Reading 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' by Coleridge

Part Four

Perhaps it is time to mention Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s older brother, Frank, who he saw as a rival for their mother and sister’s affections in their large family. When Coleridge was seven he fought with Frank over a cheese-snack - when Frank punched him, Samuel grabbed a knife to stab him, just as their mother walked in. To evade punishment, our poet dropped the knife and ran to a cold, misty field, where he spent the night and made himself ill. By the time the search party found him shivering, his mother had forgiven him. It is a story that has some parallels to the ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ – the sudden, violent urge to take a life; the journey towards redemption through suffering alone.

A year or so later, when Frank was aged just 11, he joined the naval service. Having said farewell to him at the port, Coleridge's father came home, then suddenly collapsed and died that night. In a manner, Frank setting sail ‘killed’ their father. Coleridge was eight. Soon afterwards, he was sent to board at a charity school where he composed one of his earliest known poems ‘Dura Navis’ for a school assignment. The poem imagines the risk and solitude of being at sea, including the dangers of cannibalism. It’s clear the far-off journeys of his brother were often in his mind.

Frank would never return home – he committed suicide in India after twelve years as a sailor, whilst in the grip of a hallucinatory fever.

(Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Peter Vandyke)

In this era, of course, parents and siblings died all the time, and even the best biography often dispatches a father or a brother in a sentence and then moves briskly on. But such events must have profoundly affected Coleridge and his relationship with the sea. And although Frank’s story doesn’t map onto ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ in a simple way, for me it is always pulsing beneath the surface, especially when the poem tips into a kind of hellish fever-dream. Many Christians would have believed that, as he committed suicide, Frank’s soul could not go to heaven, or was in some kind of terrifying limbo - which is what the Mariner, too, seems to sail through. Now with that in mind, let’s look at part four:

PART THE FOURTH.

"I fear thee, ancient Mariner!
I fear thy skinny hand!
And thou art long, and lank, and brown,
As is the ribbed sea-sand.

"I fear thee and thy glittering eye,
And thy skinny hand, so brown."—
Fear not, fear not, thou Wedding-Guest!
This body dropt not down.

Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.

We have returned to the wedding feast! I had almost forgotten the framing device – this is an interesting moment to jolt us back into its world. After the intense, Gothic vibes of the last section, with literal DEATH (in caps!!!) playing dice for the Mariner’s soul, it is perhaps important to remind us of the real, lived world in which the Mariner is telling his story. There’s something touchingly human and alive about his lankness and ‘skinny hand, so brown’ – tanned from the days on deck. The wedding guest’s declaration – ‘I fear thee’ – is also perhaps that of the reader, who might be feeling some hesitancy and concern. Hasn’t the story been too much? Too horrifying? It’s bad-taste, excessive, corrupting. We might fear the writer has no moral; we might be concerned where he’s taking us. The wedding guest also fears, it seems, that Mariner might be a zombie himself, but the Mariner reassures him that he did not die. His curse was instead to survive alone. And the aloneness he describes is complete: there is no god here, no heavenly intervention.

The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.

I looked upon the rotting sea,
And drew my eyes away;
I looked upon the rotting deck,
And there the dead men lay.

I looked to Heaven, and tried to pray:
But or ever a prayer had gusht,
A wicked whisper came, and made
my heart as dry as dust.

Again, this image of the sea ‘rotting’ and coated with ‘slimy things’ is remarkable, and makes me think of the destruction of our oceans now: the jellyfish, algae or stinking seaweed that so often show an ocean that is boiling or out of balance. Rot is everywhere, on water and on board – the Mariner seems to be able to see the reality of the world in some sense. That everything is dying. The landscape as Memento Mori. After all the imagery of thirst and dehydration earlier, this is a wonderful metaphor, too, for the absence of faith. Prayers no longer gush, but the heart is bone dry.

I closed my lids, and kept them close,
And the balls like pulses beat;
For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky
Lay like a load on my weary eye,
And the dead were at my feet.

The cold sweat melted from their limbs,
Nor rot nor reek did they:
The look with which they looked on me
Had never passed away.

An orphan's curse would drag to Hell
A spirit from on high;
But oh! more horrible than that
Is a curse in a dead man's eye!
Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse,
And yet I could not die.

Wow, what an amazing, queasy passage of description – feeling the balls of his eyes beat like pulses under their lids!! The sea and sky exerting such pressure on his eyeballs, they become part of his burden – one might think of Atlas holding up the heavens. And the dead – my god! – with the cold sweat ‘melting’ from their limbs, what a rancid verb! And their eyes cursing him. Everything is about eyes – looking and being looked at – the horror of being both truly seen, and without a single witness.

When I hear ‘And yet I could not die’ I think of Frank too. The Mariner seems to want to kill himself. Does he try to kill himself? How does he know he can’t die unless he has tested it somehow? There feels like there is a further, deeper horror behind that line.

The moving Moon went up the sky,
And no where did abide:
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside.

Her beams bemocked the sultry main,
Like April hoar-frost spread;
But where the ship's huge shadow lay,
The charmed water burnt alway
A still and awful red.

Fire and ice again, those twinned contradictions – light like hoar-frost; a burning sea. But there’s something interesting worth picking out from this imagery. The sea is only an awful red ‘where the ship’s huge shadow lay’. It is the presence of the (humans’) ship in this realm that turns the water to blood. The ship is a weapon of destruction.

Beyond the shadow of the ship,
I watched the water-snakes:
They moved in tracks of shining white,
And when they reared, the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes.

Within the shadow of the ship
I watched their rich attire:
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.

We’ve slipped into a new pattern here of five-line verses – abccb. Their added intricacy seems to mimic the intricacy of the snakes. What an interesting image this is. Are the ‘water-snakes’ the ‘slimy things’ that were earlier so reviled? Snakes are linked to knowledge of course; to witchcraft and the devil. But these are also not so much snakes as eels, and their defining quality is being utterly alien or nonhuman. They are elfin and exquisite. And in their ice (‘hoar’) and ‘fire’ these opposed elements now seem not hellish but part of the rich wholeness of the world. The Mariner is, finally, moved to care:

O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware.

The self same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.

What a strange, strange moment this is. It’s almost a reverse-image of the fall of Man in Eden. Instead of a snake leading to humanity being cast out of God’s favour, here love for the snake allows a man to regain God’s grace.

It’s this section which many have argued makes this a kind of early ecopoem. Having killed the albatross, the Mariner can only be redeemed when he feels love towards nature – a nature very determinedly not anthromorphised but blessed in all its radiant otherness.

His mouth is still too dry to speak - in this poem so concerned with the physical weirdness of having a human body with a tongue and eyeballs in it – but his heart floods with the blood of tenderness again. And - splash! – there goes that massive, heavy, deeply unlikely Albatross that you’d forgotten was around his neck to sink to the bottom of the ocean.

Thank goodness for that.

Just one problem though. You probably think this is the end of the poem. This is certainly as far as I remember. But it’s only part four and there are THREE WHOLE PARTS LEFT. Should a good editor (Wordworth?) have told him to cut it here? Let’s find out next week.