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GUIDE TO SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE’S
“RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER”
Down, Down, Down...
Many Romantic poems are about a journey, and often you’ll find—alongside the literal, physical journey portrayed in the poem—some image that suggests descent. This implies that the real journey is psychological. Early in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” for instance, we have the lines, Merrily did we drop Below the kirk, below the hill, Below the lighthouse top.
The boat sails over the horizon. That’s literally what’s happening in the imaginative fiction of the poem, but Coleridge uses this kind of imagery and language several times to suggest a psychological quest. There’s going to be a descent into the underworld—the otherworld of deep, irrational consciousness.
The green world in Shakespeare is one in which the ordinary rules don’t seem to apply or function properly. There’s something similar in the Romantics. We get outside of the city, into the world of the imagination. Lord Byron talks about the Mediterranean world as “the greenest island of my imagination.” In contrast, he calls England “tight,” where “winter ends in July, only to recommence in August.”
What we’re talking about is a symbolic typography of the mind. All of these places of nature are literally the physical landscape, but the Romantic writer often uses the real-world, external typography to talk about internal states of mind. He or she talks about the mind in geographic terms. Blake makes it very clear that whenever he uses the image of a “cavern” or “abyss,” he’s referring symbolically the human mind. There’s a famous passage in The Prelude where the Imagination rises from the mind’s abyss. This is a typical Romantic use of the external to talk about states of mind, or the internal. It’s what Eliot calls an “objective correlative,” e.g., some kind of external object that correlates to an internal reality.
The imagery of descent in “The Rime” is not just psychological, though—it’s also mythic. It’s the mythic other world. In Native American culture, the way you enter paradise is to climb a tree and reach the sky gods. Another mythological path is through the omphalos, the Greek word for navel. It’s a place where you pass from one world to another. And Shakespeare’s green world suggests that as well, a place of “crossing over” and transformation.
In still other terms, the descent leads to the heightened world. It’s life idealized—the life of the transcendent self.
What makes “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” a Romantic poem? How do we know this poem (which is full of traditional images and subjects) is Romantic?
How do we know that it was written at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, rather than in the Middle Ages—the time in which the poem is actually set?
Think of this line first:
We were the first to ever burst Into that silent sea.
How does that help you to understand the poem? What are the possible connotations of that line? What sorts of expectations and imaginings, possible patterns or structures, does it suggest?
- Many Romantic poems are about the growth of the poet’s mind. Someone begins in a state of unawareness of his or her own imaginative powers, and gradually discovers them. Advice: Always start with the most concrete or interesting word. If we pick “burst,” it suggests images of birth and creativity. And the poem is about that. But we also have notions about what it means to learn. Often, the path that leads to the growth of the poet’s mind entails a way that is unchartered, very difficult, perilous and frightening. Coleridge seems to be suggesting that as well.
These are some of the implications of the word “burst.” At one point in The Prelude, Wordsworth describes the bust of Sir Isaac Newton, calling it, “The marble index of a mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought alone.” Certainly that is what Coleridge’s poem is about as well. The Mariner is going to travel into strange seas of thought.
- Go back to the word “burst.” It does suggest birth, but what else? We’re talking about going from point A to point B, so why does Coleridge use the word “burst”? It signifies breakage. Romantic poetry is often about boundary breaking.
- What else does “burst” suggest? What’s the nature of “bursting” into something? Energy... violent energy. Think about the structure of this work. The event that really launches the poem, and lies at the heart of the Mariner’s journey, is the shooting of the Albatross. So it’s not just breaking boundaries: it’s an act of violent transgression. And yet this will somehow lead to knowledge and the growth of the poet’s mind, to rebirth. That’s very Romantic. It is a violation that cannot be undone. In that sense, it is like birth. Once we are born, we are cast out into the world; then the struggle is inevitable.
From the Known to the Unknown...
Think too about the phrase “silent sea.” It’s a form of personification. The Mariner’s bursting disturbs the silence of the sea, and the sea, in effect, retaliates. In mythic terms, the sea is associated with the Otherworld, the Unknown. The Mariner begins in the known, the familiar, the natural. The silent sea symbolizes everything that is not those things. It is not known, it is not conventionally natural. It’s not the familiar world of habit and custom.
A New View of Reality Based on a New View of the Self...
In the poem, there’s “the Line.” This is the equator—another boundary that he crosses. In mythic terms, this crossing of the line is called a “passage.” When viewed as a literary archetype, the journey is called a “rite of initiation,” or “rite of passage.” In a rite of passage, what the protagonist originally thinks gets torn down, and something else gets built up in its place. And that thing is a new view of reality based on a new view of the self. There’s a fundamental transformation of the initiate. He begins one person, and very often during the initiation he is given a new name.
Think of Roots. Kunta Kinte leaves the village, goes into the woods, and enters a tent. In mythic terms, the tent symbolizes a womb. They go into the womb and come out new people. It’s like Jonah going into the belly of the whale. These are all archetypal images of descent into some womb-like structure that gives birth to a new person. Joseph Campbell once argued that at the heart of all myths—not just rites of initiation, but all myths—is the notion of metamorphosis. That’s what we’re talking about. You begin one person, and then there’s a transformation and you become someone else.
But makes this poem distinctively Romantic? How do these mythic structures signify particularly Romantic themes and concerns?
The aforementioned examples of mythic transformations and rites of passage are not distinctively Romantic at all. But remember, Romanticism is all about tradition and revolution, secularization and internalization. The Romantic writer works within tradition, within all of these ancient patterns, archetypes and rituals and myths. But the Romantic poet internalizes them. So the passage and the Otherworld are going to have to do with perception and imagination, rather than with sky gods, or whales, or a traditional religious perspective.
We can compare this poem to the medieval quest, too. Romanticism is often defined as “the internalization of quest romance.” The general claim is this: the great hero is Imagination. This is an imaginative odyssey, a growth of the poet’s mind and a rite of passage toward a heightened Imagination.
A Romantic Internalizing and Secularizing of Christian Myth...
You can interpret any work of art from a religious perspective—any religion can be a lens through which someone sees everything in the world, including works of art. “The Rime” encourages that kind of approach, as well as the approach of mythic rite of passage. What details suggest this?
— They hang the Albatross instead of the cross around his neck. — They hail it in God’s name as if it were a Christian soul. — The penance of life falls upon the Mariner. — The Virgin Mary.
The poem is filled with Christian references. So another way of looking at this is through an important literary genre in the 19th century—the pattern of religious conversion, with its four parts of sin, punishment, penance, and redemption. But again, the Romantic artist is not simply going to reproduce that established pattern. He or she will revise, internalizing and secularizing.
The Netherworld...
In the broadest terms, think about this poem as being about an imaginative journey into the Otherworld, especially the Netherworld. What does “Underworld” suggest that is different from “Otherworld”? Hell, Hades. Is there anything in the poem that supports this? The ship of the dead. The sun looks like blood. The water burns like witch’s oil. But on the other hand, where was heaven in classical mythology? How did one get there? Where are the Elysian Fields? They are in the Underworld.
So there’s ambiguity in every Underworld. And this of course should make us think of psychological depths. So this is a journey to Otherness. On the one hand, this Otherness is “out there” for Coleridge: it’s the “sublime,” an Otherworld that we are unaware of in our normal waking hours. But the Otherworld is also within, the world of our own psyche that we are not normally aware of either—the netherworld of the unconscious. In a particularly Romantic vein, Coleridge is going to explore elements of the unconscious. He’s going to “map” the unconscious in this poem.
In many respects, that is what Romantic art is all about—that cusp between full waking consciousness and the world of dreams and images and sleep. Note that Coleridge subtitles this poem, “A Poet’s Reverie.” Reverie is a word you’ll find again and again in English Romanticism. It’s a twilight zone of the mind. Logic, prudence, reason—all of those things are relaxed. They’re not gone, but they are subsided. We’re not asleep, we’re not fully dreaming. Instead, we’re in a state of mind somewhere in between wakefulness and sleep, and that’s where imagination resides. And so this poem is about that Otherworld as well.
The Mariner as Seer...
Like many Romantic poems, “The Rime” is circular in its poetic pattern. We begin at the end. The experience has already happened, and the Mariner is telling it to the Wedding Guest. But how is the Mariner described? For one example, he’s got a “glittering” eye. He’s a seer. In folk art, the eyes are the windows on the soul. He can be understood as a visionary. He has seen something remarkable that the Wedding Guest is unaware of. And from the perspective of Romantic poetic themes, that’s true. But what does the Wedding Guest mean when he says that the Mariner has a “glittering” eye?
The Mariner hypnotizes the Wedding Guest. He can’t move. So the Wedding Guest thinks that the eyes are those of an evil man. This is the evil eye to the Wedding Guest. He says,
interpretation, claiming that in fact the albatross did not split the ice, and that the bird was responsible for the storm and the mist. But initially they regard him as a good omen.
Some readers might suggest—in trying to answer why the Mariner shoots the albatross—that the Mariner is the captain of the ship, and that he may be jealous of the bird, because the bird is suddenly controlling things and in power. These answers are plausible. But what we find is that the poem really doesn’t give us an answer.
“In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud, It perched for vespers nine; Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white, Glimmered the white Moon-shine.”
“God save thee, ancient Mariner! From the fiends, that plague thee thus!— Why look’st thou so?”—With my cross-bow I shot the ALBATROSS.
What literally happens? The Mariner is telling his story, and then the Wedding Guest interrupts and reacts with shock and horror because the Mariner’s face is contorted and wrenched. He’s thinking about killing the Albatross. He’s haunted, convulsed. The Mariner is not just retelling the experience, he’s reliving it. We are in the world of time, of logic and sequence. The story is taking place in that time. Suddenly, in the most important event in that narrative, there’s a break. The Wedding Guest blurts out, “What’s happening to you?” So we can imagine why the Mariner shot the Albatross, we can speculate about what makes sense. But notice that we are given no explanation before or after. And furthermore, there is a sudden break, with no preparation. We’re given no explanation. That seems very purposeful on Coleridge’s part. He wants to leave us in “mists.” That’s part of the intention.
So how are we to understand it if he simply picks up the crossbow and shoots the bird? What conclusions can you draw about the significance of the act, which seems strikingly unmotivated?
The act is totally irrational, instinctive, unmotivated. In one sense that makes it all the more troubling. Often, this idea is very upsetting to those readers who come up with plausible explanations. They could be right. We can’t say for certain whether they are right or wrong. Perhaps the Mariner was indeed jealous of the bird. But try to support it. Is there any language that can support a particular claim? There’s no support in the text for any claims. And that’s the most frightening thing of all.
This is the world of the modern mind. It’s the mind of the Jeffrey Dahmers of the world. There may be an explanation. Often for these people, the cause is physiological—something about the chemicals in the brain. But for most of the 20th century, one of the most frightening things is this kind of act of violence has no explanation at all.
Now step back and think about the Christian myth of the Fall. It’s everywhere in Romantic poetry. If this is the myth of the Fall, what explanation can we give for why he shot the Albatross? Original Sin. And remember that Original Sin is an imaginative construction to explain something that can’t be explained in any other way.
There seems to be something radically wrong with the human will that causes us to act against our own self interests. This is the bird that—as far as they know—is responsible for rescuing them. And the Mariner kills the very thing that would save them. We’re asked to think about that as a possibility. That’s the true nightmare, because he doesn’t know why he did it.
Darkness...
Another definition of Romanticism is “the rediscovery of the Dark Ages after the Enlightenment.” Remember that the period before the Romantic Age is the so-called Age of Reason. The Middle Ages and the so-called “Dark Ages” can be used as a metaphor for everything that is not rational about the human being. These are nightmare visions of the imagination. That’s the dark world the Mariner inhabits at that moment. It is the deepest level of our humanity. Coleridge’s poem is not just about a journey to the Other World. It’s also about a journey into the heart of darkness.
We’re talking about darkness in two traditional senses: this is about sin, irrationality, violence, destruction and evil. But at the same time it’s about the sublime, the mysterious, the non-rational imagination and what it can do for good and for ill.
Some Review Before Moving On to the Middle of the Poem...
- In 19th-century literature, a pattern of conversion emerges. On of the greatest examples is Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resaurtus. Generally we find it in autobiography. Darwin in his autobiography talks about having a nervous breakdown and recovering by reading Byron and Wordsworth. John Ruskin describes something very similar. So you can take a religious, and specifically Christian, approach to this poem that focuses on a pattern of conversion: sin, suffering, penance and redemption.
- We can also think of the poem in terms of the journey to the Other World. In that sense it is a journey into the sublime. This is a sublime world in which the ice is emerald green, which cracks and makes sounds. It is a world in which the waters burn with witch’s oils. It is a world of the doldrums, where there is no breeze.
- But ultimately the journey as it appears in Romanticism—because of its emphasis on internalization—is a psychological journey, an imaginative odyssey. And it’s when we start to talk about the poem on this level that we begin to talk about what is distinctively Romantic about it. It has to do with perception, with ways of seeing, ways of at least half-creating what we perceive.
place where evil begins and the heart of darkness is entered—when the Mariner lashes out (without understanding why) against something that is good and wholesome. One of the patterns that Blake explicitly uses is that life is about a journey from innocence to experience. So we can think about the Mariner’s journey in that way as well. The journey into the world of experience begins with the destruction of something innocent.
- We can also see it as a thing of the earth. It seems to represent what in “The Aeolian Harp” Coleridge calls “the one Life within us and abroad,” and what Wordsworth calls “the wedding of man and nature.” The Albatross clearly is associated on one level with nature. And so the Mariner’s crime is that he doesn’t understand (at this point in the poem, at least) “the one Life within us and abroad.” He lacks that vision, lacks an understanding that there can be a fruitful wedding of man and nature. So we have what we found in Wordsworth’s visionary “spots of time”: that the wedding is not a given. It’s a discovery. The visionary figure has to take an active part and half-create the spot of time. Initially the boy in The Prelude is alone and seems to be “a trouble to the peace.” The Mariner is also ignorant, profane, and so he violates nature, but this eventually leads to discovery. If the ideal in Coleridge is “the one Life,” and the Mariner doesn’t understand this, then what would be the appropriate poetic justice, the appropriate punishment for him? That he would be alone: Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea!
It’s poetic justice. Think of solitude leading to the ideal of relationship. Here we have the Mariner in solitude, and he turns that solitude into total isolation due to the violence of that crime. So one way to look at this is to see the Albatross as symbolizing nature—and not just nature in the literal sense, but Nature as an embodiment of some kind of divinity that gets violated.
- But we know specific, literal things about the Albatross that go beyond the more general fact that it is a part of nature. The Albatross comes from another world. It’s an emissary. There is a sense of freedom and something transcendent about the Albatross. And the Mariner isn’t aware of the transcendent possibilities of life. Think about it this way: What does the Albatross do first, literally? It breaks the ice free, or at least they assume it does. Here’s a ship stuck in the ice, then, the ice splits and the ship sails free. It rescues them when they are trapped. So the Albatross represents a kind of salvation, a kind of Christ-like symbol. (Be sure, though, to make a distinction between saying the Albatross is a “symbol for Christ” and saying it’s a “Christ-like symbol.” There’s a huge difference. The poem doesn’t work in a mechanical way where the bird represents exact episodes or features of Christ’s life. When you say that the Albatross is a symbol for Christ, then it starts to sound like allegory. Coleridge wasn’t interested in allegory as much as he was in symbol. If you say, however, that the bird is a “Christ-like” symbol, there may be no one-to-one parallel to Christ. So it avoids that kind of explicit, overt, mechanical identification, but its general significance has parallels with the significance and doings in the life of Christ—salvation, for example.)
The bird comes suddenly. The sailors aren’t expecting it. It rescues them. So Coleridge seems to be suggesting that there is a Christ-like, redeeming spirit at work in the universe, whether the Mariner and his crew are aware of it or not. It’s Coleridge’s intuition that the universe is divinely ordained, that there is something out there working on our behalf. The Albatross symbolizes that world, that genius loci. Or in mythic terms, it is the emissary of the gods, sent to take the initiate across the threshold into the new world. In Christian terms, what do you call what the albatross symbolizes? It rescues them. It saves them. You don’t ask for it. It suddenly comes. It’s grace. Coleridge views the Albatross through the concept of grace. So it’s something like grace, something freely given. And the Mariner rejects grace. Now ask yourself: what are the consequences of denying grace? Damnation. What does Red-Cross Knight suffer from in The Faerie Queene? He suffers from “wane hope,” or despair. That’s damnation. So that’s another way of understanding this act in the middle of the poem. It’s a state of damnation, a state of “wan hope,” and a state of despair.
- The Albatross can also symbolize the transcendental and imaginative possibly within the Mariner, which he rejects in himself. Sir Philip Sidney, in his famous Defense of Poesy, written during the Renaissance, describes what art does, and he says that art offers “a golden world.” For the Romantics, paradise and heaven are our life heightened, composed, filled with meaning. And so that’s what the Albatross symbolizes, and everything that happens is because of what the Mariner himself launches it. He has to assert himself eventually before that “golden world” can become the world around him.
The Over-reacher and the Theme of Evil...
We can also think of the Mariner in terms of the classical tragic hero, the over-reacher. The tragic flaw is called “harmartia,” and the etymology of the term comes from archery. It means to miss the bull’s eye in one way: by overshooting it. So the tragic hero is the Over-reacher. If you come back to the theme of evil, the Mariner as the over-reacher is guilty of hubris because he usurps the prerogatives of the gods. He acts as if his will were universal will. He doesn’t consult the members of the crew, what they think about the bird. There’s no democratic vote. He simply asserts his own will. In this, he’s like Lucifer, who usurps the will of God.
But on the other hand, the word “Lucifer” means “light-bearer.” The Mariner is also like Prometheus, who usurps the will of authority and brings light. Think in terms of Romantic mythology. The Romantics draw upon many great myths of the classical world, but use them in distinctly Romantic ways. So the Mariner is like Lucifer, in the sense that he would war with God, the albatross being the emissary of God. He would usurp the prerogatives of God. But he’s also like Prometheus. His act is one of dynamic self-assertion.
Two Ways of Viewing Evil...
Think about the Mariner’s punishment. Does it seem fair? Basically, the Mariner picks up a cross bow and shoots a bird, and for that he has to suffer damnation. Is that fair or not?
terms, we can also describe this as insanity or madness. It’s the nightmare of the mind. The mind works all of the time. It creates images all of the time. When we use the term “creative imagination,” we use it as if it were always positive. But the mind can create images that are not at all positive. It’s not that the Mariner is literally hallucinating. Dramatically, we are meant to take everything as having external reality. But in terms of significance in the poem, this is the world he creates.
What do you think Coleridge means by Life-in-Death?
Her lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was as white as leprosy, The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she, Who thicks man’s blood with cold.
If you are interested in myth, she’s the White Goddess. She’s also a vampire after “blood.” This is the Gothic influence of English Romanticism. These mythic figures suck life—emotional, spiritual, imaginative life. Again, this is very traditional. This is the femme fatale, the temptress, the vampire. Remember that the vampire makes us one of them. So the Mariner is physically and biologically alive, but dead in every other way: spiritually, emotionally, imaginatively. This is a kind of zombie existence.
The Will... Exerted and Lost
This is a work in which not much happens. Consider what the Mariner actually does in this poem:
- He shoots the bird.
- He tries to pray, but can’t. Then he sucks the blood out of his arm.
- He blesses the snakes.
Notice that this is another aspect of crime and punishment that Coleridge explores. The Mariner loses his will. He can’t act. After he acts as if his will is universal will—by shooting the Albatross—then he’s paralyzed. He can’t act or move. The doldrums are entered. The ship is like: “a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean.” It’s a state of pure stasis.
The Possibility of Chance...
But there is something that happens in the middle part of the poem. They play dice. Why? The game captures the randomness and chance of existence. Here is a poem which we try to interpret logically, analytically. We talk about a world where there is some sense and meaning. If you do something like reject mercy and grace, then you are going to be damned. It’s very causal. Everything is somehow knowable. But here, in one of the most crucial points in the whole work, it’s a crap shoot. Coleridge seems to desperately wonder in this work if the world does contain “one Life within us and abroad,” or whether it is sheer hit-or-miss.
Coleridge wonders: Is it a Christian world of sin and suffering, but ultimately redemption and love? Is it this world where the Mariner can say:
Farewell, farewell! but this I tell To thee, thou Wedding-Guest! He prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all.
Is it? On the one hand, yes.
Is it a work in which we journey into the heart of darkness and discover that we control our fate imaginatively? Yes.
Is it fair that he should suffer the tortures of the damned for Over-reaching? Yes.
But also no.
At this crucial event in the poem, all the logic and rationality of the world escapes. It is true that the dice are loaded, there’s no question about that. If Death wins the Mariner, instead of Life-in Death, well, the poem’s over. He dies and that’s the end of it. So we know on some level that Life-in-Death is going to win the dice match. But Coleridge has to be responsible for the implications of his images. And he has it decided by a crap shoot. That’s meaningful. It seems to contradict all the interpretations we’ve been talking about. The image of the crap game disrupts easy readings of the work and easy readings of Coleridge’s vision. It’s slippery on purpose.
We have the ending, of redemption and love. Everything in the universe at the end is linked in a chain of love. But there’s one thing the Mariner says that destabilizes that:
O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been Alone on a wide wide sea: So lonely ’twas, that God himself Scarce seeméd there to be.
That is, maybe this is a universe that doesn’t even have a God at all. And we’re talking about a Christian interpretation of the poem? Do you see how self-deconstructive it is in this regard? The poem seems to contradict itself purposefully.
Blessing the Water Snakes...
He’s seen them before, but now what’s changed? Literally, he sees them now in moonlight, and that symbolizes illumination, understanding, the lamp of imagination. It’s his ability to see imaginatively. That’s pretty clear. But push a little further. He’s seen these water snakes a couple times on this journey, and probably before. So they are not something he doesn’t understand, or hasn’t seen before.
This is different from the Albatross. At the beginning of the poem, he doesn’t understand that there is a genius loci, that there is a divine presence. But he knows these snakes. So why can he bless them now, but couldn’t before? What does Coleridge tell us? Here he blesses them “unawares.” That’s the key word. Why does he emphasize that twice? Why does he initially reject grace, and now accept it?
It’s a very unfair question. There is no explanation. The key idea is “unawares.” It’s not conscious. It just happens. Why? There’s really no answer. We talked about Original Sin. It was irrational, unpremeditated, “unawares.” Why do we sometimes lash out “unawares”? Why do we sometimes love and accept “unawares”? It’s a mystery. It has to do with the unconscious. There are things that we know and understand, but that’s not only the answer. He’s understood the ramifications of his actions for some time. He’s regretted being responsible for the deaths of the crew. He’s tried to pray. But he couldn’t do it. It was a mystery.
The Irrational World...
So this is a journey that begins in mystery, in which he irrationally launches himself into another world by killing the Albatross. And the turning point or resolution is equally mysterious. We can speculate about his blessing in rational terms, as we can his killing of the Albatross. But there is a mysterious parallelism here of sheer mystery and inexplicability. Coleridge writes “unawares” twice.
We can analyze it and explain it after the fact. But our analysis doesn’t tell us why it happened. It’s like a spring of well-water. In “Dejection: An Ode,” Coleridge describes joy as a fountain. Sometimes is bursts forth, sometimes it doesn’t. The point isn’t that we are not responsible for those acts like killing the Albatross. It’s not that we should simply give up, and that we have no free will. But not everything is explicable.
The sea becomes a desert, and this is someone crying out in the wilderness, when suddenly, without premeditation or rational intent, he blesses the water snakes. It’s as if the “one Life” has come together inexplicably. He sees life suddenly in the world of death. He sees into the life of things “unawares.”
Escaping the Curse of Narrow Selfhood...
He’s tried to pray, but why isn’t prayer enough? Coleridge simply tells us that the blessing happens “unawares.” In Coleridge’s terms, he suddenly escapes the curse of narrow selfhood.
The ego is not longer completely dominating. He can see other things that are alive and are a part of the “one Life” inside and outside our beings. They have value and meaning that is transcendent of self.
But what’s the Mariner like at the end? Is this what we’d expect after someone has experienced a radical conversion? Do we have an apostle filled with a beautific smile, standing up to the world to tell of the glory of Christ? Look at the language:
The ancient Mariner earnestly entreateth the Hermit to shrieve him; and the penance of life falls on him.
‘O shrieve me, shrieve me, holy man!’ The Hermit crossed his brow. ‘Say quick,’ quoth he, ‘I bid thee say— What manner of man art thou?’
Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched With a woeful agony, Which forced me to begin my tale; And then it left me free.
And ever and anon through out his future life an agony constraineth him to travel from land to land;
Since then, at an uncertain hour, That agony returns: And till my ghastly tale is told, This heart within me burns.
It’s doubtful that Billy Graham will be using this as an emblem of the meaning of Christian redemption. So what’s going on here?
Think about this psychologically. He can talk about the poem in terms of birth and creativity, but who wants the Mariner’s life at the end? Remember that this is a journey, and we associate the journey with the accumulation of knowledge and discovery. That’s all happened to the Mariner. And we’ve talked about that. But why is Coleridge describing him in this way? He’s not sharing the Christian message of joy at the end. The Mariner is in agony. And again it’s as if he has no free choice. It’s as if this story were haunting and possessing him. He has no power over it: it has all the power over him. He’s forced to tell it, and it’s only after he’s told it that there is any peace at all. And the suggestion is that his peace doesn’t last very long. Why?
The Wandering Jew and the Burden of Full Consciousness...
lines, chants a celebration of the seizer. It’s all a matter of value. When you get into Romanticism, you are talking about a value system, a very complex one.
On the primary level, then, this poem offers us Coleridge’s vision of reality. It is a world that is divinely ordained. It is a world of cause and effect. That’s what Coleridge thinks and hopes the world is like. But in those moments when interpretation breaks down, there seems to be a sense of a universe that Coleridge deeply fears, a universe perhaps run by a harsh Calvinist God, or the Jehovah of the Old Testament, where “Alone on a wide wide sea: / So lonely ’twas, that God himself / Scarce seeméd there to be.”
Or it is a world of pure chance without design, the universe as a game of dice. That’s the universe that Coleridge fears. This universe rears its image in Coleridge’s dreams. And both are true. Because we half create the world in which we live. So there is the world that Coleridge desires it to be, and the world that Coleridge sometimes, in his darkest moments, dreads.
