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.
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!
