Seamus Perry
speaker
386 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 31 Aug
Seamus Perry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
Appearances
They are wonderful, aren't they?
Exactly.
So he comes across the ruined house, four naked walls that stared upon each other.
And then he also comes across the old guy who's going to be the main narrator of Margaret's sorry tale.
That pride of nature and of lowly life, the venerable Armitage, who he's met before.
And Armitage is a peddler.
He just wanders around selling things from his backpack.
But he's also at one of the same time invested with this absolutely colossal kind of philosophical and metaphysical authority, isn't he, within the poem?
Yes, and that comparison with the ancient mariner is a good one, isn't it?
So the first, as it were, 55 lines or so that we're talking about at the moment, those seem to have been added in the spring of 1798.
So those weren't part of the poem that Coleridge wrote.
originally heard Wordsworth read out loud.
And what those opening lines do is to establish a great interest in the figure of the person who's telling you the story.
So it's just like the ancient mariner.
The point of the poem
isn't as it were the narrative that it tells, but the fact that a narrative is being told by someone.
And just as we end The Ancient Mariner wondering what on earth The Ancient Mariner is quite like as a person or what gives him the authority to tell the story that he does.
So I suppose in this poem, we feel the same about Armitage.
"'Hello.
You had a great loss in not seeing Coleridge,' Dorothy Wordsworth wrote to her friend in June 1797.
Showing 201–220 of 386 · page 11 of 20
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