Reading 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' by Coleridge

Part Six

Hope you’re enjoying the spring sunshine? I’ve already drunk two pots of coffee today and have been spending too much time on social media. Just to share a couple of links, The Poetry School Summer courses are now open for bookings, and I’m doing an online course about reading female poets. And I have a new poem in the absolutely excellent poetry journal BASKET called ‘Poetry’ if you’d like to read it (after Marianne Moore’s poem of the same name that begins ‘I too, dislike it’)

Does it seem like I’m putting off talking about ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’? Okay, maybe. Turns out ‘Part the Sixth’ is of a similar quality to ‘Part the Fifth’. Let’s just race through it, shall we? And remember that reading flawed poetry can still teach us something (especially when it’s by someone of Coleridge’s genre-inventing brilliance). So here we go:

PART THE SIXTH

FIRST VOICE.

But tell me, tell me! speak again,
Thy soft response renewing—
What makes that ship drive on so fast?
What is the OCEAN doing?

SECOND VOICE.

Still as a slave before his lord,
The OCEAN hath no blast;
His great bright eye most silently
Up to the Moon is cast—

If he may know which way to go;
For she guides him smooth or grim
See, brother, see! how graciously
She looketh down on him.

FIRST VOICE.

But why drives on that ship so fast,
Without or wave or wind?

SECOND VOICE.

The air is cut away before,
And closes from behind.

Fly, brother, fly! more high, more high
Or we shall be belated:
For slow and slow that ship will go,
When the Mariner's trance is abated.

Okay so in this first section the Mariner is still in a swoon, and for some reason Coleridge thinks the two polar-spirit-demons need to have a clunky expositional conversation about why the ship is moving. Once again, this is a narrative problem Coleridge simply doesn’t need to solve. When the albatross dropped off the mariner’s neck, the breeze could just have resumed. In supernatural fantasy stuff can just happen! Instead Coleridge turned the crew into angel-zombies and is now torturously explaining how the air is somehow being ‘cut’ from before and ‘closing’ behind, and that it won’t work when the Mariner is conscious(?) Also the polar-spirit-demons are apparently late for some other appointment! All absolutely unnecessary. Then the Mariner wakes:

I woke, and we were sailing on
As in a gentle weather:
'Twas night, calm night, the Moon was high;
The dead men stood together.

WHAT??? NO!!! Not the dead men! The angels that were inhabiting them already flew off! Who are they possessed by now? This doesn’t make any sense! (It never made any sense, I guess, but it had a kind of dream logic before at least). Coleridge’s later notes add, ominously: ‘the Mariner awakes and his penance begins anew’. Oh, for God’s sake.

All stood together on the deck,
For a charnel-dungeon fitter:
All fixed on me their stony eyes,
That in the Moon did glitter.

The pang, the curse, with which they died,
Had never passed away:
I could not draw my eyes from theirs,
Nor turn them up to pray.

But we dealt with this! We sorted it out in part four, Coleridge! Are we really doing this again?

I wonder if part of the problem is that Coleridge is still in search of a moral. It’s like it seemed too easy, that simply feeling something for wild creatures would be enough to absolve the Mariner of his guilt and responsibility, especially given the Mariner’s action led to so many deaths. The Mariner is a kind of tragic figure – one whose human flaw led to terrible consequences. Coleridge seems torn between a kind of ancient worldview where such an error brings down disaster on the hero, and a Christian conception that everyone can be redeemed. You can feel the poet wobbling. Should the Mariner be forgiven yet? Has he suffered enough? And then, apropos of nothing, Coleridge finally has mercy and decides to lift the curse. Or, I think he does:

And now this spell was snapt: once more
I viewed the ocean green.
And looked far forth, yet little saw
Of what had else been seen—

Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.

But soon there breathed a wind on me,
Nor sound nor motion made:
Its path was not upon the sea,
In ripple or in shade.

I don’t really understand what’s going on anymore, to be honest. Also, very bored by Coleridge wanting to have no wind and also blow it. Please, no more descriptions of winds behaving weirdly. Oh, wait:

It raised my hair, it fanned my cheek
Like a meadow-gale of spring—
It mingled strangely with my fears,
Yet it felt like a welcoming.

Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship,
Yet she sailed softly too:
Sweetly, sweetly blew the breeze—
On me alone it blew.

Okay, well hopefully that’s it now. And finally - finally - land is homing into view.

Oh! dream of joy! is this indeed 
The light-house top I see?
Is this the hill? is this the kirk?
Is this mine own countree!

We drifted o'er the harbour-bar,
And I with sobs did pray—
O let me be awake, my God!
Or let me sleep alway.

I do like these last two lines a lot. The whole poem has, in a way, been positioned somewhere uneasily between consciousness and unconsciousness; reality and dream. I’m glad that idea seeps back.

The harbour-bay was clear as glass,
So smoothly it was strewn!
And on the bay the moonlight lay,
And the shadow of the moon.

The rock shone bright, the kirk no less,
That stands above the rock:
The moonlight steeped in silentness
The steady weathercock.

This is an evocative description of the sight of home: a ‘kirk’ is a church, and is usually Scottish or northern English according to my dictionary. It sounds more Scottish to me, with the little harbour bay with its lighthouse and ‘weathercock’. And I love the repetitions of moon – very ballady, and suggesting the moonlight bouncing off and reflecting off everything.

But wait - let’s not assume Coleridge has ACTUALLY lifted the curse of the Ancient Mariner, oh no:

And the bay was white with silent light,
Till rising from the same,
Full many shapes, that shadows were,
In crimson colours came.

A little distance from the prow
Those crimson shadows were:
I turned my eyes upon the deck—
Oh, Christ! what saw I there!

Each corse lay flat, lifeless and flat,
And, by the holy rood!
A man all light, a seraph-man,
On every corse there stood.

This seraph band, each waved his hand:
It was a heavenly sight!
They stood as signals to the land,
Each one a lovely light:

This seraph-band, each waved his hand,
No voice did they impart—
No voice; but oh! the silence sank
Like music on my heart.

Christ, what, really? We’re doing the angels leaving the zombie-bodies thing again? Even though they already left them? And the angels are crimson and – checks notes - lovely? And this time they DON’T sing like birds and flutes? Because….? Luckily, help is coming:

But soon I heard the dash of oars;
I heard the Pilot's cheer;
My head was turned perforce away,
And I saw a boat appear.

The Pilot, and the Pilot's boy,
I heard them coming fast:
Dear Lord in Heaven! it was a joy
The dead men could not blast.

I saw a third—I heard his voice:
It is the Hermit good!
He singeth loud his godly hymns
That he makes in the wood.
He'll shrieve my soul, he'll wash away
The Albatross's blood.

(Fishermen at Sea by JMW Turner, painted 1796, just a year before Coleridge wrote the poem)

And that’s the end of ‘Part the Sixth’. I have to say, if this hermit doesn’t sort it out, I’ll be very annoyed. The hermit is singing hymns – he’s bringing Christian morals into a poem that has sort of got lost in a soup of polar-spirit-demonic-angel weirdness.

I’m going to finish today though by adding that – to be fair – Coleridge was often his own best critic. In Table Talk he wrote:

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 judgement 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 a 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.

What a perfectly articulated observation! Coleridge couldn’t really have diagnosed the problem better. Having an albatross you killed hung around your neck, then it finally being released, SOUNDS like a moral tale, but is actually only so in the strange manner of a fairy story. It has been Coleridge’s pursuit of a moral conclusion to please a Christian readership that has had his poem struggling on stagnant waters for the last two sections. But the final part is now in sight.

What do you all think? Do you remember this part? Are me (and Wordsworth and Coleridge) being too harsh on this poem? Would love to hear your comments as we approach the end…