Reading 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' by Coleridge

Part Three

To recap: ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ was originally planned as a collaborative poem - as part of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads project - with Wordsworth claiming to be the originator of the idea of killing an Albatross. Their initial motivation was also to make money, as the Gothic genre was very popular at the time. This next section – ‘Part the Third’ is perhaps the most Gothic. But also, one wonders if it’s the point at which Wordsworth dropped out, claiming their ‘respective manners proved so widely different’ that it would have been ‘presumptuous of him to continue’.

The biographer Richard Holmes in his fantastic biography Coleridge: Early Visions notes that ‘Their friendship was based on an attraction of temperamental opposites: Coleridge was fleshy, rumbustious, excitable, overflowing with talk and animal sympathies, while Wordsworth was tall, bony, taciturn and powerfully self-sufficient’. Hazlitt observed at the time that: ‘Coleridge has told me that he himself liked to compose in walking over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse-wood, whereas Wordsworth always wrote (if he could) walking up and down a straight gravel-walk’. It is hard to imagine the straight and taciturn Wordsworth enjoying something as death-metal as this next section, and indeed – as we will see later – he eventually decided he disproved of the poem, testing their friendship in the process.

Anyway, let’s begin:

PART THE THIRD.

There passed a weary time.  Each throat
Was parched, and glazed each eye.
A weary time! a weary time!
How glazed each weary eye,
When looking westward, I beheld
A something in the sky.

At first it seemed a little speck,
And then it seemed a mist:
It moved and moved, and took at last
A certain shape, I wist.

A speck, a mist, a shape, I wist!
And still it neared and neared:
As if it dodged a water-sprite,
It plunged and tacked and veered.

With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
We could not laugh nor wail;
Through utter drought all dumb we stood!
I bit my arm, I sucked the blood,
And cried, A sail! a sail!

So - an incredible opening, with Coleridge using the ballad technique of refrain or repetition to create some wonderful effects: to mimic the tedious passing of time, and then that doublecheck when something is finally seen. I love the almost cinematic zoom as the ship comes into view – ‘A speck, a mist, a shape’ – and the internal rhyme on ‘With throats unslaked, with black lips baked’. It’s hard to say aloud, actually – it makes you kind of conscious of your lips and tongue as the sailors are. And then the total goth move of having to bite your arm and suck the blood in order to get the moisture in your mouth to speak! It’s a vampirish image obviously, and proto-vampires were part of the gothic trend of the time. Let’s continue:

With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
Agape they heard me call:
Gramercy! they for joy did grin,
And all at once their breath drew in,
As they were drinking all.

See! see! (I cried) she tacks no more!
Hither to work us weal;
Without a breeze, without a tide,
She steadies with upright keel!

The western wave was all a-flame
The day was well-nigh done!
Almost upon the western wave
Rested the broad bright Sun;
When that strange shape drove suddenly
Betwixt us and the Sun.

And straight the Sun was flecked with bars,
(Heaven's Mother send us grace!)
As if through a dungeon-grate he peered,
With broad and burning face.

So, stuck as they are, dehydrated and weary on an unmoving ship, at first the sight of another ship speeding towards them seems a mercy. But it is also, of course, deeply unsettling – how can it move ‘without a breeze, without a tide’? The sun is setting, making the sea ‘a-flame’ (that impossible mixture of fire and water again), and the ship drives between the crew and the sun. This is another absolutely astonishing image – the sun is ‘flecked with bars’ as if peering through a ‘dungeon-gate’. The Mariner realises with a lurch that they are not freed but trapped. It as if a cage slams down on all of them.

Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud)
How fast she nears and nears!
Are those her sails that glance in the Sun,
Like restless gossameres!

Are those her ribs through which the Sun
Did peer, as through a grate?
And is that Woman all her crew?
Is that a DEATH? and are there two?
Is DEATH that woman's mate?

The ship is figured as a woman then, but a terrifying one: like a zombie bride, or a white lady haunting some mansion. The fine, tattered cobweb of her sails barely covers her ‘ribs’; the ship is skeletal. And then, as the camera zooms in again, we see there is a Woman on board, and with her ‘a DEATH’. How much more chilling than simply DEATH! For it implies there are many DEATHS roaming the seas.

There is a technique in poetry called a ‘blazon’ where the poet catalogues another person’s physical attributes – usually a woman’s. Her eyes are like sapphires, her forehead like ivory, etc. (Shakespeare parodied this in ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’). Here Coleridge describes the female figure thus:

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.

She has the same bloodied lips as the Mariner (and red is a colour that keeps coming back in this poem). It is interesting her hair is like gold – usually a positive for writers of blazons, but here we might be reminded that seafaring was usually linked to the desire for wealth, whether trade, colonialism or piracy. Her skin is white as a leper’s – leprosy was not only a contagion, but at the time was seen to corrupt or decay the living body. LIFE-IN-DEATH is undead.

(18th Century image of Life-and-Death)

There’s no doubt Coleridge is influenced here by the relatively new legend of The Flying Dutchman, a phantom ship that functioned as a portent of doom, and he was codifying our ideas of the ghost-ship in this poem – the influence of this section can still be seen today in films like The Pirates of the Caribbean series.

But he’s also participating in the invention of the zombie. The English word ‘zombie’ isn’t actually recorded yet - the poet Robert Southey first writes in ‘zombi’ a history of Brazil in 1819 – but the concept is in the air. The 1773 German ballad, ‘Lenore’, in which a young woman rides with a mysterious stranger to her ‘marriage bed’ only to find he is dead and it is a grave, made a huge stir when translated into English in 1796, and must have been fresh in Coleridge’s mind, with it also clearly influencing his unfinished ‘Christabel’.

Now this ghost-slash-zombie ship approaches:

The naked hulk alongside came,
And the twain were casting dice;
"The game is done!  I've won!  I've won!"
Quoth she, and whistles thrice.

The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out:
At one stride comes the dark;
With far-heard whisper, o'er the sea.
Off shot the spectre-bark.

We listened and looked sideways up!
Fear at my heart, as at a cup,
My life-blood seemed to sip!

Reading that first verse, I think of Death and the knight playing Chess in Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal. This is the literally ‘dicing with death’, and although that phrase apparently isn’t recorded until the twentieth century, surely the image comes from here? Life-in-Death wins this game though, which means – I think – that she has won the Mariner’s soul for her own. Immediately night pours in. (‘The sun’s rim dips’ is a marvellous mouthful of sound).

That last image is incredibly hard to parse due to the grammar (which makes it sound a bit like blood is sipping, rather than sipped). However, I think terror is sipping the blood out of his heart, which is actually amazing, and makes me feel quite drained and faint. And ready for this terrifying final passage:

The stars were dim, and thick the night,
The steersman's face by his lamp gleamed white;
From the sails the dew did drip—
Till clombe above the eastern bar
The horned Moon, with one bright star
Within the nether tip.

One after one, by the star-dogged Moon
Too quick for groan or sigh,
Each turned his face with a ghastly pang,
And cursed me with his eye.

Four times fifty living men,
(And I heard nor sigh nor groan)
With heavy thump, a lifeless lump,
They dropped down one by one.

The souls did from their bodies fly,—
They fled to bliss or woe!
And every soul, it passed me by,
Like the whizz of my CROSS-BOW!

There’s something of the black mass or occult ritual about this – the wait until the ‘horned’ (devilish?) moon has ‘clombe’ (a past tense form of climb) to a specific point that aligns with the ship. The dog star, since the days of Homer, was often seen as an evil portent and bringer of fevers and madness (being associated with rabid dogs).

And then the Mariner is forced to witness his whole crew, of two hundred men, die in front of him. Each, as they die, turn to him with a ‘ghastly pang’ – what a painfully accurate description – and seems to curse him with a look. In killing the Albatross HE did this. He is responsible for all their deaths. And as if to remind him, over and over, each soul whizzes past (a remarkable verb) like a shot from his cross-bow.

The consequences of his original action seems outsized, but he is like Pandora opening her jar or Eve biting the apple – in some way the Mariner has caused a fall, and invited Death to their ship. The rest of the poem will, in many ways, be about how one can endure such a responsibility, and the weight of survivors’ guilt.