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GUIDE TO SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE’S
“RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER”
Down, Down, Down . . .
Many Romantic poems are about a journey, and often you’ll find—alongside the literal, physical journey portrayed in the poem—some image that suggests descent. This implies that the real journey is psychological. Early in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” for instance, we have the lines,
Merrily did we drop
Below the kirk, below the hill,
Below the lighthouse top.
The boat sails over the horizon. That’s literally what’s happening in the imaginative fiction of the poem, but Coleridge uses this kind of imagery and language several times to suggest a psychological quest. There’s going to be a descent into the underworld—the otherworld of deep, irrational consciousness.
The green world in Shakespeare is one in which the ordinary rules don’t seem to apply or function properly. There’s something similar in the Romantics. We get outside of the city, into the world of the imagination. Lord Byron talks about the Mediterranean world as “the greenest island of my imagination.” In contrast, he calls England “tight,” where “winter ends in July, only to recommence in August.”
What we’re talking about is a symbolic typography of the mind. All of these places of nature are literally the physical landscape, but the Romantic writer often uses the real-world, external typography to talk about internal states of mind. He or she talks about the mind in geographic terms. Blake makes it very clear that whenever he uses the image of a “cavern” or “abyss,” he’s referring symbolically the human mind. There’s a famous passage in The Prelude where the Imagination rises from the mind’s abyss. This is a typical Romantic use of the external to talk about states of mind, or the internal. It’s what Eliot calls an “objective correlative,” e.g., some kind of external object that correlates to an internal reality.
The imagery of descent in “The Rime” is not just psychological, though—it’s also mythic. It’s the mythic other world. In Native American culture, the way you enter paradise is to climb a tree and reach the sky gods. Another mythological path is through the omphalos, the Greek word for navel. It’s a place where you pass from one world to another. And Shakespeare’s green world suggests that as well, a place of “crossing over” and transformation.
In still other terms, the descent leads to the heightened world. It’s life idealized—the life of the transcendent self.
What makes “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” a Romantic poem?
How do we know this poem (which is full of traditional images and subjects) is Romantic?
How do we know that it was written at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century,
rather than in the Middle Ages—the time in which the poem is actually set?
Think of this line first:
We were the first to ever burst
Into that silent sea.
How does that help you to understand the poem?
What are the possible connotations of that line?
What sorts of expectations and imaginings, possible patterns or structures, does it suggest?
1. Many Romantic poems are about the growth of the poet’s mind. Someone begins in a state of unawareness of his or her own imaginative powers, and gradually discovers them. Advice: Always start with the most concrete or interesting word. If we pick “burst,” it suggests images of birth and creativity. And the poem is about that. But we also have notions about what it means to learn. Often, the path that leads to the growth of the poet’s mind entails a way that is unchartered, very difficult, perilous and frightening. Coleridge seems to be suggesting that as well.
These are some of the implications of the word “burst.” At one point in The Prelude, Wordsworth describes the bust of Sir Isaac Newton, calling it, “The marble index of a mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought alone.” Certainly that is what Coleridge’s poem is about as well. The Mariner is going to travel into strange seas of thought.
2. Go back to the word “burst.” It does suggest birth, but what else? We’re talking about going from point A to point B, so why does Coleridge use the word “burst”? It signifies breakage. Romantic poetry is often about boundary breaking.
3. What else does “burst” suggest? What’s the nature of “bursting” into something? Energy . . . violent energy. Think about the structure of this work. The event that really launches the poem, and lies at the heart of the Mariner’s journey, is the shooting of the Albatross. So it’s not just breaking boundaries: it’s an act of violent transgression. And yet this will somehow lead to knowledge and the growth of the poet’s mind, to rebirth. That’s very Romantic. It is a violation that cannot be undone. In that sense, it is like birth. Once we are born, we are cast out into the world; then the struggle is inevitable.
From the Known to the Unknown . . .
Think too about the phrase “silent sea.” It’s a form of personification. The Mariner’s bursting disturbs the silence of the sea, and the sea, in effect, retaliates. In mythic terms, the sea is associated with the Otherworld, the Unknown. The Mariner begins in the known, the familiar, the natural. The silent sea symbolizes everything that is not those things. It is not known, it is not conventionally natural. It’s not the familiar world of habit and custom.
Think back to the term “genius loci” (discussed in the “Tintern Abbey” Study Guide). In “The Rime,” we have the polar spirits. They start to control the world in which the Mariner finds himself. In the poem, then, there is a “spirit of place” in this Antarctic region. Notice that Antarctica is a descent into the unknown realm of the mind, too. So what we have then is a protagonist who violently intrudes, interlopes, blasphemes a world in which there is a “genius loci”—a collection of polar spirits.
And what happens? They strike back. Think about American Western movies of the fifties. You have the white settlers who discover gold. Where? On Indian burial grounds. What happens to them? The spirits rise and pursue them. Think of Lon Chaney in The Mummy. What happens? They break into the pyramid and rouse the mummy. In Greek tragedy, what happens to the classical protagonist when he violates the moral order? The Furies retaliate.
A Romantic Internalizing of the Myth of the Profane Man and a Rite of Passage . . .
On one hand, then, the poem taps into something ancient and mythic that goes far beyond Romanticism—a larger pattern. There is a protagonist, the Mariner. A scholar of comparative religion or myth would call him a “profane man.” This protagonist is unaware that there is a spiritual dimension to reality. In The Prelude the is a section in which the boy Wordsworth sets out alone and is “a trouble to the peace.” The cliffs start to chase him. He hears voices.
In Coleridge’s poem, we’ve got the Mariner, the Everyman. He’s unimaginative, profane, ignorant, and he’s about to enter the Otherworld. On one level, the spirit of place is going to pursue him. But that is the way one discovers the spiritual dimension. You often have in Romantic literature (the boy in The Prelude and the Mariner) a figure whose imagination projects all this haunting and fearful pursuit. That’s the way we discover. We project with our mind, and it seems to be out there, mirrored back to us in dramatic form. That is how we discover it.
Think of the beginning of “The Rime”:
The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared,
Merrily did we drop
Below the kirk, below the hill,
Below the lighthouse top.
Selection is meaning. So why does Coleridge say to us that the Mariner is leaving the church and going down? It’s a movement away from the conventional, ordinary, and safe religious world. The phrase that the Irish use for this is “sailing beyond the pale.” You go outside the safety of the society and enter the sublime unknown of the Otherworld. Even while, on the level of the poem’s plot, the Mariner sails outside the safe harbor of the known world, on a psychological level, the journey all takes place within himself.
A New View of Reality Based on a New View of the Self . . .
In the poem, there’s “the Line.” This is the equator—another boundary that he crosses. In mythic terms, this crossing of the line is called a “passage.” When viewed as a literary archetype, the journey is called a “rite of initiation,” or “rite of passage.” In a rite of passage, what the protagonist originally thinks gets torn down, and something else gets built up in its place. And that thing is a new view of reality based on a new view of the self. There’s a fundamental transformation of the initiate. He begins one person, and very often during the initiation he is given a new name.
Think of Roots. Kunta Kinte leaves the village, goes into the woods, and enters a tent. In mythic terms, the tent symbolizes a womb. They go into the womb and come out new people. It’s like Jonah going into the belly of the whale. These are all archetypal images of descent into some womb-like structure that gives birth to a new person. Joseph Campbell once argued that at the heart of all myths—not just rites of initiation, but all myths—is the notion of metamorphosis. That’s what we’re talking about. You begin one person, and then there’s a transformation and you become someone else.
But makes this poem distinctively Romantic?
How do these mythic structures signify particularly Romantic themes and concerns?
The aforementioned examples of mythic transformations and rites of passage are not distinctively Romantic at all. But remember, Romanticism is all about tradition and revolution, secularization and internalization. The Romantic writer works within tradition, within all of these ancient patterns, archetypes and rituals and myths. But the Romantic poet internalizes them. So the passage and the Otherworld are going to have to do with perception and imagination, rather than with sky gods, or whales, or a traditional religious perspective.
We can compare this poem to the medieval quest, too. Romanticism is often defined as “the internalization of quest romance.” The general claim is this: the great hero is Imagination. This is an imaginative odyssey, a growth of the poet’s mind and a rite of passage toward a heightened Imagination.
A Romantic Internalizing and Secularizing of Christian Myth . . .
You can interpret any work of art from a religious perspective—any religion can be a lens through which someone sees everything in the world, including works of art. “The Rime” encourages that kind of approach, as well as the approach of mythic rite of passage. What details suggest this?
— They hang the Albatross instead of the cross around his neck.
— They hail it in God’s name as if it were a Christian soul.
— The penance of life falls upon the Mariner.
— The Virgin Mary.
The poem is filled with Christian references. So another way of looking at this is through an important literary genre in the 19th century—the pattern of religious conversion, with its four parts of sin, punishment, penance, and redemption. But again, the Romantic artist is not simply going to reproduce that established pattern. He or she will revise, internalizing and secularizing.
The Netherworld . . .
In the broadest terms, think about this poem as being about an imaginative journey into the Otherworld, especially the Netherworld. What does “Underworld” suggest that is different from “Otherworld”? Hell, Hades. Is there anything in the poem that supports this? The ship of the dead. The sun looks like blood. The water burns like witch’s oil. But on the other hand, where was heaven in classical mythology? How did one get there? Where are the Elysian Fields? They are in the Underworld.
So there’s ambiguity in every Underworld. And this of course should make us think of psychological depths. So this is a journey to Otherness. On the one hand, this Otherness is “out there” for Coleridge: it’s the “sublime,” an Otherworld that we are unaware of in our normal waking hours. But the Otherworld is also within, the world of our own psyche that we are not normally aware of either—the netherworld of the unconscious. In a particularly Romantic vein, Coleridge is going to explore elements of the unconscious. He’s going to “map” the unconscious in this poem.
In many respects, that is what Romantic art is all about—that cusp between full waking consciousness and the world of dreams and images and sleep. Note that Coleridge subtitles this poem, “A Poet’s Reverie.” Reverie is a word you’ll find again and again in English Romanticism. It’s a twilight zone of the mind. Logic, prudence, reason—all of those things are relaxed. They’re not gone, but they are subsided. We’re not asleep, we’re not fully dreaming. Instead, we’re in a state of mind somewhere in between wakefulness and sleep, and that’s where imagination resides. And so this poem is about that Otherworld as well.
The Mariner as Seer . . .
Like many Romantic poems, “The Rime” is circular in its poetic pattern. We begin at the end. The experience has already happened, and the Mariner is telling it to the Wedding Guest. But how is the Mariner described? For one example, he’s got a “glittering” eye. He’s a seer. In folk art, the eyes are the windows on the soul. He can be understood as a visionary. He has seen something remarkable that the Wedding Guest is unaware of. And from the perspective of Romantic poetic themes, that’s true. But what does the Wedding Guest mean when he says that the Mariner has a “glittering” eye?
The Mariner hypnotizes the Wedding Guest. He can’t move. So the Wedding Guest thinks that the eyes are those of an evil man. This is the evil eye to the Wedding Guest. He says,