The Ballad of the Dark Ladié

"The Ballad of the Dark Ladié: A Fragment" is a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, written in 1798 and published in 1834.[1]

The Ballad of the Dark Ladié: A Fragment
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Written1798
MeterIambic tetrameter
Iambic trimeter
Publication date1834
Lines60

Publication

This poem was first published in 1834.[1] "In a manuscript list (undated) of the poems drawn up by Coleridge appear these items together: Love 96 lines … The Black Ladié 190 lines."[2] A MS. of the three last stanzas is extant. In Chapter XIV of the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge synchronizes the Dark Ladié (a poem which he was 'preparing' with the Christabel).[3] It would seem probable that it belongs to the spring or early summer of 1798, and that it was anterior to Love, which was first published in The Morning Post on 21 December 1799, under the heading "Introduction to the Tale of the Dark Ladié".[1] If the MS. List of Poems is the record of poems actually written, two-thirds of the Dark Ladié must have perished long before 1817, when Sibylline Leaves was passing through the press, and it was found necessary to swell the Contents with "two School-boy Poems" and "with a song modernised with some additions from one of our elder poets".[1]

Text

Notes
  1. Lines 53–6:
    And first the nodding Minstrels go
    With music fit for lovely Bowers,
    The children then in snowy robes,
        Strewing Buds and Flowers.
    (MS. S. T. C.)
  2. Line 57: pace] go
    (MS. S. T. C.)

References
  1. E. H. Coleridge, ed. 1912, p. 293.
  2. Note to P. W., 1893, p. 614.
  3. S. T. Coleridge 1817, ii. p. 3.

Sources
  • Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1817). Biographia Literaria; or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions. Vol. 2. London: Rest Fenner. p. 3.
  • Coleridge, Ernest Hartley, ed. (1912). The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 293–95. Public Domain This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.

Further reading
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