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The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Badly

www.thechatner.com

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Badly

Daniel Lavery
May 18, 2020
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Share this post

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Badly

www.thechatner.com

[Initially]

[Also in the spirit of this whimsically-misunderstanding tweet:

Twitter avatar for @nailheadparty
📻 Pete’s Corvid-Man 2 @nailheadparty
William Blake stans: this man is visionary... a true psychedelic mystic and seer of old Albion William Blake: tiger tiger you are neat seeing you's a real big treat
6:56 AM ∙ May 14, 2019
16,766Likes3,711Retweets

Which, obviously, as Grace pointed out, “I assume part of the joke here is that “The Tyger” doesn’t make sense at all, and trying to sum it up as a straightforward description of what a tiger looks like is part of the point of that joke.”]

Birdie, birdie, you are good

Don’t shoot birds, you never should

Birdie, birdie, you are bad

Shooting birds, it makes me glad

Weddings, weddings, now’s the time

To stop them and discuss my crime

Snow and ice are without end

Wordsworth is my closest friend

Water, water, there’s a lot

Because of that big bird I shot.

Shooting birds is very bad

It can make the ocean mad

The ocean’s mad, the ship’s a wreck

They put the dead bird on my neck

The devil killed my friends with dice,

and now this ship just isn’t nice.

The devil’s best friends hair’s a mess,

And she is also Death, I guess,

Water, water, there’s a lot,

And yet to drink, I guess there’s not.

Water, water, it’s so bad

If you kill birds, the sea gets mad

The sea gets mad and you can’t drink

And that’s what killed my friends, I think.

My friends all died, but I did not,

because of that big bird I shot

you fear my flashing, ancient eyes

you fear my lank and skinny thighs!

You wedding-guests, it’s plain to see

Don’t meet a lot of guys like me.

You wish I’d leave and go away

Because I made a bird puree.

Sleep, sleep, it is so nice

I wish that I could do it twice

I wish that I could be a ghost

To die’s the thing I’d like the most.

But now God wants to punish me

For killing birds, eternally

Birdie, birdie, you are great

I’d like to be your wedding date

Weddings, weddings, they’re so nice

All my friends are dead from dice.

Learn from me, avoid my fate,

Birds and beasts and man are great.

Be sure to love things great and small,

don’t kill any birds at all,

Love and pray at the same time,

This has been my ancient rime.

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The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Badly

www.thechatner.com
8 Comments
J. Woods
May 18, 2020Liked by Daniel Lavery

The Tyger makes sense.

It's about subjectivity and the sublime

and God or something.

I went to grad school.

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catherine
May 18, 2020Liked by Daniel Lavery

Yall might like this story from the current ATLANTIC : "The 1798 Poem That Was Made for 2020"https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/05/rime-ancient-mariner-was-made-2020/611602/ xxxooo

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