The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (originally
The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere) is the longest major
poemPoetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
by the
EnglishEngland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
poetA poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
Samuel Taylor ColeridgeSamuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla...
, written in 1797–98 and was
published in 1798Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* William Wordsworth begins writing the first version of The Prelude, finishing it in two parts in 1799. This version describes the growth of his understanding up to age 17, when he departed for...
in the first edition of
Lyrical BalladsLyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798 and generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature...
. Modern editions use a later revised version printed in 1817 that featured a
glossA gloss is a brief notation of the meaning of a word or wording in a text. It may be in the language of the text, or in the reader's language if that is different....
. Along with other poems in
Lyrical Ballads, it was a signal shift to modern poetry and the beginning of British Romantic literature.
Plot summary
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner relates the experiences of a sailor who has returned from a long sea voyage. The Mariner stops a man who is on the way to a wedding ceremony and begins to narrate a story. The Wedding-Guest's reaction turns from bemusement to impatience and fear to fascination as the Mariner's story progresses, as can be seen in the language style: for example, Coleridge uses narrative techniques such as personification and repetition to create either a sense of danger, of the supernatural or of serenity, depending on the mood of each of the different parts of the poem.
The Mariner's tale begins with his ship departing on its journey. Despite initial good fortune, the ship is driven south off course by a storm and eventually reaches
Antarctica. An
albatrossAlbatrosses, of the biological family Diomedeidae, are large seabirds allied to the procellariids, storm-petrels and diving-petrels in the order Procellariiformes . They range widely in the Southern Ocean and the North Pacific...
appears and leads them out of the Antarctic but, even as the albatross is praised by the ship's crew, the Mariner shoots the bird ("with my cross-bow / I shot the albatross"). The crew is angry with the Mariner, believing the albatross brought the south wind that led them out of the Antarctic. However, the sailors change their minds when the weather becomes warmer and the mist disappears ("'Twas right, said they, such birds to slay / that bring the fog and mist"). However, they made a grave mistake in supporting this crime as it arouses the wrath of spirits who then pursue the ship "from the land of mist and snow"; the south wind that had initially led them from the land of ice now sends the ship into uncharted waters, where it is becalmed.
- Day after day, day after day,
- We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
- As idle as a painted ship
- Upon a painted ocean.
- Water, water, every where,
- And all the boards did shrink;
- Water, water, every where,
- Nor any drop to drink.
Here, however, the sailors change their minds again and blame the Mariner for the torment of their thirst. In anger, the crew forces the Mariner to wear the dead albatross about his neck, perhaps to illustrate the burden he must suffer from killing it, or perhaps as a sign of regret ("Ah! Well a-day! What evil looks / Had I from old and young! / Instead of the cross, the albatross / About my neck was hung"). Eventually, in an eerie passage, the ship encounters a ghostly vessel. On board are Death (a skeleton) and the "Night-mare Life-in-Death" (a deathly-pale woman), who are playing dice for the souls of the crew. With a roll of the dice, Death wins the lives of the crew members and Life-in-Death the life of the Mariner, a prize she considers more valuable. Her name is a clue as to the Mariner's fate; he will endure a fate worse than death as punishment for his killing of the albatross.
One by one, all of the crew members die, but the Mariner lives on, seeing for seven days and nights the curse in the eyes of the crew's corpses, whose last expressions remain upon their faces. Eventually, the Mariner's curse is temporarily lifted when he sees sea creatures swimming in the water. Despite his cursing them as "slimy things" earlier in the poem ("Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs / upon the slimy sea"), he suddenly sees their true beauty and blesses them ("a spring of love gush'd from my heart and I bless'd them unaware"); suddenly, as he manages to pray, the albatross falls from his neck and his guilt is partially expiated. The bodies of the crew, possessed by good spirits, rise again and steer the ship back home, where it sinks in a whirlpool, leaving only the Mariner behind. A
hermitA hermit is a person who lives, to some degree, in seclusion from society.In Christianity, the term was originally applied to a Christian who lives the eremitic life out of a religious conviction, namely the Desert Theology of the Old Testament .In the...
on the mainland had seen the approaching ship and had come to meet it with a pilot and the pilot's boy in a boat. When they pull him from the water, they think he is dead, but when he opens his mouth, the pilot has a fit. The hermit prays, and the Mariner picks up the oars to row. The pilot's boy goes crazy and laughs, thinking the Mariner is the devil, and says, "The Devil knows how to row." As penance for shooting the albatross, the Mariner, driven by guilt, is forced to wander the earth, tell his story, and teach a lesson to those he meets:
- He prayeth best, who loveth best
- All things both great and small;
- For the dear God who loveth us,
- He made and loveth all.
After relating the story, the Mariner leaves, and the Wedding Guest returns home, and wakes the next morning "a sadder and a wiser man".
Background
The poem may have been inspired by
James CookCaptain James Cook, FRS, RN was a British explorer, navigator and cartographer who ultimately rose to the rank of captain in the Royal Navy...
's second voyage of exploration (1772–1775) of the South Seas and the
Pacific OceanThe Pacific Ocean is the largest of the Earth's oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic in the north to the Southern Ocean in the south, bounded by Asia and Australia in the west, and the Americas in the east.At 165.2 million square kilometres in area, this largest division of the World...
; Coleridge's tutor,
William WalesWilliam Wales was a British mathematician and astronomer.-Early life:Wales was born around 1734 to John and Sarah Wales and was baptized in Warmfield that year...
, was the astronomer on
Cook's flagshipHMS Resolution was a sloop of the Royal Navy, and the ship in which Captain James Cook made his second and third voyages of exploration in the Pacific...
and had a strong relationship with Cook. On this second voyage Cook crossed three times into the
Antarctic CircleThe Antarctic Circle is one of the five major circles of latitude that mark maps of the Earth. For 2011, it is the parallel of latitude that runs south of the Equator.-Description:...
to determine whether the fabled great southern continent existed. Critics have also opined that the poem may have been inspired by the voyage of
Thomas JamesCaptain Thomas James was an English sea captain, notable as a navigator and explorer, who set out to discover the Northwest Passage, the hoped for ocean route around the top of North America to Asia....
into the Arctic. "Some critics think that Coleridge drew upon James's account of hardship and lamentation in writing
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
According to
William WordsworthWilliam Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....
, the poem was inspired while Coleridge, Wordsworth and Wordsworth's sister
DorothyDorothy Mae Ann Wordsworth was an English author, poet and diarist. She was the sister of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, and the two were close for all of their lives...
were on a walking tour through the
Quantock HillsThe Quantock Hills is a range of hills west of Bridgwater in Somerset, England. The Quantock Hills were England’s first Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty being designated in 1956 and consists of large amounts of heathland, oak woodlands, ancient parklands and agricultural land.The hills run from...
in Somerset in the spring of 1798. The discussion had turned to a book that Wordsworth was reading,
A Voyage Round The World by Way of the Great South Sea (1726) by Captain
George ShelvockeCaptain George Shelvocke was an English privateer who wrote a famous 1723 book based on his exploits, A Voyage Round the World By Way of The Great South Sea....
. In the book, a melancholy sailor,
Simon HatleySimon Hatley was a British mariner active in the early 18th century. Little is known of Hatley's life, other than in connection with the voyages he made...
, shoots a black
albatrossAlbatrosses, of the biological family Diomedeidae, are large seabirds allied to the procellariids, storm-petrels and diving-petrels in the order Procellariiformes . They range widely in the Southern Ocean and the North Pacific...
:
- We all observed, that we had not the sight of one fish of any kind, since we were come to the Southward of the streights of le Mair, nor one sea-bird, except a disconsolate black Albatross, who accompanied us for several days ..., till Hattley, (my second Captain) observing, in one of his melancholy fits, that this bird was always hovering near us, imagin'd, from his colour, that it might be some ill omen. ... He, after some fruitless attempts, at length, shot the Albatross, not doubting we should have a fair wind after it.
As they discussed Shelvocke's book, Wordsworth proffers the following developmental critique to Coleridge, which importantly contains a reference to tutelary spirits: "Suppose you represent him as having killed one of these birds on entering the south sea, and the tutelary spirits of these regions take upon them to avenge the crime." By the time the trio finished their walk, the poem had taken shape.
Bernard MartinHon. Bernard Martin MLC was appointed to the New Zealand Legislative Council in 1936, and was Speaker from 1948 to 1950.He was a pioneer of the Labour Party. Born in England, he migrated to New Zealand in 1900, and was a member of the first Executive of the Labour Party in 1916. From Auckland, he...
argues in
The Ancient Mariner and the Authentic Narrative that Coleridge was also influenced by the life of Anglican clergyman
John NewtonJohn Henry Newton was a British sailor and Anglican clergyman. Starting his career on the sea at a young age, he became involved with the slave trade for a few years. After experiencing a religious conversion, he became a minister, hymn-writer, and later a prominent supporter of the abolition of...
, who had a near-death experience aboard a slave ship.
The poem may also have been inspired by the legends of the
Wandering JewThe Wandering Jew is a figure from medieval Christian folklore whose legend began to spread in Europe in the 13th century. 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...
, who was forced to wander the earth until Judgement Day for taunting Jesus on the day of the Crucifixion, and of the Flying Dutchman.
The poem received mixed reviews from critics, and Coleridge was once told by the publisher that most of the book's sales were to sailors who thought it was a naval songbook. Coleridge made several modifications to the poem over the years. In the second edition of
Lyrical Ballads, published in 1800 (see
1800 in poetryNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* January 10 – The Serampore Mission and Press is established in Serampore India by Baptist missionaries Joshua Marshman and William Ward...
), he replaced many of the archaic words.
Coleridge's comments
In
Biographia Literaria XIV, Coleridge writes:
- 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, 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...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. ... With this view I wrote the 'Ancient Mariner'.
In
Table Talk, 1830–32, Coleridge wrote:
- Mrs Barbauld told me that the only faults she found with the Ancient Mariner were — that it was improbable and had no moral. As for the probability — to be sure that might admit some question — but I told her that in my judgment the poem had moral, and that too openly obtruded on the reader, It ought to have no more moral than the story of the merchant sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well and throwing the shells aside, and the Genii starting up and saying he must kill the merchant, because a date shell had put out the eye of the Genii's son.
Wordsworth's comments
Wordsworth wrote to Joseph Cottle in 1799:
- From what I can gather it seems that the Ancient Mariner has upon the whole been an injury to the volume, I mean that the old words and the strangeness of it have deterred readers from going on. If the volume should come to a second Edition I would put in its place some little things which would be more likely to suit the common taste.
However, when
Lyrical Ballads was reprinted, Wordsworth included it despite Coleridge's objections, writing:
- The Poem of my Friend has indeed 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 supernatural 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 the passion is every where 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. It therefore appeared to me that these several merits (the first of which, namely that of the passion, is of the highest kind) gave to the Poem a value which is not often possessed by better Poems.
The gloss
Upon its release, the poem was criticised for being obscure and difficult to read. It was also criticised for using archaic words, not in keeping with
RomanticismRomanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
. In 1815–16, Coleridge added to the poem marginal notes (still deliberately written in an archaic style) that
glossA gloss is a brief notation of the meaning of a word or wording in a text. It may be in the language of the text, or in the reader's language if that is different....
the text, ostensibly explaining the meaning of verses. While the poem was originally published in the collection of
Lyrical BalladsLyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798 and generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature...
, the 1817 version was published in his collection entitled
Sibylline Leaves (see
1817 in poetryNationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* February 28 — Lord Byron writes a letter to Thomas Moore and includes in it his poem, "So, we'll go no more a roving"...
).
The gloss describes the poem as an account of sin and restoration. While some critics see the gloss as spelling out clearly the moral of the tale, others point to the inaccuracies and illogicalities of the gloss and interpret it as the voice of a dramatized character that only serves to highlight the poem's cruel meaninglessness. In particular, Charles Lamb, who had deeply admired the original for its attention to "Human Feeling", claimed that the gloss distanced the audience from the narrative, weakening the poem's effects.
Interpretations
The poem on the surface explores violation of nature and its resulting psychological effects on the Mariner, who interprets the fates of his crew to be a direct result of his having shot down an albatross. Although the poem is often read as a Christian
allegoryAllegory is a demonstrative form of representation explaining meaning other than the words that are spoken. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation...
,
Jerome McGannJerome McGann is a textual scholar whose work focuses on the history of literature and culture from the late eighteenth-century to the present.-Career:Educated at Le Moyne College , Syracuse University Jerome McGann (born July 22, 1937) is a textual scholar whose work focuses on the history of...
argues that it is really a story of
our salvationWithin religion salvation is the phenomenon of being saved from the undesirable condition of bondage or suffering experienced by the psyche or soul that has arisen as a result of unskillful or immoral actions generically referred to as sins. Salvation may also be called "deliverance" or...
of Christ, rather than the other way round. The structure of the poem, according to McGann, is influenced by Coleridge's interest in higher criticism, and its function "was to illustrate a significant continuity of meaning between cultural phenomena that seemed as diverse as pagan superstitions, Catholic theology, Aristotelian science, and contemporary philological theory, to name only a few of the work's ostentatiously present materials."
In his 1946-47 essay "The Mariner and the Albatross", George Whalley suggests that the Ancient Mariner is an autobiographical portrait of Coleridge himself, comparing the Mariner's loneliness with Coleridge's own feelings of loneliness expressed in his letters and journals.
External links