Coleridge 2

1. Coleridge 2 Mystery poems

2. The persistence of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’

3. Coleridge & Wordsworth: the supernatural & the natural • …a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural…. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life… • In this idea originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads; in which it was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination thatwilling suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us…(BiographiaLiteraria492)

4. Coleridge’s mystery poems Coleridge’s mystery poems Dante’s Divine Comedy (G. W. Knight) Paradise For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise. Purgatory Hell • ‘Kubla Khan’ • ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ • ‘Christabel’

5. Coleridge and the supernatural • The supernatural and the Gothic revival • The supernatural & the psychological But yester-night I prayed aloud In anguish and in agony, Up-starting from the fiendishcrowd Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me: (‘The Pains of Sleep’)

6. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: what is it about? Argument (1798) Argument (1800) How a ship, having first sailed to the Equator, was driven by storms, to the cold country towards the South Pole; how the Ancient Mariner cruelly; and in contempt of the laws of hospitality, killed a sea-bird; and how he was followed by many and strangejudgements; and in what manner he came back to his own country. • How a ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to the cold country towards the South Pole; and how from thence she made her course to the tropical latitude of the great Pacific Ocean; and of the strangethings that befell; and in what manner the Ancient Mariner came back to his own country.

7. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:what is it about? • [The poem] has indeed great defects…. [The mariner] does not act, but is continually acted upon…. The events having no necessary connection do not produce each other… (Wordsworth) • A Christian allegory: 7 books & 7 stages of salvation • Sin • Suffering • Death • Repentance • Rebirth • Penance • Salvation • [The Ancient Mariner] was in my mind the ever-lasting Wandering Jew – had told this story ten thousand times since the voyage, which was in his early youth and 50 years before. (Coleridge)

8. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: too much moral? • Mrs. Barbauld once told me that she admired the ‘Ancient Mariner’ very much, but that there were two faults in it; it was improbable, and had no moral. As for the probability, I owned that there might admit some question; but as to the want of a moral, I told her that in my own judgment the poem had too much; and that the only, or chief fault, if I may say so, was the obtrusion of moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of such pure imagination. It ought to have had no more moral than the Arabian Night’s tale of the merchant’s sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well, and throwing the shells inside, and Lo! a genie starts up, and says he must kill the aforesaid merchant, because one of the date shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie’s son. (Coleridge)

9. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: interpretation • The ballad has been variously interpreted as a Christian allegory of fall and redemption; a moral study of the origins of Evil; a symbolic account of the poètemauditfigure; an autobiographical vision of opium addiction; a ‘Green parable’ of man’s destruction of nature and Nature’s revenge; and a psychological investigation of post-traumatic stress syndrome with its well established features of obsessive recall and compulsive guilt. (Richard Holmes) • Readers’ interpretation • The mariner and the crew • The wedding guest • The glossarist • A poem about interpretation • Discovering meaning and making meaning

10. It is an ancient Mariner And he stoppeth one of three. That moment that his face I see, I know the man that must hear me. (588-9) The wedding guest sat on a stone: He cannot choose but hear… Part I: opening

11. The ice was here, the ice was there, The ice was all around Part I: seascape

12. Part I: the albatross • As if it had been a Christian soul, We hailed it in God’s name. • …With my crossbowI shot the Albatross. • O the one life within us and abroad, Which meets all motion and becomes its soul… (‘The Eolian Harp’) • Never to see or describe any interesting appearance in nature without connecting it, by dim analogies, with the moral world proves faintness of impression. Nature has her proper interest, and he will know what it is who believes and feels that everything has a life of its own, and that we are all One Life. (Coleridge’s letter)

13. The glossarist • The ancient mariner inhospitablykilleth the pious bird of good omen. (79ff) • A spirit had followed them; one of the invisible inhabitants of this planet… concerning whom the learned Jew, Josephus, and the Platonic Constantinopolitan, Michael Psellus, may be consulted. (131ff)

14. Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink. Part II: stasis & drought

15. And the twain were casting dice; “The game is done! I’ve won! I’ve won!” Quoth she, and whistles thrice. As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods They kill us for their sport. (King Lear) Part III: Life-in-Death

16. Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea! Part IV: the lone survivor

17. Part IV: the moon & watersnakes

18. And when I awoke, it rained. Part V

19. I could not draw my eyes from theirs, Nor turn them up to pray. Part VI

20. Part VII

21. The tension in Coleridge • For the religiously devout Coleridge, the existence of an ordered, moral, Christian universe was a psychological necessity. His finest poems embody … unresolved tension between a vision of an always-becoming universe and a demand for coherent meaning. Coleridge found this tension deeply painful. He desperately wanted to believe in the absolute validity of an ordered Christian universe but could not, could not because his own acute intelligence perceived the existence of an underlying chaos. (Anne K. Mellor) • … a combination of … two warring tendencies in Coleridge – towards unity and towards fragmentation … (Lucy Newlyn)

22. Tutorial: Part 7 1. Presentation: Read Part 7 of the poem closely. Pay special attention to the following questions: • How is the hermit portrayed? What might this figure signify? • Why does the ship go down ‘like lead’ (549)? • What do you make of the ending of the mariner – telling the tale forever? • What do you make of the ‘moral’ the mariner delivers to the wedding guest (612-617)? • Why does the wedding guest become ‘a sadder and a wiser man’ (624)? What might the wedding as the frame of the story suggest? 2. Discussion: Refer back to ‘The Thorn’. Discuss how Coleridge compares with Wordsworth in ballads.

23. Thoughts for next week • What kind of figure is the protagonist, Childe Harold? What about the narrator? How are the two related? • What is the tone of the opening stanza and the concluding ones (S115-8), both of which are addressed to ‘my daughter’? How would you describe the tone of the canto as a whole? In what sense is it consistent? In what sense is it not? What might have to do with such a tone? • The poem is read by many as autobiographical. In this sense, how does it compare with Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’? Consider, for example, the relationship between the ‘I’s at different stages and its subject. • Presentation: use Childe Harold as an archetype and a textual support, give an example (literary or cultural) of a Byronic hero. In what sense is it an inheritance of it and in what sense is it a revision?