antarctica. An albatross (compared as Christian soul) appears and leads them out of the Antarctic, but, even as the albatross is praised by the ship's crew, the Mariner shoots the bird ("with my cross-bow / I shot the albatross"). The crew is angry with the Mariner, believing the albatross brought the south wind that led them out of the Antarctic. However, the sailors change their minds when the weather becomes warmer and the mist disappears ("'Twas right, said they, such birds to slay / that bring the fog and mist"). The crime arouses the wrath of spirits who then pursue the ship "from the land of mist and snow"; the south wind that had initially led them from the land of ice now sends the ship into uncharted waters, where it is becalmed.

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.

Here, however, the sailors change their minds again and blame the Mariner for the torment of their thirst. In anger, the crew forces the Mariner to wear the dead albatross about his neck, perhaps to illustrate the burden he must suffer from killing it, or perhaps as a sign of regret ("Ah! Well a-day! What evil looks / Had I from old and young! / Instead of the cross, the albatross / About my neck was hung"). Eventually, in an eerie passage, the ship encounters a ghostly vessel. On board are Death (a skeleton) and the "Night-mare Life-in-Death" (a deathly-pale woman), who are playing dice for the souls of the crew. With a roll of the dice, Death wins the lives of the crew members and Life-in-Death the life of the Mariner, a prize she considers more valuable. Her name is a clue as to the Mariner's fate; he will endure a fate worse than death as punishment for his killing of the albatross.


A statue of the Ancient Mariner, with the albatross around his neck, at Watchet, Somerset. The statue was unveiled in September 2003 as a tribute to Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Ah ! well a-day ! what evil looks
Had I from old and young !
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.

One by one, all of the crew members die, but the Mariner lives on, seeing for seven days and nights the curse in the eyes of the crew's corpses, whose last expressions remain upon their faces. Eventually, the Mariner's curse is lifted when he sees sea creatures swimming in the water. Despite his cursing them as "slimy things" earlier in the poem ("Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs / upon the slimy sea"), he suddenly sees their true beauty and blesses them ("a spring of love gush'd from my heart and I bless'd them unaware"); suddenly, as he manages to pray, the albatross falls from his neck and his guilt is partially expiated. The bodies of the crew, possessed by good spirits, rise again and steer the ship back home, where it sinks in a whirlpool, leaving only the Mariner behind. A hermit on the mainland had seen the approaching ship and had come to meet it with a pilot and the pilot's boy in a boat. This hermit may have been a priest who took a vow of isolation. When they pull him from the water, they think he is dead, but when he opens his mouth, the pilot has a fit. The hermit prays, and the Mariner picks up the oars to row. The pilot's boy goes crazy and laughs, thinking the Mariner is the devil, and says, "The Devil knows how to row." As penance for shooting the albatross, the Mariner, driven by guilt, is forced to wander the earth, tell his story, and teach a lesson to those he meets:

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
After relating the story, the Mariner leaves, and the Wedding Guest returns home, and wakes the next morning "a sadder and a wiser man".

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