ESPECIALLY INTERESTING RESPONSES FROM WEEK TWO: Posted Week 3
Danielle Zimmerman
Coleridge's “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” shares many traits with Homer's Odyssey. The most prominent similarity is the situation where an old, weathered sailor relays his perilous tale to a stranger. The tales' content is also similar. Odysseus sails through mystic lands with his crew and encounters the supernatural, including a few dangerous woman. Demonstrating the foibles of men, he and his crew disobey the gods and even kill the sacred cattle of Helios. In the end, only Odysseus barely survives. The ancient mariner, like Odysseus, sails through supernatural places, kills a possible representation of God in the form of an albatross, and meets a dangerous zombie woman with her mate Death. In the end, only the mariner survives. However, even though they share an epic-like structure, the two poems convey two very different tones and meanings. First, while “The Odyssey” has obvious divine interference, it's difficult to determine what forces, if any, control the ancient mariner's circumstance. The ancient mariner's adventure seems more depressing than Odysseus' because much of his misfortune is just misfortune whereas the majority of Odysseus' misfortune is more of a punishment for a previous action. Also, as a result of his misfortunes and trials, the ancient mariner does not embrace life as Odysseus does but retells his story to anyone who will listen and, with his ambiguous ending, leaves them puzzled. An analysis of the connection between “Ancient Mariner” and The Odyssey allows for a different outlook on Coleridge's poem.
Professor's Reply: Danielle, I agree that the two poems, for all their common features, are also strikingly different. I wonder if it isn't the monotheistic Christian quality of Coleridge's poem with its allusion to "the dear God who loveth us" that distinguishes it most from the pagan polytheism of the Greek gods? The latter are so unpredictable and volatile, whereas Coleridge's God seems rather "above it all."
Alexandra Bell
In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” a sense of the fantastical is infused into the text through the description of the mariner, with his “glittering eye” (p. 436, line 228), and in the mariner’s story, where “A hundred fire-flags sheen, / To and fro they were hurried about! / And to and fro, and in and out, / The wan stars danced between” (p. 438, lines 314-17). The bright imagery and energy of the narration is slightly ambiguous, and things that would normally be bright, such as stars, are instead “wan”, reversing the sense of control, order, and understanding.
The disconcerting, fantastical nature of the story is heightened by a strange connection between internal and external life, with feelings, dreams, and intuition linked to the physical action, as in the passage, “I dreamt that [buckets] were filled with dew; / And when I awoke, it rained…Sure I had drunken in my dreams, / And still my body drank” (p. 438, lines 297-304). The text supports a connection between all things, material and ethereal. The complexity of the causational flow for all of the mysterious events that occur is intentional, to highlight the frequency and intensity of life’s uncontrollable, unmotivated, and random events. The obvious cause-and-effect storyline is that the albatross’ slaying spurs punishment, but the fact that the mariner is compelled by some unknown force to tell particular, but random, people his story, and the fact that the listener is “of sense forlorn” at the end of the tale, although he is removed from the story, is significant: the larger moral is that life for everyone involves complex, unknowable, and sometimes sinister connections between all things.
Professor's Reply: If the Enlightenment gave us rational order, taxonomies, encyclopedias, and catalogues, Coleridge troubles them all again. I especially loved your choice quotations to prove your points Alexandra.
Christopher Sierra
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
So this reading was something that thoroughly held my attention. When looking at the work as a whole I believe that it speaks to how humans communicate both values and ideals, which is through a narrative. Our story begins with the mariner holding the guest with “his glittering eye” while the wedding guest “listens like a three years’ child”. As the poem continues a tale is wrought that brings into question divine providence versus the realist, random chance ideological perspectives of life. Now far be it from me to have the audacity to sit here and say that I’ll be able to consciously unravel these two paradigms of ecclesiastical and irreligious discourse, however, I do believe that the narrative of the poem itself raises plenty of philosophical issues on which a critical reader may be able to provide their own insight. Regardless, I feel as though both sides go back and forth with equally supporting arguments. It’s as though Coleridge’s aim is to keep his reader in that grey area of uncertainty, doubt and confusion while simultaneously offering hope, faith and rational belief. Most authors look to sway their audience to their belief, Coleridge seemingly finds contentment in letting the patron debate and decide for themselves. I also find it suiting that the setting of this tale being told is at a wedding celebration. What other practice do we participate that is held in high esteem in both the practical sacrilegious world as well as the ambrosial sphere? You question does this bond between woman and man have any higher calling or is it simply what it appears to be? The same can be said for the mariner’s journey. Does this bird happen to be a sign of divine intervention due to piety or were both creatures (beast and man) simply stranded and at the mercy of the only higher calling? Nature.
Professor's Reply: Christopher, I've put in bold the moment in this response that particularly caught my eye: this sounds very like Keats's description of "negative capability," but the BEST part of your point is, that in the letter where he unfolds this idea, Keats finds fault with Coleridge for not indulging this sense of mystery quite enough! (See Norton, 942-3) So you've got lots to look forward to in Keats if you've enjoyed the mysteriousness here.
Rachel Page
Upon reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” I was intrigued by the amount of figurative language which adds to the overall mysterious tone. True to Romanticism, Coleridge appeals to the imagination, but his supernatural personification of the Night-mare Life-in-Death especially stands out because this female possesses powers which the Mariner cannot overcome.
Portraying the main specter character as a female with her mate as opposed to portraying the male character first gives an illustration of the radical notions of the Romantic poets and sets the scene for the woman to take the dominant role in the scene. Firstly, the description of her is similar to a blazon, common in earlier British Literature such as Marie de France’s “Lanval” in which she describes a fairy. The red lips, yellow locks, and pale skin all match the description of the fairy, yet this Nightmare Life in Death supposedly “thicks man’s blood with cold” (Line 194). As a result of the blazon description, there is an emphasis on the woman’s beauty, making the above phrase thick with radical notions of a woman with power but also alluding to her sexual authority over men as well. Also, Coleridge continues to further her deviance from the norm by her dice playing, in which she gambles as a reckless young man would with Death. Death, a weak skeletal mate, cannot defeat the Night-mare Life-in-Death and the woman is victorious in obtaining to Mariner’s soul, giving her power over yet another man and exhibiting potentially revolutionary changes that could be happening with gender roles in both literature and society.
Professor's Reply: Ah Rachel! If you enjoyed this creepy femme fatale (a ghoulish version of the fairy), you'll love Keats's "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" coming up soon. Both are associated with forces of corruption like gambling, seduction, and unwomanly glee ("I've won! I've won!" and whistling thrice!).
Michael Piccoli
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” has a theme of God throughout, but, at first glance, it is unclear whether the poem argues for or against the presence of God. However, after a careful consideration of the text, it is clear that God is present in the world of the speaker. The last stanza, in particular, provides strong evidence for this claim. The Wedding-Guest is “of sense forlorn (line 622)” from the Mariner’s tale. Sense, though commonly defined as “faculty of perception or sensation (OED),” also carries the connotation of rationality, i.e. common sense. The Wedding-Guest “A sadder and a wiser man, / He rose the morrow morn (line 624-5),” because of the Mariner’s tale—the incredibility of the tale illogically persuades the Wedding-Guest to become a believer during the post-Enlightenment period, because of which, the Speaker calls him a “wiser” man. This last, ambiguous stanza is the key to a reading of the poem in which God is present. It provides the reader with the information necessary to see the power of God’s work, as the reader portrays it.
Professor's Reply: Michael, if we accept your opinion that the poem argues for the presence of God, what kind of God is this? Is it Judaeo-Christian? Just Christian? Monotheistic? Interestingly, you're taking me full circle back to Danielle's response with which we started, and those echoes of Homer's Odyssey that she was picking up.