With respect to his searching for the unity of the universe, Coleridge’s idea of God is clearly based on Priestley and Spinoza. By conceiving God as being closely related with the essence of each individual in the universe, he emphasises a unity, rather than a distinction, between God and the universe. Yet, for Coleridge, the power of love, which springs from God, also plays a key role in discovering the inter-relatedness of the universe. The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner has been understood from various perspectives, but the main
focus here will be on the relational aspect between the Mariner and the albatross, and the Mariner and the community. One of the Mariner’s central experiences throughout the poem is a profound sense of isolation: the
42
CL I, p. 280.
43 Lines Written in the Album at Elbingerode, in the Hartz Forest
(ll. 37, 39), in CPW I, p. 316.
44
Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division, p. 76.
background of the tale he tells the Wedding Guest indicates his separation from the community; the story of his experience is associated with a sea which has never been explored before and is a remote place far from the community and civilisation; and the murder of the albatross leaves him completely alone in a primitive place. Such isolation lends weight to one of the most unsettling elements of the poem: the Mariner’s unmotivated murder of the bird. Why did he kill it? Although it appears to be motiveless, the inexplicable act of violence has the disastrous result of rendering him alone. After killing the albatross, the Mariner is gripped by: ‘fear at my heart, as at a cup, / My life-blood seemed to sip!’ (ll, 204-5), issuing in a scene wherein his fellow sailors die in a nightmarish vision of Life-in-Death:
One after one, by the star-dogged Moon, Too quick for groan or sigh,
Each turned his face with a ghastly pang, And cursed me with his eyes.
Four times fifty living men, (And I heard nor sigh nor groan) With heavy thump, a lifeless lump,
They dropped down one by one. (ll. 212-19)
Finally, the Mariner succumbs to his exile in a vast desolate sea:
Alone, alone, all, alone, Alone on a wide wide sea! And never a saint took pity on My soul in agony. (ll. 232-35)
Whereas his motive for the murder is unclear, the result of his act of violence is clear, leading as it does to an experience of disconnectedness and isolation. Worse still, he experiences a deep separation from God and, feeling his ‘heart as dry as dust’, a detachment from the power of human and religious love45:
I looked to heaven, and tried to pray; But or ever a prayer gusht,
A wicked whisper came, and made My heart as dry as dust. (ll, 244-47)
If we further explore the religious and biblical allusions within the poem, the Mariner’s experience comes to signify a dynamic of sin and punishment. In fact, in his ‘Prefatory Note’ to the fragmentary ‘Wanderings of Cain’, Coleridge explains how ‘The Ancient Mariner was written instead’ of ‘Wanderings of Cain’.46 Just as the Mariner undergoes a nightmarish voyage after his act of murder, so Cain is driven into exile after killing his brother. Interestingly, both metaphors – of voyage and of exile - frame murders with shared consequences. Like the Mariner, Coleridge’s Cain expresses a wounded sense of abandonment:
The Mighty One that persecuteth me is on this side and on that; he pursueth my soul like the wind, like the sand-blast [. . .] I desire to die [. . .] the clouds in heaven look terribly on me; the Mighty One who is against me speaketh in the wind of the cedar grove; and in silence am I dried up [. . .] the spirit within me is withered, and burnt up with extreme
45
See, J. Robert Barth, S.J., Coleridge and the Power of Love (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988), p. 63.
46
Susan Eilenberg, ‘Voice and Ventriloquy in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, in The Rime of The Ancient Mariner, ed. by Paul H. Fry (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 282-313 (p. 298).
agony [. . .] I have prayed, and have not been heard; and how can I be afflicted more than I already am? (WC, 33-47, 164-172).
As Coleridge was aware, one of the fatal consequences of sin in the Old Testament is an exile (most notably, the exile of Adam and Eve), which implies a broken relationship between God and his people. Cain’s cries for his unheard prayer resonate with his experience of suffering following his devastating separation from God and community, an exile motif Coleridge repeats in the Mariner’s voyage in order to directly connect it back to a dynamic of sin and punishment.
First of all, after going through a nightmarish drama caused by his act of murder, the Mariner begins to recognise the life of nature around him:
The moving Moon went up the sky. And no where did abide:
Softly she was going up, And a star or two beside—
Her beams bemocked the sultry main, Like April hoar-frost spread;
But where the ship’s huge shadow lay, The charmed water burnt alway
A still and awful red. (ll. 263-271)
He then watches the water-snakes whose attire was ‘Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,’ and, for him, ‘every track / Was a flash of golden fire.’ In other words, he is now able to see the life and the significance of nature through his imagination in a sense that he describes them as ‘O happy living things.’ He
mentions that ‘no tongue / Their beauty might declare.’ Further, he deepens this newly recognised relationship by blessing them: ‘A spring of love gushed from my heart, / And I blessed them unaware’ (ll. 282-285). At that moment he ‘could pray’ and finally his neck became free from the Albatross which ‘sank like lead into the sea’. It is through the power of love that the Mariner can re-establish his broken relationship with the world beyond himself. As Harding puts it, the ‘spring of love enables the Mariner to transcend his selfhood for the first time.’47 Just as the motivation for the murder is not shown, so the reason for the ‘spring of love’ is not stated. As Barth suggests ‘in the depth of his despair, love can come to him only by grace’,48 and it may be God that allows him to feel love for something other than himself. Following this argument, Harding also refers to the divine origin of the ‘spring of love’.49 In fact, at the end of the poem, the Mariner refers to the source of love in God: ‘He prayeth best, who loveth best / All things both great and small; / For the dear God who loveth us, / He made and loveth all.’ (ll. 614-167).
What needs to be observed here is the act of interpretation which brings about the summarized Christian moral virtue as a crucial way into understanding the Mariner’s attempt to recover his broken relationship. The sole authority for the narrative of the Mariner’s experience is the Mariner himself, who experienced the events as an eye witness. As experience requires
47
Ibid., p. 63.
48 Barth,
Coleridge and the Power of Love, p. 65.
49
Anthony Harding mentions that ‘it is not the recipients of the blessing who are important, but its divine origin [. . .] It does not matter whether the object of his love is water-snakes, stars or Polar Spirits; the important thing is that God, acting perhaps through some “kind saint”, has made the Mariner’s self a centre and source instead of an enclosing and defensive wall’, Coleridge and the Idea of Love: Aspects of Relationship in Coleridge’ Thought and Writing (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974), p. 63.
interpretation in order to be shared with others within the context of a community, the Mariner tries to articulate the events of his voyage in order to convey his experience to others. In other words, his telling of his experience implies his willingness to belong to the human community. The poem has a double structure in terms of the setting: the repetition of the tale in a social context, and the content of the tale framed by a primitive sea. In the final Part VII, which itself takes place in a social setting, the Mariner offers a well- summarized Christian moral virtue; ‘O sweeter than the marriage-feast, / To walk together to the kirk / With a goodly company!-/And all together pray’ (ll. 601-6). That is, the Mariner takes from his nightmarish and primitive voyage a Christian moral virtue. Though the voyage of the Mariner is coloured by its primitive setting, supernatural powers and the primitive mind of the Mariner, his summary of his experience indicates a Christian value. This echoes back through Part I, where the Albatross is called ‘a Christian soul’, and the bird is said to perch ‘for vespers nine’. After the murder of the bird, there are a number of Christian images and the language of a society, ‘God’s own head’, ‘O Christ!’, ‘the cross’, and ‘a hellish thing’ and ‘Twas right’, in Part II.
The use of Christian language in the narrative of the tale, however, is not random or arbitrary. If we look at the two interruptions of the Wedding Guest during the narration, it can be suggested that the Mariner is actually re- interpreting his experience according to the context and language of Christianity and the society to which the Wedding Guest belongs. In Part III, the Mariner describes the scene of his shipmates dropping dead one by one, each turning his face with a ‘ghastly pang’ and cursing the Mariner ‘with his eyes’ (ll.
212-23): and, at the beginning of Part IV, the Wedding Guest interrupts him, ‘I fear thee, ancient Mariner! / thy glittering eye, / And thy skinny hand, so brown’
(ll. 224-229). This interruption is then followed by his tormenting cry of loneliness, a rather subdued tone of voice; ‘the many men, so beautiful! / And they all dead lie; / And a thousand thousand slimy things / Lived on; and so did I’ (ll. 236-9), and haunting cry of agony using Christian language; ‘I looked to heaven, and tried to pray / My heart as dry as dust / An orphan’s cry,’ etc. (ll. 244, 247, 257).
In Part V the Wedding Guest also interrupts him after hearing how the dead sailors rise like ghosts, ‘groaning’, ‘stirring’, without ‘speaking’ and ‘moving their eyes’; it was strange and eerie ‘even in a dream’ (ll. 331-334). When the Wedding Guest interrupts him in an anxious voice, he tries to pacify his fears by saying, ‘Be calm, thou Wedding-Guest! / ’Twas not those souls that fled in pain, / Which to their corses came again, / But a troop of spirits blest:’ (ll. 345-9). At the same time, he narrates the more beautiful scenes of his story using a series of eery metaphors: ‘when it dawned [. . .] Sweet sound rose slowly through their mouths [. . .] the sky-lark sing / [. . .] all little birds [. . .] now like a lonely flute; / And now it is an angel’s song [. . .] like of a hidden brook / In the leafy month of June, / That to the sleeping woods’ (ll. 350-371). As Raimonda Modiano argues, ‘the Mariner borrows the metaphors composing his aural reverie from a landscape that belongs to the Wedding Guest’s shore world. Only in this world would one normally hear sounds of skylarks, lonely flutes or hidden brooks.’50
50
Raimonda Modiano, ‘Words and “Languageless” Meanings: Limits of Expression in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, Modern Language Quarterly 38 (1977), 40-61 (p. 51).
In the long run, in Parts IV and V, the frightful descriptions of the sailors’
death and rising as ghosts are followed by the interventions of the Wedding Guest, and the Mariner appears to placate his anxieties and fears by providing a calmer narrative and using familiar images and metaphors. That is, ‘the Wedding Guest’s intervention occasions a sudden shift of narrative perspective in the Mariner’s tale which meliorates the horror of previous scenes.’51 If we
take into consideration the summarized Christian moral virtue in Part VII and the dynamics of the interchanges between the Mariner and the Wedding Guest in Parts IV and V, it can be argued that we can see ‘in his account some of the marks of events reinterpreted to harmonize with a more comfortable theology, particularly, later in the poem, with the Wedding-Guest’s more orthodox ideas and fears about ghost and spirits’.52 When the Mariner moves from his experience into a social language shared by those around him, the process of interpretation seems to be inevitable. And it is through this process of interpretation that he can extend his experience of ‘a spring of love’ in ‘the water-snakes’ to the Christian moral virtue of love, which expresses the interrelatedness of the universe.
Coleridge also develops an account of the way the power of love brings about a sense of the inter-relatedness of the universe in his Conversation
Poems. After proclaiming ‘the one Life within us and abroad’ in ‘The Eolian
Harp’, the poet confesses that the power of love permeates ‘the one Life’:
51
Ibid., p. 51.
52
Harding, The Reception of Myth in English Romanticism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995), p. 53.
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance every where— Methinks, it should have been impossible
Not to love all things in a world so fill’d;
Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air Is Music slumbering on her instrument.53 (ll. 29-33)
Further, in ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’, Coleridge urges us to be aware of the love between nature and us:
[. . .] Henceforth I shall know
That Nature ne’er deserts the wise and pure; No plot so narrow, be but Nature there, No waste so vacant, but may well employ Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart Awake to Love and Beauty! (ll. 59-64)
In fact, Coleridge was not able to join his friends for a walk around his cottage, owing to an accident.54 He, however, transcends this physical separation by
confirming the connectedness of nature, his friends and himself in terms of the ‘Love and Beauty’ held in his poetic imagination. It is a sense of love that brings together humanity and nature into the experience of interrelatedness or communion.