Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
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- Опубликовано: 6 сен 2024
- The first work in the famous Lyrical Ballads was Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It is an inexhaustibly fascinating poem with a providential supernatural machinery. The poem centres around the paradox whereby a person becomes aware of their moral guilt as a prelude to being brought to profound spiritual transformation.
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Very interesting lecture which I am going through. Having been on a small steam cargo passenger ship that picked up an albatross in the Southern Indian Ocean, I understand the idea of hospitality towards the bird. It is always there, a lone bird circling high around the back of the ship for days like a guardian angel looking over the ship and crew. In a sailing ship the albatross would give warning of approaching bad weather or high seas as they alter their relative position with the ship depending on the wind. In a perfectly natural way it becomes part of the crew, feeding on fish in the wake and on scraps that the cook throws overboard. The act of killing the albatross in the poem is the act of killing the savior who delivered them from the icy southern seas, which is why they hung the bird around his neck.
I never realised how lucky I was to have an albatross experience like the one I had or that it would make understanding poetry easier. I can still see it now over fifty years later.
Fascinating comment. Coleridge would have gleaned this episode from the travelogues of Captain Cook et al., who had navigated the same passage.
I am so deep down the Iron Maiden youtube rabbit hole right now....
Good morning Dr.
A very enlightening lecture! I wonder whether Malcome Guite has given his lecture. If not, could you ask him to comment on the identity of gloss? I enjoyed his book MARINER: VOYAGE WITH STC,where he seems to suggest the glossator is Coleridge himself, whereas critics, like Jerome McGanne, argue the glossator is a rationalistic pendant, the butt of Coleridge's mockery. But the famous gloss to the MOON is poetic, so evocative of the poet's own troubled psyche and is by no means cold and detached. I'm confused. What do you think, Masson?
You are correct. The debate about the gloss lies between the varying positions of McGann and Guite.
I am with McGann on this. The moon tends to be a stock symbol of mutability, and therefore madness, in literature.
I think the gloss does not possess a unified character. Sometimes the gloss is pedantic and trivial, but sometimes it is helpful and even profound. McGann's reading is a bit narrow to explain the evidence.
This is why you can't make commentary on pieces and parts of a work divorced from the rest of the work. So the professor asks "what is the effect of the rhyme?" and someone says "it sounds like a legend, it sounds contrived" Which of course isn't wrong. But no one pushes further than that. Yes it sounds like a legend, because IT IS. The man is literally an *Ancient Mariner*. He isn't just an old man, he is *ancient*. This didn't just happen to him, telling this story is what he has been tasked by God now to do. At the end of the poem you find out his punishment continues even after he serves his punishment at sea and is delivered back to land. He's doomed to walk the earth for the rest of all time sharing this story. The word choice, the archaic sounding language that pervades the text, is meant to drive home that this is a man out of time (this in and of itself hearkens to the legend of the wandering Jew, the man who is punished to wander undying until the day of judgement for taunting Jesus on his way to the crucifixion). The rhyme and rhythm reflects this as well. It invokes the ancient hymns of the oral tradition, which rhymed and had meter so as to be easier to memorise and further pass on. The ancient mariner is essentially singing a hymn from god that just so happens to be a thing that happened to him perhaps hundreds of years ago at the time he is telling the tale to the Wedding Guest.
This is a very interesting lecture, but I feel like it just barely scratches the surface. As you say this poem is inexhaustibly fascinating. I'm near convinced you could do a whole semester to just this one poem, or at least devote a significant number of session to it alone.
Good comment.
Wonderful comment. Thank you for sharing.