“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” Coleridge is probably best known for his long poems, including “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Even those who have never read the “Rime” have come under its influence: its words have given the English language the metaphor of an albatross around one’s neck, the quotation of “water, water everywhere, ne any drop to drink” (almost always rendered as “but not a drop to drink”), and the phrase “a sadder and a wiser man” (again, usually rendered as “sadder but wiser man”).

ThestatueoftheAncientMarineratWatchet,Somerset,England.ThestatuewasunveiledinSeptember2003,asatributetoSamuelTaylorColeridge.ColeridgelivedinthenearbyvillageofNetherStowey,about10milesfromthisstatue.In1797,whileonawalkingtour,ColeridgevisitedWatchet.Onseeingtheharbour,itisbelievedhewasinspiredtocompose“TheRimeoftheAncientMariner.”

Mary Shelley, who knew Coleridge well, mentions “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” twice directly in Frankenstein, and some of the descriptions in the novel echo it indirectly. Although William Godwin, her father, disagreed with Coleridge on some important issues, he respected his opinions and Coleridge often visited the Godwins. William loved the poem. Mary Shelley later recalled hiding behind the sofa and hearing STC’s voice chanting the “Rime” and claimed to have heard her father reciting lines from the poem to himself. • Published with Lyrical Ballads. • This poem got more response than Wordsworth’s poems. • Many inquiries came from real mariners who thought it was a sea shanty. • Famous phrase: “an albatross around one’s neck” = any heavy, sustained burden. • Christian overtones—sin or burden that must be personally expiated. • When the poem was originally created, Wordsworth and Coleridge were walking together. • Wordsworth was reading about a sea captain who sailed to the Antarctic, and from there they came up with the idea of a supernatural experience. • The ship’s log records the first mate shooting a black albatross that he thought was giving them bad luck.

• The poets had a friend who also had a dream about a skeleton ship—that’s where this image came from. _______________________________________ • An albatross can have a wingspan of up to 6 feet. • When the mariner has the albatross hung around his neck, it’s not a little bird—it’s like a turkey. • Some Thanksgiving fun: tie a turkey around your neck and have people guess who you are.

• Today, albatross is an endangered species because when it dives for fish it ends up on fishing line as it bites hooks, or it eats plastics and trash dumped into the water, which blocks its intestines. _______________________________________ • Footnotes and sidenotes (“glosses”) were added 30 years after original publication because people complained to Coleridge that they didn’t understand poem’s sequence. • Perhaps based on the legend of the “wandering Jew,” who mocked Christ before he was crucified.

• In response, he was marked with the cross, and was not allowed to die before the Second Coming. • He wanders the earth testifying of Jesus’ divinity. • Does not speak unless moved upon by the Spirit to speak to elect individuals. • To the listener it would be a life-changing experience. _______________________________________ • Poem may be read with a Christian spin: it’s a tale of sin, guilt, confession, expiation. • Another reading: wanderer is Coleridge, terrified of the lonely poetic life. _______________________________________ • The mariner mesmerizes the wedding guest. • Interesting to note the wedding guest’s reaction. • “Get away from me, you freak!” turns into a “sadder and wiser man.” • The mariner has to tell the story at various intervals and cannot relax until he’s finished.

• When the story begins the voyage is fine. • As they enter the southern hemisphere, things begin to get colder, they come upon icebergs. • They see an albatross, which is a good omen to the mariners (birds at sea are a sign of land, food).

• Then the ancient mariner shoots the albatross; he callously, unjustifiably kills the bird. • Think of Pres. Kimball’s admonition not to kill God’s creatures for fun—unbecoming of a priesthood holder to kill animals for no reason:

“I had a sling and I had a flipper. I made them myself, and they worked very well. It was my duty to walk the cows to the pasture a mile away from home. There were large cottonwood trees lining the road, and I remember that it was quite a temptation to shoot the little birds ‘that sing on bush and tree,’ because I was a pretty good shot and I could hit a post at fifty yards’ distance or I could hit the trunk of a tree. But I think perhaps because I sang nearly every Sunday, ‘Don’t Kill the Little Birds,’ I was restrained. . . . I could see no great fun in having a beautiful little bird fall at my feet” (Spencer W. Kimball, Ensign, May 1978, pp. 47–48).

• At first everything seems to be fine, but then the wind stops blowing. • This could be a deadly thing; run out of wind = you can’t get anywhere and you’ll die when your water supply is depleted. • Famous lines: “painted ship upon a painted ocean,” “water water everywhere.” • The other mariners then put the albatross around their mate’s neck. • The idea behind this is that the group is not accountable for the mariner’s individual sin. • Correlation to Jonah.

• They then see a ship, and at first are excited. • Then they realize that there are only two passengers: Death and Life in Death, who gamble for the possession of the mariners. • Life in Death wins the roll and takes the mariner, and Death takes all the rest. • Everyone (all 200) dies; souls go, corpses remain. • Corpses rot, ship rots, mariner tries to pray. • Makes the attempt, but can’t—just closes eyes. • Water snakes come back; he now describes them as beautiful things.

• Blesses them for existing. • Albatross falls off and sinks into the sea. • Corpses are re-animated; ship pushed north. • Archetypally, direction has meaning: East = birth, West = death; North = positive, South = negative.

• Wedding guest is freaking out still. • Restoration: ship is pushed by a polar spirit. • Towards the end the curse is lifted as mariner approaches land; spirits leave their bodies again. • Hermit could be priest who has separated himself from civilization to commune with God (vow of isolation). • Comes out on a skiff (small boat) to the mariner and is accompanied by a young boy. • Mariner is rescued and the ship sinks (someone flushes an oceanic toilet).

• The boy takes the mariner for a devil. • The mariner asks hermit for a blessing to expiate himself of his sins; he is set free. • Back to the wedding guest again: we learn why the mariner had to tell the story to the guest. • They part ways with another moral: “He prayeth best who loveth best.” • Purpose of life is to love God’s creations. • Mariner sins, feels guilt, by divine force has to atone for his sins, has to wait and be still until he can have a change of heart and feel godly sorrow, after which he is allowed to return to God.

Overview: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (Adapted from: David Punter, Reference Guide to English Literature, 2nd ed., edited by D. L. Kirkpatrick, St. James Press, 1991.)

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is generally regarded as one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s very few achieved masterpieces. It is a narrative poem of some 600 lines, written in traditional ballad stanzas and divided into 7 parts. At the beginning, a figure known only as the “wedding-guest” is accosted by the Mariner; and although he is in haste he is virtually hypnotized into hearing the old man’s story. This story concerns a sea voyage, in the course of which the ship is becalmed amid the ice of the South Pole. However, there appears an albatross, whereupon a wind springs up; but the Mariner kills the bird. The other sailors blame the Mariner for their dreadful plight. He finds that the albatross is hung about his neck. Amid a welter of supernatural portents, another ship is sighted, but her crew turns out to consist of Death and “the Night-mare Life-in-Death,” who are gambling for the sailors’ souls. The other men die, leaving the Mariner “alone, alone, all, all alone, / Alone on a wide wide sea.” He tries to pray and fails, but then sees a host of water snakes. He finds them beautiful and blesses them, and the moment he does so the albatross drops from his neck. The dead men come back to a kind of life and, under the guidance of “the Spirit from the south-pole,” man the ship back to the equator; but a dialogue between two spirits reveals that the Mariner still has “penance” to do for his murderous act. The sailors are transported to Heaven, leaving the Mariner alone again but now in sight of his own homeland. He is rescued, although those who rescue him see him as the Devil; and from then on, as he now explains to the wedding-guest, he is constrained to a life of wandering in which he is forced to tell his tale over and over

again. The poem ends with the wedding-guest, “a sadder and a wiser man,” turning away from the wedding feast in dismay. _______________________________________ Analysis The major theme of the poem is guilt and punishment, and this reflects aspects of Coleridge’s own pathology, as an opium-addict and a man of notoriously unreliable habits. The law the Mariner breaks is referred to as the law of hospitality, but really his crime is to break the web which should connect all living things together in love, and although he does this unwittingly, punishment is inevitable. He is only freed from this doom—and that partially—when he sees the water snakes. These water snakes might well be the creatures the Mariner saw earlier and referred to then only as “slimy things”; what happens here is that he perceives them as living, individual, beautiful, and by perceiving them in that way he re-enters the web of life from which he had previously exiled himself by shooting the albatross.

It is also very important that he blesses them “unaware”; no act of the human will can really compensate for evil, but there are moments of spontaneous love which save us. Here Coleridge is expressing a major romantic theme, for romanticism hinges on the notion that spontaneous, unconscious acts have more value than those which we produce through the exercise of will. The figure of “Life-in-Death” represents becalming not only in the nautical sense but in the wider meaning of a loss of direction, something which Coleridge always feared as a poet and as a man. Coleridge regarded the poet’s vocation as both a blessing and a curse—a blessing in that it put one directly in touch with the “divine” imagination, but a curse in that the gift of poetry isolated a man from his fellow-mortals. There were many “wanderers” in Romantic literature, including the Wandering Jew. The Wandering Jew is a figure from medieval Christian folklore whose legend began to spread in Europe in the 13th century and became a fixture of Christian mythology and, later, of Romanticism. The original legend concerns a Jew who taunted Jesus on the way to the Crucifixion and was then cursed to walk the earth until the Second Coming. He, like the Ancient Mariner, held the function of warning other people of the fate of those who go against divine law, even if that law is unjust or if one was ignorant of it at the time one transgressed. The Mariner himself is condemned to serve as a living warning, and it is highly significant that the person who is forced to hear his tale is described as a wedding-guest, for he is somebody who is on his way to celebrate all that is best about human communality. It is precisely at this point that he encounters this grisly reminder of the ever-present possibility of isolation. One of the peculiarities of the poem is that, although it can be read as a Christian allegory about divine retribution and repentance, much of the machinery Coleridge uses is pagan, and indeed the whole tone of the poem suggests an older, more violent world than the Christian one. The various spirits are clearly more animist than Christian, and the descriptions suggest a world in which natural phenomena have their own life irrespective of divine justice. We may connect this with Coleridge’s superb use of the ballad form; both the pagan elements and the traditional, song-like metrics conjure up a sense of a realm which pre-dates humanity, and with which we have to make our peace. The sailors themselves are unsure what to make of the albatross, and in the immediate aftermath of the shooting are divided as to whether the bird was angelic or diabolic.

The realm Coleridge is describing is one of primitive superstition, beyond will or rational judgment; we might also refer to it as a realm of dream, and Coleridge signifies this particularly in his use of color imagery. When the curse is upon the ship, we see a “bloody Sun,” in a “hot and copper sky,” while “the water, like a witch’s oils / Burnt green, and blue and white.” This is reminiscent of a wrongly developed photograph: the shapes are recognizable, as they might be in our dreams, but a color-shift has occurred so that what might otherwise appear beautiful or sublime now appears as a nightmare. The story of the voyage in itself might lead us to despair; but the framing narrative, involving the wedding-guest, at least suggests a possible hope, which is that if we could properly hear and attend to the meaning of the Mariner’s story. Then we might ourselves become, sadder indeed, but wiser; although this wisdom might itself be a terrible thing to bear, since it involves remaining constantly aware of the injustice and isolation at the root of human experience.