Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Ancient Mariner"

May 2, 2018

1. Ancient Mariner as "the" lyrical ballad

-Ballad: a relatively short narrative poem, written to be sung, with a simple and dramatic action. The ballads tell of love, death, the supernatural, or a combination of these. Two characteristics of the ballad are incremental repetition and the ballad stanza. Incremental repetition repeats one or more lines with small but significant variations that advance the action. The ballad stanza is four lines; commonly, the first and third lines contain four feet or accents, the second and fourth lines contain three feet. Ballads often open abruptly, present brief descriptions, and use concise dialogue.

The folk ballad is usually anonymous and the presentation impersonal. The literary ballad deliberately imitates the form and spirit of a folk ballad. The Romantic poets were attracted to this form, as Longfellow with "The Wreck of the Hesperus," Coleridge with the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (which is longer and more elaborate than the folk balad) and Keats with "La Belle Dame sans Merci" (which more closely resembles the folk ballad).

-lyrical: It has been said that each of these poems has a purpose. Another circumstance must be mentioned which distinguishes these Poems from the popular Poetry of the day; it is this, that the feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling.(From "Preface to Lyrical Ballads")

2. Occasion of the Lyrical Ballads, and the objects originally proposed--Preface to the second edition

During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moon-light or sun-set diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such, as will be found in every village and its vicinity, where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them, when they present themselves.

In this idea originated the plan of the 'Lyrical Ballads'; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth on the other hand was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.

With this view I wrote the 'Ancient Mariner,' and was preparing among other poems, the 'Dark Ladie,' and the 'Christabel,' in which I should have more nearly realized my ideal, than I had done in my first attempt. But Mr. Wordsworth's industry had proved so much more successful, and the number of his poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead of forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous matter. Mr. Wordsworth added two or three poems written in his own character, in the impassioned, lofty, and sustained diction, which is characteristic of his genius.

3. Coleridge's own comment on the poem's 'moral'

Mrs Barbauld once told me that she admired "The Ancient Mariner" very much, but that there were two faults in it---it was improbable, and had no moral. As for the probability, I owned that that might admit some question; but as to the want of a moral, I told her that in my own judgment the poem had too much, and that the only or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of such pure imagination. It ought to have had no more moral than the Arabian Nights' tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of the well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up, and says he must kill the aforesaid merchant because one of the date shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son.(Table-Talk, quoted by House, p.90.)

4. Wordsworth's comment on its "great defects"

First, that the principal person has no distinct character, either in his profession of mariner or as a human being who, having been long under the control of super-natural impressions, might be supposed himself to partake of something supernatural; secondly, that he does not act, but is continually acted upon; thirdly, that the events, having no necessary connection, do not produce each other; and lastly, that the imagery is somewhat too laboriously accumulated. Yet the poem contains many delicate touches of passion, and indeed that passion is everywhere true to nature; a great number of the stanzas present beautiful images, and are expressed with unusual felicity of language; and the versification, though the metre is itself unfit for long poems, is harmonious and artfully varied, exhibiting the utmost powers of that metre, and every variety of which it is capable.

5. Harold Bloom's introduction of The Ancient Mariner

-Tradition: The Ancient Mariner is in the tradition of the stories of Cain and of the Wandering Jew, but it does not reduce to them. It is a late manifestation of the Gothic Revival, and its first version is clearly to be related to the ballad of The Wandering Jew in Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.

-Moral: the murder is a gratuitous act, but then so is the initial appearance of the bird. There is a tradition of seemingly motiveless malevolence that goes from Shakespeare's Iago(whom Coleridge saw as a tragic poet, manipulating men rather than words) and Milton's Satan to the protagonists of Poe, Melville, and Dostoevsky, and that appears in Gide, Camus, and other recent writers. The tradition begins with the demonic (tinged with Prometheanism), moves (in the nineteenth century) into a vitalism crossed by the social image of man in revolt, and climaxes (in our own time) in a violence that yet confirms individual existence and so averts an absolute despair of self. Coleridge's mariner belongs to this tradition whose dark ancestors include Cain, the Wandering Jew, and the Judas whose act of betrayal is portrayed as a desperate assertion of freedom by Wilde, Yeats, and D. H. Lawrence. This tradition's common denominator is that of a desperate assertion of self and a craving for a heightened sense of identity.

6. William Empson on "The Ancient Mariner"

The snakes as absolutely other to him, like beings of another planet, and it is an alien part of his own mind which blesses them; he is astonished that the saving act has been performed. I do not think there is any traditional Christian parallel to this; the process is entirely unlike, though it may easily recall, the repentant saint punishing himself by kissing the leper's sores. The process is exactly the other way up. The Mariner is astonished to find his inside admiring what his outside had thought disgusting, but at once feels happy and thankful about it so that his outside joins forces with his inside; naturally his life can now be saved, and as the readers have been made to share his nausea for the creatures they can grasp the heroic character of his spontaneous reversal.

7. Geoffrey Hartman on "The Ancient Mariner"

...Coleridge's poem traces the "dim and perilous way" of a soul that has broken with nature and feels the burdenous guilt of selfhood. The crime, first of all, is purified of all extrinsic causes, even of possible motive. It is a founding gesture, or caesure dividing stages of being. It may anticipate the modern "acte gratuite" or reflect the willfulness in Original Sin, but only because both are epochal and determining acts of individuation. The punishment, moreover, is simply life itself under the condition of consciousness. Death or self-forgetfulness is not allowed: the Mariner becomes "A man by pain and thought compelled to live." Each man, to become a man, must pass through those straits of individuation...Why does the Mariner kill the albatross? A fascinating question; but even the simplest answer, that it was willfulness, implies a drive on the Mariner's part from self-presence. The killing is a shadow of the Mariner's own casting. What follows his self determining, self-inaugural act is, paradoxically, the presence of otherness.

The passages 5, 6, 7 are quoted from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House, 1986.

8. Harold Bloom, Romantic Poetry as Internalized Romance

What allies Blake and Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats, is their strong mutual conviction that they are reviving the true English tradition of poetry, which they thought had vanished after the death of Milton, and had reappeared in diminished form, mostly after the death of Pope, in admirable but doomed poets like Chatterton, Cowper, and Collins, victims of circumstance and of the false dawn of Sensibility. It is in this highly individual sense that English Romanticism legitimately can be called, as traditionally it has been, a revival of romance. More than a revival, it is an internalization of romance, particularly of the quest variety, an internalization made for more than therapeutic purposes, because made in the name of a humanizing hope that approaches apocalyptic intensity. The poet takes the patterns of quest-romance and transposes them into his own imaginative life, so that the entire rhythm of the quest is heard again in the movement of the poet himself from poem to poem.

The movement of quest-romance, before its internalization by the High Romantics, was from nature to redeemed nature, the sanction of redemption being the gift of some external spiritual authority, sometimes magical. The Romantic movement is from nature to the imagination¡¯s freedom (sometimes a reluctant freedom), and the imagination¡¯s freedom is frequently purgatorial, redemptive in direction but destructive of the social self. The high cost of Romantic internalization, that is, of finding paradises within a renovated man, shows itself in the arena of self- consciousness. The quest is to widen consciousness as well as to intensify it, but the quest is shadowed by a spirit that tends to narrow consciousness to an acute preoccupation with self. This shadow of imagination is solipsism, what Shelley calls the Spirit of Solitude or Alastor, the avenging daimon who is a baffled residue of the self, determined to be compensated for its loss of natural assurance, for having been awakened from the merely given condition that to Shelley, as to Blake, was but the sleep of death-in-life. Blake calls this spirit of solitude a Spectre, or the genuine Satan, the Thanatos or death instinct in every natural man.

There is no better way to explore the Real Man, the Imagination, than to study his monuments: The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem; The Prelude and the Recluse fragment; The Ancient Mariner and Christabel; Prometheus Unbound, Adonais, and The Triumph of Life; the two Hyperions; Don Juan; Death¡¯s Jest-Book; these are the definitive Romantic achievement, the words that were and will be, day and night.

Select Bibliography

Bloom, Harold. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Chelsea, 1986. Print. Mod. Crit. Interpretations .

---. Romanticism and Consciousness :Essays in Criticism. New York: Norton, 1970. Print. 

---. "The Internalization of Quest Romance." Yale Review: A National Quarterly 58 (1969): 526-36. Print. 

---. The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry. Doubleday; Faber and Faber, 1961. Print.

Empson, William. "The Ancient Mariner." Critical Quarterly 6 (1964): 298-319. Print.

Hartman, Geoffrey H. The Fate of Reading and Other Essays. U of Chicago P, 1975. Print.

---. Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787-1814. Yale UP, 1964. Print.