A Poetic Morality Tale That Still Haunts Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ is told by a sailor roaming the world in a perpetual state of contrition. By David Lehman
http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-poetic-morality-tale-that-still-haunts-1446831504
The scariest great poem in the English language was written by a young genius of limitless potential who turned into an opium addict, was besotted by German metaphysical philosophy, and was plagued by ill health and a loveless marriage. Though he considered himself a slothful failure, Samuel Taylor Coleridge left us a portfolio of astounding poems that includes not only “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” but “Kubla Khan” (which he characteristically denigrated as a mere “fragment”). He also produced a prose masterpiece (“Biographia Literaria”), invented the conversation poem (“This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”), and was present at the creation of a major literary movement.
ENLARGE With William Wordsworth, Coleridge was co-author of “Lyrical Ballads” (1798), the book that launched the Romantic revolution in English poetry. The first and longest poem in the book—one of only four by Coleridge (his collaborator had 20)—is the immortal “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
The two men had divided their task by subject matter. To Wordsworth were assigned the poems of “ordinary life,” to Coleridge the poems of a “supernatural” nature. But supernatural, as Coleridge fancied it, did not mean unreal. On the contrary, as he wrote in “Biographia Literaria,” the “supernatural” incidents and characters he meant to treat would seem intensely “real…to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency.” What was required of the reader, he went on, was just “that willful suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is a ballad, heavy on repetition, with at times a deliberately archaic diction (“Eftsoons his hand dropt he”) and at times a remarkable simplicity and alliterative musicality—as when the lone survivor of a calamity at sea feels his utter isolation: “Alone, alone, all, all alone, / Alone on a wide wide sea! / And never a saint took pity on / My soul in agony.”
Most of the poem’s 625 lines are in quote marks, a ghostly narrative told by the title character to a man on his way to a wedding feast. The old man’s “glittering eye” has mesmerized the listener, who hears a story the mariner has told before and will tell again as he roams around the world in a perpetual state of contrition.
The mariner had gone to sea in fair weather, on a ship full of sailors and with a benevolent albatross as escort. Without warning or provocation the mariner, with his crossbow, shoots the bird—and suddenly the luck of the sailors changes drastically. There is no wind; the ship is paralyzed, and the men on board hang the albatross around the guilty mariner’s neck. The men are listless, “with throats unslaked, with black lips baked.”
A ship approaches, but on it are only two figures: Death and Death-in-Life. They roll the dice, and Death-in-Life claims the albatross’s assassin, ceding the rest of the crew to her “Deathmate.”
The men die. Surrounded by their corpses, the mariner beholds the “slimy” creatures of the deep, despising them. But it is here that the redemptive epiphany occurs. As if blessed by an invisible agent, he looks into the sea and finds himself sharing the blessing with the water snakes below. The moment he blesses the repulsive creatures, the albatross falls off his neck.
This is the moral climax of the poem, the primary lesson that the mariner teaches his captive audience. All of creation deserves our praise. But the phantasmagoria has only just begun. The mariner sees the dead men rise in the air, “inspirited.” But the “lonesome Spirit from the south-pole”—as Coleridge puts it in the helpful prose gloss he added to the poem for an 1817 edition—“still requireth vengeance.” The mariner falls into a trance when his vessel moves northward at supernatural speed. He will have another ghastly vision of his shipmates before the terms of his absolution are communicated to him. He is to wander the earth reciting his tale. “The moment that his face I see, / I know the man that must hear me.”
The disaster at sea, the shipwreck, the ghostly visions and supernatural interventions—these, rendered in unforgettable verse, transcend the realm of morality and ethics. Coleridge here (and in “Kubla Khan”) achieves a power of enchantment unique in English poetry. When I think of this bard of the uncanny, I summon up the magical image that concludes “Kubla Khan”: “Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread, / For he on honey-dew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise.”
—Mr. Lehman’s latest book, just out, is “Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World” (HarperCollins). He teaches in the graduate writing program of the New School in New York City.
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