Some Notes on Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Epistemological Questions

• What constitutes evidence?
• What pre-established cognitive and cultural patterns have intervened in making that determination for the Mariner and for us as readers?
• What drives the quest to make meanings?

Metaphysical nature of the Mariner’s universe

• Is it Christian or pagan?
• Is it meaningful or absurd? Or is it both, and how and why?

Overview

• Plot and technique
• The literary ballad, etc.
• Truly Romantic
• the journey
• the frame story
• the circle or spiral
• ironic and multiple voices
• the exile, wanderer, deviant, storytelling, bard, as hero
• mesmerism, magic, supernatural force
• sympathetic, living nature
• human fall from innocence
• human imagination
• Why shoot the albatross?
• To assert mastery; to show who is in charge
• If he has no reason, why do it?
• Does every truly free act require transgression? Is this “liberty”?
• What if this is an “uncaused will” to violence or simply a desire to break away from ‘virtue’ (recall Poe’s “the imp of the perverse”—we act without a comprehensible object for the reason that we should not)
• Are we innately good, bad, a mix?
• What might the albatross represent?
• An actual bird—then shooting the albatross becomes killing an animal (a surprisingly ‘normal’ human activity)
• The animal world—that which is alive, sentient, but not human—then shooting the albatross becomes about asserting human superiority over animals
• Nature (with a capital N)—then shooting the albatross becomes about asserting mastery and control over Nature (again a surprisingly ‘normal’ human activity)
• Purity and innocence—then shooting the bird becomes an act of defilement, an act of ‘experience’
• Christ or Christian symbol—then shooting the bird becomes the betrayal of Christ; the killing of the god, the greatest sin which will then require the greatest act of forgiveness
• We could go on and on
• What about the crew?
• Superstitious
• They object to killing the bird at first
• Later they change their minds when killing the bird seems to lead to better weather (the gloss writer calls the crew “complicit” in the Mariner’s crime for this shift)
• What about the specter ship? (what does this say about chance?)
• Dice game for souls? Pagan not Christian
• Chance determines the fate of the mariner’s soul—is this very different from the Mariner’s senseless (or at least reason-less) taking of the albatross’ life?
• What about the spirits?
• What kind of universe is this? are they benevolent or malevolent?
• What about the Mariner’s punishment
• Instead of a cross the albatross was hung around his neck
• Ship becalmed (like a painted ship upon a painted ocean)
• Physical suffering (utter drought)
• Cannot pray
• Crew struck dead (is this his punishment or their punishment or both?)
• The curse in a dead man’s eye (they blame him for their deaths, or he imagines that they blame him for their deaths (i.e. his feelings of guilt)
• Alone, alone, all, all alone
• His frame is wrenched and then he must repeat his tale
• Must wander (never home again?)
• Suffering?
• Why does he continue to suffer?
• Does suffering heal or only lead to more suffering?
• How about the hermit? Is he the answer?
• Paying for your crimes or sins
• Blesses the water-snakes—he does this ‘unawares’ (is that important?)
• Is he protected by any of the spirits? (He loved the bird who loved the man who shot him with his bow—the albatross loved the man?)
• Asks the hermit to shrive him of his sins—the hermit never gets the chance
• Telling his tale leaves him ‘free’—until later he is ‘wrenched’ again and must tell his tale
• The wedding and the Wedding Guest
• Why a wedding? Social event, yes, but what do weddings represent culturally? Community, formation of family, to walk together to the church in a goodly company as the Mariner himself describes happiness
• Why does the Wedding Guest turn away from the door? In other words, he never goes to the wedding or the reception. Why?
• Why is the Wedding Guest ‘sadder and wiser’? Is that a good thing? A bad thing? Just a thing?
• Does the Mariner teach the Wedding Guest something he wouldn’t confront on his own or does the Mariner use him to relieve his own suffering?

More Questions

1.      Why does the Mariner stop the Wedding Guest?

2.      Why a wedding?

3.      Moon/Sun, Day/Night, Dry/Wet: what do we make of these image patterns?

4.      What is the albatross?

5.      Why does the Mariner kill it?

6.      How does the crew respond?

7.      Speech and silence—how does this run through the poem?

8.      A ghost-ship?

9.      Why a game of dice? What does this suggest about fate, justice, God?

10.  What are the punishments? What are the crimes? Do the punishments fit the crimes?

11.  Why can’t the Mariner pray? When can he again?

12.  Why is the “blessing” of the water-snakes important? Why does he do it?

13.  Rain/baptism, sleep/death: are there other patterns like these?

14.  Is the Mariner forgiven? What about the crew?

15.  Who is the Spirit? What connection do we make with the claim that the spirit loved the bird who loved the man who shot the bird?

16.  Why more penance?

17.  Why is the curse not broken?

18.  Why does the Mariner fear being pursued? Who or what is pursuing him?

19.  Does the Hermit shrive him? Why or why not?

20.  What is speech associated with in this last part?

21.  Is the Mariner still punished? Why?

22.  What would the Mariner prefer? What is odd about this preference?

23.  What is the moral of the poem? Does the moral fit the Mariner’s story?

24.  What is the Wedding Guest’s response? Why is he “sadder and wiser”?

Some Foundations for Reading Wordsworth's Ode

John Stuart Mill was one of the most important writers and thinkers of the nineteenth century. Trained from a very early age by his father in a kind of experiment in perfectly rational education, Mill was an early and forceful advocate for utilitarianism--a somewhat mechanistic and purely rational moral philosophy that is now known more by its satiric treatment in Dickens' Hard Times, and the catchy philosophical soundbite, "the greatest good for the greatest number." But as his friends knew and as the Victorian reading public would discovery only after his death, Mill's education to be the perfect embodiment of rationality took a huge toll in the form of serious bouts of depression and a mental collapse so severe that he admits in his posthumously published autobiography to having lost the will to live. Mill movingly recounts his depression and what came to his aid: literature. He recalls reading a  memoir and being moved to tears when contemplating the feelings of a young man left without a father. That moment convinced Mill that he was still capable of feeling and he dates his recovery from that day.

Feeling, and the imaginative sympathy that is often a key component of reading, rescued Mill from his false belief that he had been trained not to feel. He notes specifically that he sought out poetry as his cure, turning first to Byron because that poet was known for his cultivation and communication of "intenser" feelings. Byron proved to be the wrong medicine, for that poet's moods were too much like his own. Mill then turned to Wordsworth and found in his poetry and found there just what he needed:

I needed to be made to feel that there was real, permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this, not only without turning away from, but with a greatly increased interest in, the common feelings and common destiny of human beings. And the delight which these poems gave me, proved that with culture of this sort, there was nothing to dread from the most confirmed habit of analysis. At the conclusion of the Poems [Collected Poems of 1815] came the famous “Ode,” falsely called Platonic, “Intimations of Immortality”: in which, along with more than his usual sweetness of melody and rhythm, and along with the two passages of grand imagery but bad philosophy so often quoted, I found that he too had had similar experience to mine; that he also had felt that the first freshness of youthful enjoyment of life was not lasting; but that he had sought for compensation, and found it, in the way in which he was now teaching me to find it. The result was that I gradually, but completely, emerged from my habitual depression, and was never again subject to it. I long continued to value Wordsworth less according to his intrinsic merits, than by the measure of what he had done for me. Compared with the greatest poets, he may be said to be the poet of unpoetical natures, possessed of quiet and contemplative tastes. But unpoetical natures are precisely those which require poetic cultivation. This cultivation Wordsworth is much more fitted to give, than poets who are intrinsically far more poets than he. (Mill, Autobiography, "A Crisis in My Mental History")

Wordsworth's Ode

Ode: a long, usually stately lyric poem in stanzas of varied metrical pattern employing a high style

M. H. Abrams on the “greater Romantic lyric”: “In the course of [his] meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem. Often the poem rounds upon itself to end where it began, at the outer scene, but with an altered mood and deepened understanding which is the result of the intervening meditation” (201).

Form

Three sections

Stanzas 1-4: Loss

Stanzas 5-8: The story of how we lose

Stanzas 9-11: The promise of compensation

Turns and counterturns (note especially in the early stanzas)

“There was a time” (1) -> “It is not now as it hath been” (6)

“The Rainbow comes and goes” (10) -> “But yet I know” (18)

“a thought of grief” (22) -> “I again am strong” (24)

The Big Question

Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

Reverses the story of maturation

We grow into society / darkness / isolation / culture / custom

We grow away from God / Light / Connection / Nature / Imagination

Balancing Losses and Compensations

Stanza	Then	Now
1	celestial light glory and freshness of a dream	can see no more
2	Rainbow comes and goes . . .	there hath past away a glory from the earth
3	fullness of your bliss	thought of grief
4	visionary gleam glory and the dream	if I were sullen whither is fled
5	not in entire forgetfulness trailing clouds of glory Heaven lies about us Nature’s Priest vision splendid	a sleep and a forgetting shades of the prison house Man perceives it die away fade into the light of common day
6	[Nature’s] Foster-child glories he hath known imperial palace whence he came	Inmate Man Earth fills her lap with pleasures
7	his dream of human life	some fragment of [his dream of human life] this hath now his heart fit his tongue to dialogues of business, love, strife, the little Actor As if his whole vocation / Were endless imitation
8	Thy Soul’s immensity Thou best philosopher thou Eye among the blind read’st the eternal deep haunted forever by the eternal mind Mighty Prophet Seer blest glorious in the might	In darkness lost darkness of the grave to bring the inevitable yoke blindly with thy blessedness at strife earthly freight custom lie upon thee with a weight

Stanza	Loss	Gain
9	Delight and liberty simple creed / Of Childhood new-fledged hope that immortal sea / which brought us hither [cannot be children on the shore]	perpetual benediction obstinate questionings blank misgivings first affections Our souls have sight of that immortal sea . . . see the Children sport upon the shore
10	radiance once so bright spendour in the grass glory in the flower	primal sympathy soothing thoughts that spring / Out of human suffering faith that looks through death years that bring philosophic mind
11	to live beneath [Nature’s] more habitual sway [a time when I] tripped lightly as [the brooks] the innocent brightness of a new-born Day	sober coloring kept watch o’er man’s mortality To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Listening to Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Here is the link to the old "handouts" page on my old Romantic Age course site:

http://web.calstatela.edu/faculty/jgarret/467/handouts.php

Remember that you need a password to access links to the recordings.

Also, if you prefer Youtube, you can use the following links:

Ralph Richardson reading the 1817 version (https://youtu.be/XKCn3mXAxj0)

Ian McKellan reading the 1798 version (https://youtu.be/1raSUYAr0s0)

Orson Welles reading the 1817 version as part of an experimental 1977 animated film--the only thing missing are the bell bottoms (https://youtu.be/_NluHDBzwEQ)

And of course Iron Maiden's 1984 magnum opus "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" ("She, she, Life in Death, She lets him live!") (https://youtu.be/t7zk4as9kzA)

Wordsworth's Spots of Time

A Quick Overview of Wordsworth's The Prelude (1805)

1.      Composed 1798-1805; began as preparation for The Recluse - never completed 'philosophical poem' that Coleridge asked Wordsworth to write

in blank verse, addressed to those, who, in consequence of the complete failure of the French Revolution, have thrown up all hopes of the amelioration of mankind, and are sinking into an almost epicurean selfishness, disguising the same under soft titles of domestic attachment and contempt for visionary philosophies. (Coleridge to Wordsworth, 1799)

2.      Genre: auto-bio-graphy (self-life-writing): autobiography always a writing of self, a construction; Wordsworth kept rewriting/reinventing his life/poetic autobiography throughout his life; we need to distinguish between human being who wrote poem (Wordsworth) and the speaker as a textual construct/written being ('Wordsworth').

a.       'The Prelude turns epic inward' (2A, p.452): 'the term epic or heroic poem is applied to a work that meets at least the following criteria: it is a long narrative poem on a serious subject, told in a formal and elevated style, and centered on a heroic or quasi-divine figure on whose actions depends the fate of a tribe, a nation, or (in the instance of ... Paradise Lost) the human race' (Abrams, Glossary); in The Prelude, artist/poet becomes quintessential Romantic hero – but focus more on inner life than heroic action; yet a sense in which Wordsworth is a 'hero' that the nation needs to follow in order to save itself.

b.      Epic, but also an epistle to Coleridge with wonderful lyrical passages.

3.      'Argument': Wordsworth's expansion of five-part poem of late 1790s into 13-book poem completed in 1805 allowed The Prelude to become philosophical poem he thought himself unable to write; new material included account of his period of radical political activity, subsequent crisis, and means of recovery; Wordsworth gives his life a 'plot', making it an example to radicals who had undergone similar disillusionment; poem's 'argument' is that Wordsworth's childhood – in which intense experiences of nature helped to shape his imagination – inspired in him a love of liberty that prepared him to become an enthusiast for French Revolution; things began to go wrong when Britain declared war against France (destroying his faith in Britain), and when the French Revolution developed into Terror under Robespierre and military imperialism under Napoleon; these developments eventually led Wordsworth into despair; poem claims that he recovered and rediscovered himself through influence of Coleridge, his sister Dorothy, and Nature (X, 904-26); concludes that true liberty exists only in soul and through the imagination's creative interaction with nature – which is where poem begins ...

4.      The Prelude a poem of self-reflexive analysis rather than self-aggrandizement; also often a self-reflexive poem about itself – about how it came to be written and processes of writing.

5.      Can The Prelude be regarded as espousing a radical or a conservative political viewpoint?

Some Reading Questions for the "Spots of Time" Passage

1.      XI, lines 258-79 ('There are in our existence' – 'beneficent influence') and lines 326-43 ('So feeling comes' – 'future restoration').

a.       In what ways might these two passages be read as articulating a theory of perception and/or imagination?

b.      Try to work out the theory of, or assumptions about, the mind or the self that appears in these two passages.

c.       To what extent does Wordsworth understand his own self and the sources of his 'power' (336)? What power?

2.      XI, lines 289-326: 'At a time' – 'They left behind?'

a.       Why does the 'ordinary sight' (309) get invested with a 'visionary dreariness' (311) that is impossible to represent?

b.      Why is the same ordinary sight illuminated by a divine radiance when Wordsworth returns to the spot as an adult with his sister and future wife?

3.      XI, lines 345-89: 'One Christmas-time' – 'thence are brought'.

a.       What is the difference (or what differences are there) between the place where the 13 year-old Wordsworth waited for the horses to take him and his brother home for Christmas (356-61) and his memory of the place after his father's death (376-85)?

b.      Why have these images been transformed? What effect do the images then have, and why?

4.      To what extent do these two 'spots of time' illustrate the theory of lines 258-79 and 326-43?

5.      In what ways might the whole passage reveal a psychological account of the development of the (poetic) mind?

6.      Identify (underline, highlight) all the words and imagery to do with height and depth throughout the whole passage. What do you make of the way this imagery is used? How does it help or change your answers to the previous questions? 

A Walk-through of One of the Spots of Time (XI, 345-397, pages 533-534)

1. Begins with details of place and time ("One Christmas-time" and "There was a crag"); note the specificity of each and note also the unusual formulation of the phenomena itself, which Wordsworth calls "spots" (i.e. places) of "time" (obviously time), not moments of time or spots of earth, but spots of time.
2. Note the attention to the mood or attitude of the poet, specifically his mood at that time: feverish, tired, restless, impatient.
3. The poet enters the scene ("Thither I repair'd"). Again we have mostly descriptive language, but occasionally something more ("wild," "naked," "shelter'd") and the language which reminds us of the first few lines of the passage ("straining," "intensely").
4. Note the "mist" (obscuring, baffling--a key Wordsworth word) and how it introduces uncertainty into the scene.
5. The word "dreary" is pretty interesting, especially its etymology. Note that it echoes the rich phrase he used in discussing the first spots of time episode--"visionary dreariness"
6. Sudden shift: " . . . ere I had been ten days / A Dweller in my Father's House, he died / And I and my two Brothers, Orphans then, / Followed his Body to the Grave. The event /". 
1. In terms of form, note how the caesura (the mid-line pause) accentuates these words: he died, Orphans then, the event. The attention here is on cause-and-effect: the event, the father's death, made the children orphans. That seems obvious, but if so, why accentuate it?
2. Note also the plain language used to describe "the event" (which must have been traumatic, of course).
3. Why does he call himself a "Dweller in my Father's House"? Note also how "House" and two lines later "Grave" occupy the same location in the line. 
7. He calls "the event" a "chastisement"--a great Wordsworth word. Why should he feel so humbled? The issue for the poet is the contrast between "the event" and its consequences, and the pre-event poet/child who stood on the crag waiting for the horses to take him home. Remember the mood of the child (feverish, tired, restless, impatient), which he now calls "anxiety of hope" and "trite reflections of morality." 
8. What then is a spot of time? Because of the conjunction of a particular place and a particular time and a particular mood and a particular event, the place and the memory of the place has become saturated with the mood, the event, and the memory of them all. A spot of time is an example, according to Wordsworth, of the power of the imagination to invest, alter, endue, combine (words he uses in Book XIII) the material world (i.e. our perception of things) with our feelings, moods, desires, and in this case our humility and chastisement. A place is never just a place--it is always "our" place, written over with our moods, our attitudes, our feelings. The boy and the man feel the huge distance between the "trite reflections" of the anxious boy waiting impatiently for a ride home and the world after the death of his father when the "Dweller in my Father's House" becomes an orphan. That huge distance occasions the feelings of chastisement--as if Nature itself lectures the boy about the things that matter. Compare this moment to the episodes in Book I, specifically when the young Wordsworth steals a boat and feels as if the mountains themselves are chasing him.
9. A spot of time is an example of the way in which the world in which we move is everywhere written over with our feelings and with our pasts. There is no crag, or "single sheep," or "one blasted tree," or "old stone wall" that isn't also a memory, a reminder, a chastisement of some past mood, or failure, or joy, or desire to somebody. To Wordsworth, the world we move through is a world everywhere marked by human presence. In short, there is no world (or we can know of no world) other than the world that we perceive, not just objectively through our perfectly machine-like senses, but also subjectively through our moods, attitudes, beliefs, past experiences, and in this case the conjunction of a foolish child worried about his ride home and the death of his father a few days later, which for a time ended for the newly-orphaned all possibility of "home."