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From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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Episode 85

From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Mark McGuinness reads and discusses a passage from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

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Poet

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Reading and commentary by

Mark McGuinness

From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

By Samuel Taylor Coleridge

PART THREE

There passed a weary time. Each throat
Was parched, and glazed each eye.
A weary time! a weary time!
How glazed each weary eye,
When looking westward, I beheld
A something in the sky.

At first it seemed a little speck,
And then it seemed a mist:
It moved and moved, and took at last
A certain shape, I wist.

A speck, a mist, a shape, I wist!
And still it neared and neared:
As if it dodged a water-sprite,
It plunged and tacked and veered.

With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
We could not laugh nor wail;
Through utter drought all dumb we stood!
I bit my arm, I sucked the blood,
And cried, A sail! a sail!

With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
Agape they heard me call:
Gramercy! they for joy did grin,
And all at once their breath drew in,
As they were drinking all.

See! see! (I cried) she tacks no more!
Hither to work us weal;
Without a breeze, without a tide,
She steadies with upright keel!

The western wave was all a-flame
The day was well nigh done!
Almost upon the western wave
Rested the broad bright Sun;
When that strange shape drove suddenly
Betwixt us and the Sun.

And straight the Sun was flecked with bars,
(Heaven’s Mother send us grace!)
As if through a dungeon-grate he peered,
With broad and burning face.

Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud)
How fast she nears and nears!
Are those her sails that glance in the Sun,
Like restless gossameres?

Are those her ribs through which the Sun
Did peer, as through a grate?
And is that Woman all her crew?
Is that a Death? and are there two?
Is Death that woman’s mate?

Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Night-Mare Life-in-Death was she,
Who thicks man’s blood with cold.

The naked hulk alongside came,
And the twain were casting dice;
“The game is done! I’ve won! I’ve won!”
Quoth she, and whistles thrice.

The Sun’s rim dips; the stars rush out:
At one stride comes the dark;
With far-heard whisper, o’er the sea.
Off shot the spectre-bark.

Podcast Transcript

This is a passage from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s most famous poem, one of the best-known poems in the English language. It’s because of this poem that we talk about having an albatross around your neck. It’s also the source of the famous lines, ‘Water, water, everywhere, / Nor any drop to drink.’ So, in today’s podcast, I’m going to talk about what makes this poem so justly famous, and what an extraordinary storyteller, as well as an amazing poet, Coleridge was.

The Poem’s Genesis

Interestingly, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was devised as a conscious literary experiment, a little bit like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, another Romantic classic.

It was Coleridge’s main contribution to a book called Lyrical Ballads, which he published in collaboration with William Wordsworth in 1798. The idea behind this book was a deliberate poetic programme: to make poetry more relatable by, in Wordsworth’s famous phrase, using ‘language really used by men’, instead of the rather ornate and highly artificial poetic diction and elevated poetic subjects which had been the stock-in-trade of poetry throughout the 18th century.

So, the book is not only seen as a cornerstone of Romanticism in English poetry but pretty well the beginning of modern poetry – the kind of poetry that we write today. I mean, in the sense of personal reflections on one’s life and experience, and expressing that. It’s why we typically associate poetry with personal experience, emotional expression and authenticity.

Now, that’s the main project, if you like, of Lyrical Ballads, and it was divided into two categories, as Coleridge explained in his book Biographia Literaria:

The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural, and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real … For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life.

Coleridge took the lead on the supernatural, while Wordsworth concentrated on poems about ordinary life. So as I say, The Ancient Mariner started as a conscious literary experiment. It’s a bit like a writing prompt you would get in a modern creative writing class, so sometimes these things do work, even for the most Romantic of poets. But it’s also pretty clear that Coleridge had accidentally tapped into the wellspring of his poetic genius, which if you ask me, in some ways goes even deeper than Wordsworth’s, certainly to darker places than Wordsworth ever plumbed in his poetry.

The Ballad Form

Picking up on the title, Lyrical Ballads: a ballad, as we’ve seen before on the podcast, is a traditional form associated with songs and storytelling. Thousands of traditional ballads that have survived, often being recorded by folklorists around the time that Coleridge was writing his own ballad. And Coleridge was thoroughly immersed in this folk tradition. He would have heard ballads in childhood, in taverns, wherever, and he alluded to traditional ballads in several poems.

And what we have here is a literary ballad, which, as the name suggests, is taking the oral tradition and making something a little more refined and extended than the oral ballads composed and sung and handed down by generations of unliterary and often illiterate balladeers. We’ve seen a few examples of the literary ballad, or ballad-like poems, in the podcast already, such as Edward Lear’s ‘The Jumblies’, Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’, Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Oxen’ and W. B. Yeats’s ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’.

The Mariner’s Tale

Zooming in on today’s passage, this is from the beginning of Part Three of The Ancient Mariner. There are seven parts altogether. Immediately, that marks it out from most folk ballads, which are typically much shorter. This was a ballad to be read, or maybe read aloud, well beyond the kind of length that would typically be recited from memory.

Just to fill you in on the action: Part One famously begins,

It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?’

So, in Coleridge’s words, in the marginal notes that he added to later editions of the poem, ‘An Ancient Mariner meeteth three Gallants bidden to a wedding-feast, and detaineth one’. The wedding guest is trying to get into the reception, he’s probably gasping for a drink after the church service, and he’s stopped by this Ancient Mariner, this old seaman with a long grey beard and glittering eye, who insists on telling him a story. In spite of himself, the wedding guest is, as Coleridge’s words, ‘spell-bound by the eye of the old seafaring man, and constrained to hear his tale’. So, that’s the framing device of the whole poem.

The Mariner says his ship set out with a good wind in fair weather, but was driven by a storm towards the South Pole. Then an albatross appears, which the sailors initially think is an omen of good fortune. But the Ancient Mariner, again, in Coleridge’s words, ‘inhospitably killeth the pious bird of good omen’. This makes him unpopular among his shipmates who were afraid of bad luck – and indeed soon afterwards, they find themselves becalmed. This is where the famous lines come:

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.

At this point the Mariner’s shipmates turn on him and hang the albatross around the Mariner’s neck, ‘in order to throw the whole guilt on the Ancient Mariner’. He was the Jonah, the scapegoat for the crew.

And this is where we pick up the story with today’s passage, from the beginning of Part Three of the poem:

There passed a weary time. Each throat
Was parched, and glazed each eye.
A weary time! a weary time!
How glazed each weary eye,

These opening lines contain the whole poem in microcosm. That first sentence, even, ‘They passed a weary time’, is the story of the whole poem, really. They passed a weary time, and the Mariner is going to weary the Wedding Guest and the rest of us by telling his story. Time is a really crucial quality in this poem: it speeds up at certain points in the action, it slows down at others. And yet, in another sense, the whole thing seems to take place outside of time, on a plane of magical or mythological reality.

The Stanza Form and Repetition

Looking again at these first four lines, they constitute a classic ballad stanza form called common metre, where you alternate lines of four stresses and three stresses.

There passed a weary time. Each throat
Was parched, and glazed each eye.
A weary time! a weary time!
How glazed each weary eye,

This is the baseline metre of the whole poem. You can hear how it chugs along steadily and propels us through the poem, so it’s no surprise that this stanza has been used for storytelling from time immemorial.

But that’s not the whole story of this stanza, because Coleridge has added an extra two lines:

When looking westward, I beheld
A something in the sky.

This is very typical of his practice in this poem: to have some stanzas longer than others for poetic and dramatic effect. In this case, it introduces a new piece of the action.

They passed a weary time. Each throat
Was parch’d, and glaz’d each eye.
A weary time! a weary time!
How glaz’d each weary eye!

Can you hear how the repetition of ‘weary’ and ‘weary time’ creates the effect of stasis? Because they’re becalmed, it’s wearying, it’s boring. The repetition is like the child in the back seat in a traffic jam, who keeps saying ‘I’m bored’.

And yet, with the addition of those two lines, suddenly the action starts up again:

When looking westward, I beheld
A something in the sky.

They’re becalmed, and it feels like it’s going to go on forever, and then suddenly he’s introduced this new element, and he’s done it by adding two lines to the stanza. Extra lines were not unheard of in traditional ballads; quite often, there would be an extra refrain to heighten the moment. But hardly anyone varied stanza length as extensively and expressively as Coleridge did in The Ancient Mariner. He’s taking this traditional folk tune and playing a Fantasia on it, it’s like the prog rock guitar solo version.

The Approaching Ship

Coleridge typically uses these extended stanzas for close-ups or highly dramatic moments. And then he goes back to the basic four-line stanza when he wants to move the story on. Which is exactly what happens next, having introduced a glimpse of ‘something’ on the horizon:

At first it seem’d a little speck,
And then it seem’d a mist;
It moved and moved, and took at last
A certain shape, I wist.

Isn’t this a brilliant description of what it’s like when you’re looking out, straining towards the horizon? There’s something there, but you can’t quite see what it is, and your eye is trying to resolve it. So first of all, he says, ‘I beheld a something in the sky’, then ‘it seem’d a little speck’, then ‘a mist’. He says ‘It moved and moved, and took at last / A certain shape, I wist.’ (‘Wist’ meaning ‘knew’.) But he doesn’t tell us what the certain shape is, heightening the suspense, which continues into the next stanza:

A speck, a mist, a shape, I wist!
And still it neared and neared:
As if it dodged a water-sprite,
It plunged and tacked and veered.

The words ‘speck’, ‘mist’, ‘shape’, and ‘wist’ are all repeated from the previous stanza; the repetition continues the effect of stasis, but also claustrophobia. This whole poem is like a nightmare that folds back in on itself, that you can never escape, as we keep encountering the same words, the same phrases, the same images.

Then we get this delightful simile: ‘As if it dodged a water-sprite, / It plunged and tack’d and veer’d.’ So it’s dodging and plunging and tacking and veering about, as if it’s trying to escape from a water spirit, which is a very unsettling image and introduces the idea of supernatural intervention.

Finally the image resolves, and the object is identified, in a typically dramatic fashion:

With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
We could not laugh nor wail;
Through utter drought all dumb we stood!
I bit my arm, I sucked the blood,
And cried, A sail! A sail!

So we’ve got more repetition here, in the rhyme of ‘slaked’ and ‘baked’, and also the clustered consonants: the L’s and the K’s and the B’s and the P’s – ‘unslaked … black lips baked’. It’s quite difficult to say. My mouth’s feeling dry as I say that; I’m very conscious of my tongue and my lips moving to pronounce the sounds. I feel like I could do with a sip of water.

So Coleridge doesn’t just repeat words, he’s more subtle than that. We’ve got repeating rhyme, obviously a form of repetition, but you also have repeating syntactic structure: ‘with throats unslaked, with black lips baked’. Similarly: ‘I bit my arm, I sucked the blood’ – the same grammatical pattern in quick succession. And a thoroughly gruesome image: unlike me, the Mariner doesn’t have a glass of water to hand, so he bites his own arm and sucks the blood to moisten his mouth so he can speak.

And that line, ‘I bit my arm, I sucked the blood’ is the extra line in this stanza, which heightens the tension just before the ship finally comes into focus, when he cries: ‘A sail! A sail!’

With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
Agape they heard me call:
Gramercy! they for joy did grin,
And all at once their breath drew in,
As they were drinking all.

See! see! (I cried) she tacks no more!
Hither to work us weal;
Without a breeze, without a tide,
She steadies with upright keel!

So the Mariner says, rather optimistically, the ship is coming ‘Hither to work us weal’, to help us. And yet there’s something uncanny about its motion: ‘Without a breeze, without a tide, / She steadies with upright keel.’ Which hints that maybe this isn’t the kind of ship that you want coming towards you.

The Nightmare Vision

Then we get an absolutely extraordinary visual image of the ship approaching:

The western wave was all a-flame.
The day was well nigh done!
Almost upon the western wave
Rested the broad bright Sun.

And once again, to these four lines are added two extra lines that propel the action forward:

When that strange shape drove suddenly
Betwixt us and the Sun.

So, it’s a static picture of the sun seeming to stand still, to rest upon the waves. But then ‘suddenly’, the ‘strange shape’ of the ship appears and inserts itself ‘Betwixt us and the sun’.

And straight the Sun was fleck’d with bars,
(Heaven’s Mother send us grace!)
As if through a dungeon grate he peer’d
With broad and burning face.

So, a ship goes in front of the sun, but instead of being a solid shape, it’s more like a dungeon grate, where the sun’s face is peering ‘with broad and burning face’. That’s such a brilliantly evocative image. The poem has been illustrated by several illustrators of genius, including Gustave Doré and Mervyn Peake, but you don’t need an illustration for this; you can see it so vividly. To me, this one of the most arresting visual images in all poetry. It has such a stark simplicity. It’s like something from a children’s picture book, which is absolutely appropriate for the ballad form. Coleridge is extending the ballad into a more literary form, but he’s not over-elaborating. He sticks to the simplicity, the starkness, that is at the heart of the ballad form.

Then, very interestingly, the approach of the ship is described via the Mariner’s thoughts:

Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud)
How fast she nears and nears!
Are those her sails that glance in the Sun,
Like restless gossameres?

Are those her ribs through which the Sun
Did peer, as through a grate?
And is that Woman all her crew?
Is that a Death? and are there two?
Is Death that woman’s mate?

So what we have her is a series of questions that occur to the Mariner inside his mind, as he watches the ship approach and tries to figure out what it is’. He sees these shapes across the sun and asks ‘Are those her sails … ?’ ‘Are those her ribs … ?’

And then he asks, ‘And is that Woman all her crew?’ which is brilliantly immediate. He doesn’t say, ‘Oh, there’s a woman there. Is she the only crew member?’ It’s just, ‘is that Woman all her crew?’ And we suddenly realise he’s been staring at a woman.

Next question: ‘Is that a Death?’ Unusually, death has an indefinite article: a Death. It’s like, you know, a scarecrow, a Guy on Guy Fawke’s night, a Pierrot or a Harlequin from the Commedia del’arte. It’s like it’s a stock character: a Death.

Next questions: ‘And are there two? / Is Death that Woman’s mate?’ So he’s saying, ‘My God, Death, which is traditionally pictured as male, has a mate, has a partner who is a woman’. I guess it’s possible, given the maritime context, that ‘mate’ here could be ‘shipmate’, but I think there’s a pretty strong suggestion that they are mates in the marital or sexual sense. Which is borne out by the language of the next stanza, one of the most mesmerising descriptions in all of literature:

Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was white as leprosy,
The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she,
Who thicks man’s blood with cold.

We’ve seen this kind of thing before, haven’t we? It’s the blason or catalogue of the attributes of the beloved from Petrarchan love poetry, which we looked at in the episodes about Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ and Christopher Smart’s cat Jeoffry – you know, ‘her lips are like rubies, her eyes are like sapphires, her hair is like gold’. And we saw that well before Coleridge’s time it was so hackneyed it had been parodied by Shakespeare and used ironically by Marvell and for comic effect by Smart.

But Coleridge modulates the Petrarchan mode not into comedy but horror. The first two lines are very conventionally Petrarchan – She’s got red lips and hair as yellow as gold – but in the next line it flips: her skin is ‘white as leprosy’, and she is ‘The Nightmare Life-in-Death’. So she is clearly horrific, yet she’s weirdly compelling. There’s an unmistakable sexual magnetism here.

She’s names as the Nightmare Life-in-Death, which sounds like a traditional stock figure, but Coleridge actually invented her. And there have been all kinds of interpretations of this figure and what she represents.

We could take her name very literally, because Coleridge suffered badly from nightmares from boyhood onwards, so the Nightmare Life-in-Death could easily be the embodiment of these night terrors. By the time he wrote The Ancient Mariner he was in the early stages of the opium addiction that would plague him for the rest of his life, and one of the symptoms of opium addiction is vivid nightmares. So you don’t have to be a psychologist of genius to connect the Nightmare Life-in-Death with to the living death of addiction. If this is the face of the nightmare that Coleridge lived as an addict, then it’s all the more terrifying for that.

Inevitably, there have been Freudian interpretations of the Nightmare Life-in-Death, as well as feminist, Christian, philosophical, and ecological readings. Robert Graves uses her as one of the main exhibits in his book The White Goddess. Graves identifies her with the White Goddess, a.k.a. the moon goddess or Muse who has traditionally been seen as the inspiration for true poetry. Now I have some sympathy with Graves’s take, and she undoubtedly has some archetypal qualities, but I’m always wary of reducing a poem or a poetic image to a single interpretation. What makes Coleridge’s Nightmare Life-in-Death so hair-raising is that she is absolutely compelling, original, and memorable inside the world of the poem.

Dicing with Death

Anyway, she’s the Nightmare Life-in-Death ‘Who thicks man’s blood with cold’ – and in this case it’s a very particular man’s blood – the Mariner himself. Because it turns out that the Mariner and his shipmates are the stakes in a game of dice between Death and the Nightmare Life-in-Death:

The naked hulk alongside came,
And the twain were casting dice;
‘The game is done! I’ve won! I’ve won!’
Quoth she, and whistles thrice.

The poem will shortly go on to describe the Mariner’s shipmates dropping dead because, of course, Death has won them. But the biggest prize is the Mariner and his soul, and that’s why Nightmare Life-in-Death says, ‘The game is done! I’ve won! I’ve won!’ Because what could be worse than death? Well, the Ancient Mariner is about to find out.

And I’m not going spoil the poem for you. If you haven’t read it, I absolutely recommend you get a copy right now and rip through it, and you will discover the fate worse than death that awaits the Mariner.

OK, once we’ve had the horrific close-up of the Nightmare Life-in-Death, in a marvellously extended five line stanza. Then we’re back to the standard four-line stanza as the action resumes, with the game of dice and then the final stanza of today’s passage:

The Sun’s rim dips; the stars rush out:
At one stride comes the dark;
With far-heard whisper, o’er the sea,
Off shot the spectre-bark.

Talk about an abrupt exit! So ‘the stars rush out’ and ‘at one stride comes the dark’ – that doesn’t sound classically poetic, does it? Or even Romantic. But that abruptness, that kind of jerkiness, like a crudely animated film, is absolutely typical of the ballad form. And the ‘spectre-bark’, the ghost ship of Death and the Nightmare Life-in-Death, shoots off into the darkness, leaving the Mariner to his fate, which you will discover when you read the rest of the poem.

Coleridge’s achievement

OK, I hope my comments on this passage from The Ancient Mariner have impressed upon you what an incredible poem this is. And would be nice to think that this poem was a huge triumph for Coleridge, publishing it alongside his great friend, Wordsworth, whom he admired so much. But alas, not really, because he always felt overshadowed by Wordsworth, and it didn’t help that Wordsworth himself made some very biting criticisms of the poem, in public as well as privately.

Coleridge often felt that he was a failure, that he had left his potential unrealised, but he did finish The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. And if this was the only thing that he had written, his poetic immortality would have been more than assured. There’s nothing else like it, either in literature or in the ballad tradition, the two streams that it draws from.

You can probably tell Coleridge is one of my all-time favourite poets. Accordingly, I have granted him the ultimate accolade of more than one episode of A Mouthful of Air, a laurel that has only previously been granted to Shakespeare, Yeats, and Hardy. What he shares with them is that he is a multi-faceted writer. In Shakespeare, we had a sonnet and a soliloquy; in Yeats, we had two very different types of poem. Hardy, of course, was a novelist as well as a poet.

And this kind of range is something that Coleridge shares with them. Back in Episode 34 we heard the spellbinding lyricism of ‘Kubla Khan’; in The Ancient Mariner, he takes us on a voyage of imagination into a dark night of the soul. And I haven’t even done one of his marvellous conversation poems – personal reflections and meditations in blank verse. Maybe I’ll get to one of those in a future episode.

But for now, let’s listen again to the Mariner’s encounter with the Nightmare Life-in-Death and savour the beauty, the horror, and the magnificence of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.