This presentation will bring together Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” (1798) and The White Doe of Rylstone; Or, The Fate of the Nortons (1807/1815) into a long-overdue conversation. After all, these “bookend” poems – the former being the very first poem appearing in the sequence of the original 1798 collection of Lyrical Ballads and the latter being, according to Wordsworth, the final lyrical ballad that he authored – have surprisingly much in common. Both are adapted literary ballads from Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) – “The Wandering Jew” and the “Rising of the North,” respectively, that center a non-human character, the albatross and the white doe, to foreground didactic messages about the sanctity of all living beings in the natural world. Each is also structured formally as a seven-part frame narrative whose plots about pilgrimages advance cyclically even beyond their final lines: the mariner will continue to tell his tale and the doe will journey from Rylstone to Bolton Priory to make its weekly sabbath appearance. As both begin and end with a narrator ruminating on past tragic events, parts two through six track that previous experience (the mariner’s travails at sea and the downfall of the Norton family), employing gothic tropes through the appearance of haunted ships, sailors rising from the dead, or spectral visions of phantasms. In this paper, however, I wish to investigate specifically how both poems of tragedy and hope curiously operate as generic experiments. Each poem methodically distances itself from the particularity of literary traditions, including romance, elegy, legend, lyric, and balladry, while also exploring a deep interest in establishing alternative collective bodies outside of the conventional structures of organized religion. More specifically, in pushing their lyrical and balladic boundaries, both poems present what I call a hymnic mode, a process by which each poem's culminating point of lyric and exilic transformation is linked with the communal presentation of a hymn. In other words, when each lyrical ballad becomes specifically hymnic, I suggest that the form transmutes by expanding the personal or individual voice of the poet into an interpersonal and communal/plural mode of expression. Ultimately, I propose that both “The Rime” and The White Doe continually reaffirm their shifting power paradigms and revisionary modes of historiography and testimony through their recursive structures: both repeatedly underscore their radical ambitions, which include, I will suggest, their representations of minoritarian communities as well as the post-humanist propositions on which each work is fundamentally grounded.