Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner (1798)

Although I am a con­firmed land-lub­ber, the sea holds a fas­ci­na­tion for me. There’s some­thing quite hor­ri­fy­ing about being in the mid­dle of the ocean, with no land vis­i­ble in any direc­tion and untold depths below, and being in a ves­sel whose for­tune is dic­tat­ed by the forces and whims of Nature. Of course, my own expe­ri­ences of being in the mid­dle of the sea have been lim­it­ed to very safe, reli­able and gen­er­al­ly nature-defy­ing cruise ships, so I’m not claim­ing any real expe­ri­ence of the above. I’m real­ly think­ing about those incred­i­ble sea adven­tur­ers of yore, like Cook or Mag­el­lan, or those gnarly men who would go to sea for years on end in pur­suit of whales (see my blog about Moby Dick here). Or the man depict­ed in Samuel Tay­lor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Coleridge’s epic poem was pub­lished in 1798 in Lyri­cal Bal­lads, the poet­ry col­lec­tion in which he col­lab­o­rat­ed with William Wordsworth (and which marked the begin­ning of British Roman­tic lit­er­a­ture). For a vol­ume that rep­re­sent­ed a new mod­ern approach to poet­ry, it is iron­ic that this par­tic­u­lar poem seems pre-mod­ern in its goth­ic set­ting, archa­ic spelling and super­nat­ur­al mood; per­haps he thought it was just too good not to be includ­ed.

The nar­ra­tor is accost­ed at a wed­ding cer­e­mo­ny by a grey-beard­ed old sailor who tells him a sto­ry of a voy­age he took long ago. The wed­ding guest is at first reluc­tant to lis­ten, as the cer­e­mo­ny is about to begin, but the mariner’s glit­ter­ing eye cap­ti­vates him, and he sim­ply has to lis­ten. The mariner’s tale begins with his ship depart­ing on its jour­ney. Despite ini­tial good for­tune, the ship is dri­ven south by a storm and even­tu­al­ly reach­es the icy waters of the Antarc­tic. An alba­tross appears and leads the ship out of the ice jam in which it was get­ting stuck, but even as the alba­tross is fed and praised by the ship’s crew, the mariner shoots the bird with his cross­bow.

Oh dear: bad luck! The crew is angry with the mariner, believ­ing the crime would arouse the wrath of the spir­its, and indeed their ship is even­tu­al­ly blown into unchart­ed waters near the equa­tor, where it is becalmed.

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a paint­ed ship
Upon a paint­ed ocean.

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

The sailors blame the mariner for the tor­ment of their thirst and force the mariner to wear the dead alba­tross about his neck.

Fron­tispiece by William Strang, 1903

The mariner endures a fate worse than death as pun­ish­ment for his killing of the alba­tross: one by one, all of the crew mem­bers die, but the mariner lives on, see­ing for sev­en days and nights the curse in the eyes of the crew’s corpses, whose last expres­sions remain upon their faces.

Even­tu­al­ly, this stage of the mariner’s curse is lift­ed and he begins to pray. As he does so, the alba­tross falls from his neck and his guilt is par­tial­ly expi­at­ed. It begins to rain and his own thirst is slaked. The bod­ies of the crew, now pos­sessed by good spir­its, rise up and help steer the ship home, floun­der­ing just off the coast of the mariner’s home town. The mariner is res­cued but as penance, and dri­ven by the agony of his guilt, he is now forced to wan­der the earth, telling his sto­ry over and over. His cur­rent rapt lis­ten­er, the wed­ding guest, is just one in a long line…

If you have a spare half an hour, and you haven’t yet heard the full Ancient Mariner sto­ry, you could do worse than lis­ten to Ian McK­ellen recite the entire thing here!

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