One of Gustave Doré’s celebrated engravings illustrating the poem. PHOTO: ART RESOURCE
Perhaps the scariest great poem in the English language, even including Poe's, 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.
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 nineteen)—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.”
Ed. note: I suggest reading the poem in comparison with the Book of Jonah in the Bible. - DL
From the archive. Originally in the Wall Street Journal, November 6, 2015. Read "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," 1817 edition, here. For other readings of great poems click on these links, or on the "Great Poems" link on the left side of our page.
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/01/what-trumps-vain-boasts-the-wizardry-of-ozymandias-by-david-lehman.html
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/02/introducing-emily-dickinson-part-1-by-david-lehman.html
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/02/introducing-emily-dickinson-part-ii-by-david-lehman.html
What a fine tribute to Coleridge's RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER and his other amazing work.I have always loved (and used) his vital contrast (in BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA) between "fancy" ("fixed and dead") and "imagination," which is "gifted with "esemplastic power." And the end of "Kubla Khan" is indeed great. The mysterious "milk of paradise" is both innocent and sublimely canny. Thank you, David.
Posted by: Angela Ball | March 07, 2021 at 12:56 PM
Thank you for the thoughtful comment, Angela.
Posted by: David Lehman | March 07, 2021 at 09:16 PM
There are twenty-three poems in 1798 LB, not twenty-four, a not inconsiderable fact when one remembers that the poem at dead center is "The Thorn."
Posted by: Theodore Worozbyt | March 13, 2021 at 09:31 AM
Thanks for your comment, Theodore. There were 23 poems in the 1798 edition, of which my favorites are the Ancient Mariner and Tintern Abbey.
Posted by: David Lehman | March 13, 2021 at 01:03 PM
I enjoyed reading this blog post so much! I first read this poem in high school and I don’t think I appreciated it as much as I could have (although it made an impression). For some reason I never studied it in college during many years as an English major. How wonderful to be inspired to reread it again and to see it in a more mature light.
Posted by: Victoria Kelly | March 24, 2021 at 01:35 PM
Thank you, David, for this sensitive and insightful re-reading. I am grateful to have "The Ancient Mariner" thrust into the foreground of my consciousness again. For another disaster at sea poem, I suggest re-reading G.M.Hopkins "The Wreck of the Hesperus" as a comparison.
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Posted by: Millicent Caliban | March 27, 2021 at 07:13 AM