On Reading Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” For the First Time
Rearranged my poetry book shelf today and came upon my copy of Oxford Classic’s Samuel Taylor-Coleridge: Selected Poetry. Coleridge is known for primarily two poems: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan. Today I read Mariner for the first time.
Out of the entire poem, one line stuck out for me. It delivered sensation when it left my lips, that particular power that poetry has over prose. It appears near the end of Part III.
It is near midnight. The sky is black, though the pale moon glows. Large icebergs shimmer emerald green. The Mariner is on a ship, and another ship, stripped to the ribs, approaches. The Mariner spots a person on board: “Life-in-Death” in the form of a pale woman with red lips and gold locks. She casts dice in a game she claims she has won.
Right before the Mariner’s eyes, his own ship’s crew begin to collapse. It is rendered in a way to mimic the sound of every body hitting the wooden planks:
“With heavy thump, a lifeless lump / They dropped down one by one.”
With the repetition of the “u” sound in “thump” and “lump” one can hear the loose bodies hitting the wooden deck. The follow up line portrays the steady pace that the bodies fell. It was not all at once, but one body slowly after another, as if a row of dominoes set off to fall in slow motion.
The loss of the Mariner’s crew was punishment in reply to shooting down the albatross with a cross bow.
Mariner is written in iambic tetrameter, with stanzas around two to six lines long.
Here is a poem that displays the scope of Coleridge’s original imaginative power. No more borrowed talk about lying in the shade of green bowers smelling the perfumed zephyrs with one head on the snowy white maiden’s breast.
Instead, through the bright-eyed Mariner, who spills his story in a bridegroom’s ear, we hear a harrowing tale where Death personified is confronted. Their ship moves in frozen desolation, an earthly last circle of Hell. Their eyes are filled to the brim with “Water, water, everywhere / Nor any drop to drink.”
The body’s necessities demand acts of desperation. The Mariner and the crew, with their “throats unslaked / with black lips baked,” to gain the strength to call out to the oncoming ship, stick their teeth into their arms and drink their blood.
This is potent imagery. Its power is derived from the dire circumstance which warrants the extreme action. This is what makes readers return to this poem again and again.
No doubt in subsequent readings other lines in the poem will stick out to me, whether it be a result of the mood or a subtle phrase that is often glossed over in the initial reading.
