Halmi, N., P. Magnuson and R. Modiano (eds) Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose. (New York: Norton, 2003) [ISBN 9780393979046]. This edition contains both the 1798 and 1834 versions of the poem, relevant chapters from the Biographia Literaria, together with nineteenth- and twentieth-century critical responses, including Robert Penn Warren’s seminal, although often challenged essay, ‘A Poem of Pure Imagination: an Experiment in Reading’.
Jackson, H.J. (ed.) Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Major Works. (Oxford: World's Classics, Oxford University Press, 2008) [ISBN 9780199537914].
Keach, W. (ed.) The Complete Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 2004) [ISBN 9780140423532].
We would also suggest that it might be worthwhile looking at parts of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria in order to get some idea of his theories of the poetic imagination and the intent that lay behind the original publication of the Lyrical Ballads. These issues are discussed mainly in Chapters 4, 13 and 14.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Biographia Literaria. (London: Everyman Paperback Classics, 1997) [ISBN 9780460873321].
Bate, W.J. Coleridge. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1973) [ISBN 9780020484004].
Boulger, J. ‘Christian Skepticism in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”’ in From Sensibility to Romanticism. Edited by F.W. Hilles and H. Bloom. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965; reprinted 1970)
[ISBN 9780195008029].
Boulger, J. (ed.) The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: Twentieth-Century Interpretations. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969)
[ISBN 9780137812110].
Brett, R.L. Reason and Imagination: A Study in Form and Meaning in Four Poems. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960; reprinted 1968)
[ISBN 0197134106].
Burwick, F. (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) [ISBN 9780199229536]. A collection of essays which discuss biography, the prose and poetry, sources, critical theory, and reception.
Campbell, P. Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991) [ISBN 9780333522592].
Ferguson, F. ‘Coleridge and the Deluded Reader: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”’ in Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Edited by P. Fry. (Boston and New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 1999)
[ISBN 9780312112233].
Hill, J.S. A Coleridge Companion: An Introduction to the Major Poems and the Biographia Literaria. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984)
[ISBN 9780333237694].
House, H. ‘The Ancient Mariner’ in English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism. Edited by M.H. Abrams. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) [ISBN 9780195019469].
Jones A.R. and W. Tydeman (eds) Coleridge: The Ancient Mariner and Other Poems: A Casebook. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1973)
[ISBN 9780333128374].
McGann, J. J. ‘The Meaning of “The Ancient Mariner”’ in Spirits of Fire: English Romantic Writers and Contemporary Historical Methods. Edited by G.A. Rosso and D.P. Watkins. (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990) [ISBN 9780838633762]. This chapter is available online:
http://l-adam-mekler.com/mcgann_am.pdf
Orr, L. (ed.) Critical Essays on Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1994) [ISBN 9780816188673].
Rubasky, E.A. ‘“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”: Coleridge’s Multiple Models of Interpretations’ in The Coleridge Bulletin, New Series 24 (NS) Winter, 2004. This article is available online:
www.friendsofcoleridge.com (‘Search this site’: enter e.a.rubasky).
Stillinger, J. Coleridge and Textual Instability: The Multiple Versions of the Major Poems. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) [ISBN 9780195085839]. For a related article, ‘The Multiple Versions of Coleridge’s Poems: How many Mariners did Coleridge write?’ in Studies in Romanticism, vol.31 no.2 (1992), see online: http://babylon.acad.cai.cam.ac.uk/students/study/english/2/coleridg.pdf
Warren, R.P. Selected Essays. (New York: Random House, 1964) [no ISBN].
http://isbndb.com/d/subject/romanticism_great_britain/books.html (a broad database of critical writing about ‘Romanticism’)
It is probably a critical commonplace to suggest that any text which surrenders itself to a single reading will not satisfy long. No such danger attaches itself to Coleridge’s verse: in fact his declared conviction was that poetry ‘gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood’. In the nineteenth century, it was this very lack of distinctiveness that attracted hostile criticism to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, so much so that it prompted Robert Southey, the soon-to-be Poet Laureate, to declare ‘We do not sufficiently understand the story to analyze it'. Even Coleridge’s friend Charles Lamb was forced to admit that he had no taste for the ‘unmeaning miracles’, yet he was aware of its power and ‘was totally possessed with it for many days’. Lamb seems unconcerned to attempt any sort of interpretation, but this sense of possession, of being drawn along by what he describes as ‘Tom Piper’s magic whistle’, surely invokes the figure of the Wedding Guest, charmed, mesmerised by exotic but sometimes disturbing images, and uncertain of the true significance of the Mariner’s narrative. A frequent response at the time was to talk of the poem as a creation of the ‘pure imagination’, a term of curiously faint praise in that it appeared to suggest a work born of the poet’s macabre dream-world, which enjoyed no meaningful connection with reality. So, in a sympathetic essay in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (October 1819), J.G. Lockhart describes The Rime as a poem to be ‘felt’ and ‘cherished’, but not one capable of being analysed or criticised, it is something sung ‘to the sleeping ear’, its images have ‘the beauty, the grandeur, the incoherence of some mighty vision'.
Of course, the idea that a poem might be incoherently unavailable to analysis proved to be an irresistible challenge to twentieth-century academic criticism. The spectrum of conflicting readings is remarkable, and in some ways their multiplicity relives the uncertainties of earlier readers, and celebrates Coleridge’s original declaration. A detailed and orthodox Christian allegory is confronted by a nightmare universe of irrational and unpredictable forces; ideas of atonement and mercy are put to the question by the rigour of Old Testament justice; repressed biographical information is measured against the broader implications of symbolic patterning; and there is space for discussions of genre, Freud, Unitarianism, gender, imperialism and other ‘issues’. The best we can hope to do in this chapter is to sketch a general map of the terrain, to supply some signposts, and to encourage the idea that journeys are not necessarily about reaching a fixed point.
The impetus for the writing of The Rime was not, in the common sense of the word, romantic. In 1797, while on a walking tour in the Quantock Hills, Wordsworth and Coleridge agreed to collaborate in the composition of a popular Gothic ballad, in order to defray the costs of their expedition. Destined for the Monthly Magazine, it would exploit a contemporary vogue for the macabre, and would put money in their purses. However, it was an idea that quickly became associated with other plans for collaboration, and with other recurrent, sometimes obsessional, preoccupations which they shared. Both were exploring the ballad form with its folkloric background as a vehicle for narrative verse, and both had been flirting with two archetypes of guilt-laden alienation, Cain and The Wandering Jew. The former never achieved more than fragmentary existence in ‘The Wanderings of Cain’ by Coleridge, Wordsworth having quickly withdrawn from joint authorship. The latter appears as a jotting in Coleridge’s notebooks as ‘Wandering Jew, a romance’, while Wordsworth composed ‘Song for the Wandering Jew’ in 1800. Their interest was not, perhaps, especially original, as these figures have a common currency in the writing of the period. The Jew, for instance, is among the ancient ballads collected in Percy’s Reliques (1765), a copy of which Coleridge owned, and he features in Lewis’s Gothic novel The Monk (1796), which Coleridge reviewed a year after its publication.
The suggestion, here, is not that the mariner is a dramatisation of either of these figures, but that the two poets had found a resonance in the moral and emotional landscapes inhabited by these legendary outcasts. In the event, apart from a neighbour’s dream of a skeletal ship, it was Wordsworth who supplied much of the narrative material and direction. His recent reading of Captain George Shelvocke’s Voyage Round the World by the Way of the Great South Sea (1726), turned up a story of a sailor who had shot an albatross: to this he added the suggestion of revenge pursued by guardian spirits, and the project was launched. It was, however, rapidly subsumed by a new and more ambitious undertaking, which would become the consciously radical collection, Lyrical Ballads.
Activity
Read what Coleridge has to say about this enterprise in the Biographia Literaria. In Chapter 4 he speaks of ‘the fine balance of truth in observing with the imaginative faculty in modifying the objects observed’, and in Chapter 14, describing the ‘occasion’ of Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge identifies their shared belief in what constitutes the power of poetry – ‘a faithful adherence to the truth of nature’ and ‘the modifying colours of imagination’. It is this transfiguring power of the imagination that is the hallmark of so much Romantic poetry and theory. You need to test these ideas against your reading of The Rime. Could Coleridge justifiably claim that his poem ‘strips the veil of familiarity from the world’ (Shelley, Defence of Poetry), and, if so, how does he achieve it?
The plan which Coleridge records involved a division of labour. Wordsworth was to choose his subjects from ‘ordinary life’, but illuminate them in such a way that they became, magically, more than ‘ordinary’. Coleridge, on the other hand, elected for the ‘supernatural’, his task being to endow it with a human truth which the readers could recognise in themselves, even if the figures and incidents were beyond all experience. Upon his imaginative power would depend the reader’s ‘willing suspension of disbelief’.
As work on the joint collection progressed in the early months of 1798, Wordsworth’s interest in being co-author of The Rime evaporated and he pursued his talent for scenes of rural life. Coleridge now had singular control over his ‘supernatural’ world, and the poem moves from its original ambition of being a piece of populist Gothic to a more disturbing exploration of the imagination’s darker places. Furthermore, it was considerably revised and doubled in length. In September 1798, Lyrical Ballads was published anonymously. Only a few lyrics by Coleridge were included, but The Rime was a dominating presence, having been set at the head of the collection. What was immediately apparent to contemporary readers was how different this poem appeared to be from the bulk of the rural ballads which followed in its wake. The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere was marked by its obsolete words, its inversions and crabbed syntax, and its archaic spellings (most obviously in the title). Coleridge’s attempt to manufacture a mediaeval linguistic context for his mediaeval mariner did not meet with approval. Wordsworth was concerned to dissociate himself from the poem’s ‘strangeness’, and by the time of the publication of the second edition, the mariner’s tale had been relegated to the end of the first of two volumes. The collection also now had an acknowledged author, William Wordsworth. Coleridge’s poem had undergone some heavy revision, and most noticeably he had been at pains to purge the diction of some of its archaisms and to modernise the spelling.
The issue of what language was appropriate to poetry was much discussed as the Romantics turned their backs on the artifice of eighteenth-century diction. Wordsworth’s thesis concerning ‘the real language of men’, which he outlines in the preface attached to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, undoubtedly carries a political agenda, and it would be instructive to read what he has to say. More immediately, you might consider whether Coleridge has improved his poem by removing the pastiche antiquity of words like ‘eldritch’ (ghostly), ‘pheere’ (mate) or ‘eftsoons’ (anew). Do anachronisms of this sort create a divorce between ‘poetic diction’ and the ‘living’ language? The Norton edition’s side-by-side printing of the 1798 and 1834 versions allows you to make a detailed comparison should you so wish. The changes also have an effect upon the narrative voice. The original speaker who was given to saying ‘Gramercy’ and ‘Wel-a-day’ was cast in the role of mediaeval bard. Do you think that the revisions have given the narrator (Coleridge?) a greater freedom by assuming a more
neutral tone?
Finally, in 1817, Coleridge published The Rime under his own name in his collection, Sibylline Leaves. It had been restored to pride of place as the opening poem, it contained more reworkings, and perhaps most importantly it carried an extensive commentary in the form of prose marginal glosses, which will be discussed below.
As was suggested in the Introduction, early responses to Coleridge’s narrative ballad ran the gamut from hostile to admiringly bemused. In some degree it was damned by association. Against a backdrop of popular Gothic horror, readers could be forgiven for being captured, at a fairly visceral level, by the pictorial power of the poet’s imagination, while at the same time consigning the poem to the realms of opium-fuelled fantasy – beautiful but inconsequential. However, as the nineteenth turned into the twentieth century, the hunt for some sort of coherent ‘meaning’ accelerated.
In 1927, J.L. Lowes published The Road to Xanadu, a monumental piece of literary detection which trawled Coleridge’s reading in order to discover the sources of those clusters of images that give life to the mariner’s tale. However, Lowes is no mere cataloguer – he is concerned to investigate and celebrate the way in which the imagination works upon its material. So, as a starting point for your own reading of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, we offer you his concluding, if somewhat florid words, to see whether they match your own experience. In his opinion, ‘the imagination voyaging through chaos and reducing it to clarity and order is the symbol of all the quests which lend glory to
our dust’.
Not unexpectedly, some of the earliest attempts to codify a coherent ‘meaning’ were of a religious cast, specifically Christian. It is not difficult to discover in the mariner’s otherworldly voyage, a variant on the traditional progress of the soul. Readers who pursued this path were justified by a dense fabric of religious iconography. In general terms, sea-storms, extremes of fire and ice, thirst and aloneness have provided a setting for the journeys of any number of tortured spirits. There are, however, more specific allusions which seem to provide a conscious focus. Perhaps the most visually startling image is the cruciform shape of the albatross when it is first silhouetted against the sky, and Coleridge underscores the perception with his choice of verb: ‘At length did cross an Albatross’. When the dead bird is later draped around the mariner’s shoulders, its drooping, broken wings will even more dramatically recall a crucifixion: ‘Instead of the cross, the Albatross/About my neck was hung’. The cross and the bird are forced into conjunction by internal rhyme, and it surely can be no accident that the weapon of choice is a ‘cross-bow’. Even the departing souls of the sailors ‘whizz’ (almost comically) past with the sound of a cross-bow bolt.
Activity
It would be worth documenting all those details in the poem which might suggest a Christian ethos. We will touch upon broader themes below, but the poem is permeated with images, figures and a diction that carry religious, even doctrinal, echoes. For instance, is there a significance in the fact that the expedition begins at the ‘kirk’, and ends at the ‘kirk’, if indeed it does?
Many critics have been happy to accept, in whole or in part, an orthodox structure of a sacramental progress, initiated by sin (the killing), through recognition of sin, repentance, punishment and eventual redemption. At the time of writing, Coleridge recorded his interest in an epic poem on ‘The Origin of Evil’, and the wanton destruction of the albatross may be emblematic of some form of Original Sin, but are we then comfortable when told that the mariner’s act is a dramatisation of The Fall, that the sun is an image of God, and the hermit represents the established Church? This is just one example of the way in which an allegorical method can encourage a too precise search for correspondences. Perhaps the most contentious discussions surrounding doctrinal orthodoxy have worried away at the blithe recommendation which the mariner offers to the wedding guest (and, one assumes, to an infinite number of mesmerised listeners through time).
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
These final words of the mariner have the benign, and some say banal simplicity of a Sunday school hymn; and they are arguably matched by the banality of the rhythm. It is true that they recall the mariner’s blessing of the water-snakes which freed him from the albatross, but do they adequately reconcile us to the nightmare of terror, remorse, physical suffering, aloneness that he, and we have experienced? In response to a claim by Mrs Barbauld that the poem had no moral, Coleridge famously replied that, in his opinion, it had ‘too much’; and the lines quoted do hint at an obtrusive piety. Yet the additional glosses of 1817 had, arguably, enhanced a Christian reading. As the ship speeds home, crewed by angelic spirits, the marginal comment claims, ‘The curse is finally expiated’ – but is it? At the end of the poem, unshriven by the hermit, the mariner feels the wrenching agony of his penance, an eternal telling, and hence reliving, of his dreadful odyssey. To all whom he meets, he says, ‘My tale I teach’, and the guest, no longer a wedding celebrant, leaves ‘a sadder and a wiser man’. Whether or not the mariner is a wiser man, however, is a moot point. His pious summary of the events that brought him to this place are, perhaps, his way of dealing with the unknowable nature of his terrifying experiences.
Activity
You could, at some stage, draw up a forensic review of the processes of crime and punishment. Do we need to ascertain motive? Was it an act of will? Was it something done because it could be done? Was it a cruel or evil demonstration of power? Was it a capricious destruction for the intensity of the moment? Does the mariner deserve to be sentenced to what looks like an eternal reparation? Do the crew deserve to die for their weakness of complicity? Of course, these questions may appear mundane in a universe beyond human normalcy, but they have implications if we wish to evaluate the legitimacy of reading Christian allegory into the mariner’s narrative. In the light of a theology that speaks of mercy and redemption, there is something savagely Old Testament about the suffering, the vengeful spirit, the collateral damage of the crew’s deaths and the never-ending penance.
One of the more radical interrogations of a traditional Christian reading focuses upon the encounter with the spectral ship crewed by Death, and his mate, Life-in-Death. As a Unitarian Christian, Coleridge would have every reason to confirm a belief in a benevolent world order: even to echo the moral of the mariner’s last words. Yet the whimsical destruction of the albatross has conjured a lurid and draconian universe, better suited to the Furies of Greek tragedy. However, the moment that demolishes any sense of logic or coherence is when we witness the rolling of the dice. The arbitrariness of the bow-shot is matched by a game of hazard. The mariner’s (eternal) fate is sealed by chance. Is it too much of a paradox to suggest that, despite his nightmare experiences, and despite his wracking sense of guilt, the mariner’s blithe hope of prayer and love is his way of coping with forces whose significance he will never understand?
After the murder of innocence, the mariner’s ship ‘bursts’ into an unfathomable and contradictory universe. Under a copper sky, beneath a bloody sun, in irons on a slimy sea, shadowed by a vengeful (possibly pagan) spirit, the images that surround the outcast speak of deprivation, physical and psychological suffering and horror. Once free of the demands of a doctrinal allegory, a counterpoint of different readings is more easily accommodated. While the poem’s rich vein of Christian symbolism pushes it towards a closure which may be captured in the mariner’s final words, another experience of the voyage remembers only fierce punishments, anxieties, fear and an overwhelmingly unexpiated guilt. Could it be that this contradictoriness, this mystery and unknowableness are a part of what the verses are intended to express? In 1817, Coleridge replaced his ‘Argument’ with an epigraph from the seventeenth-century divine, Thomas Burnet. The cleric affirms his belief in the many invisible forces in the world, but then contemplates them nonplussed. Uncertain of their hierarchies, their functions, their habitations, he concludes: ‘The human mind has always desired the knowledge of these things, but never attained it’. It is just such a world that the mariner inhabits both externally and internally.
Activity
In that edition of Sibylline Leaves in 1817, Coleridge appended his prose marginal glosses. You should study them closely, and assess what, if anything, they add to the poem. Some can be pedantic (at ll.131–4), others piously orthodox (at ll.297–300), such that one wonders whether the late-mediaeval narrator who had been banished by the modernisations has been reinvented. On another occasion, as the moving moon intensifies the exquisite loneliness of the mariner, the images in the gloss are as poetic as the verse they illuminate. Do such devices have a place, and are they reliable or consistent in the way they comment upon the mariner’s progress?
At some point in our reading, the temptation to turn to the life will prove irresistible, and as the Romantic poets made themselves so much the subject of their writing, there seems to be some justification. Such a proposal comes hedged around with a host of caveats. The poem is not an autobiography, allegorical or otherwise. So, if you see it suggested (as it has been) that the wedding guest is Coleridge, that the hermit is Wordsworth, and that Life-in-Death is Mrs Coleridge, our advice would be rapidly to retreat. From the date of the poem’s first composition (1797/8), through sometimes heavy and always continuing revisions, to its appearance as his work in 1817, there is ample evidence of an accelerating sense of alienation engulfing Coleridge. A failing marriage, the death of a son, an illicit love, ill-health, estrangement from friends and a growing dependency upon opium were sufficient ingredients to generate intense feelings of neurotic self-recrimination. The guilt carried by Cain, the Wandering Jew, and the Ancient Mariner have kinship in Coleridge’s imagination. In fact, it was the life of the imagination, above all, that caused the deepest anxieties and remorse. Coleridge was plagued by a growing conviction that he was squandering his talent (a by-product of his addiction), and worse, that the inspirational power had left him.
Activity
To get some idea of the terrors of failing vision, read Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: an Ode’ (especially Stanza II), and for a very similar disquiet in his fellow-poet Wordsworth, see his ode ‘Intimations of Immortality’ (Stanzas I–IV).
Such biographical information is ‘background’, and to be used obliquely, and with caution. The death of the albatross might (or might not) represent the dying of Coleridge’s imagination. However, the more general reading is sometimes the more plausible. The idea that the mariner might be an alter ego for the Poet carries some conviction. Driven by visionary winds, he sails to unvisited seas, witnesses terrifying events, suffers spiritual and emotional extremes, and returns with a compulsion to tell his tale to those who do not wish to listen. To make things worse, it is a story fraught with contradiction, irresolution, perplexity and fearful nightmares. Perhaps it is the equivocal nature of this unknowable universe that has provoked such a rich variety of interpretations. Would Coleridge have concurred with Keats’s description of what he calls ‘Negative Capability’? – ‘that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mystery, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’
By the end of this chapter and having read the essential text and any associated recommended reading, you should be able to: