Month: November 2016

The Ancient Mariner was cheered by the Hermit’s singing. He admired the way the Hermit lived and prayed alone in the woods, but also “love[d] to talk with mariners.” As they neared the ship, the Pilot and the Hermit wondered where the angels – which they had thought were merely beacon lights – had gone. The Hermit remarked on how strange the ship looked with its misshapen boards and flimsy sails. The Pilot was afraid, but the Hermit encouraged him to steer the boat closer. Just as the boat reached the ship, a terrible noise came from under the water, and the ship sank straightaway. The men saved the Ancient Mariner even though they thought he was dead; after all, he appeared “like one that hath been seven days drowned.” The boat spun in the whirlpool created by the ship’s sinking, and all was quiet save the loud sound echoing off of a hill. The Ancient Mariner moved his lips and began to row the boat, terrifying the other men; the Pilot had a conniption, the Hermit began to pray, and the Pilot’s Boy laughed crazily, thinking the Ancient Mariner was the devil. When they reached the shore, the Ancient Mariner begged the Hermit to absolve him of his sins. The Hermit crossed himself and asked the Ancient Mariner what sort of man he was. The Ancient Mariner was instantly compelled to share his story with the Hermit. His need to share it was so strong that it wracked his body with pain. Once he shared it, however, he felt restored.

Part 6 opens with a dialogue between the two voices: the first voice, the Ancient Mariner says, asked the second voice to remind it what moved the Ancient Mariner’s ship along so fast, and the second voice postulated that the moon must be controlling the ocean. The first voice asked again what could be driving the ship, and the second voice replied that the air was pushing the ship from behind in lieu of wind. After this declaration, the voices disappeared. The Ancient Mariner awoke at night to find the dead sailors clustered on the deck, again cursing him with their eyes. They mesmerized him, until suddenly the spell broke and they too disappeared. The Ancient Mariner, however, was not relieved; he knew that the dead men would come back to haunt him over and over again. Just then, a wind began to blow and the ship sailed quickly and smoothly until the Ancient Mariner could see the shore of his own country. As moonlight illuminated the glassy harbor, lighthouse, and church he sobbed and prayed, happy to be either alive or in heaven. Suddenly, crimson shapes began to rise from the water in front of the ship. When the Ancient Mariner looked down at the deck, he saw an angel standing over each dead man’s corpse. The angels waved their hands silently, serving as beacons to guide the ship into port. The Ancient Mariner heard voices: a Pilot, the Pilot’s boy, and a Hermit were approaching the ship in a boat. The Ancient Mariner was overjoyed to see other living human beings and wanted the Hermit to wipe him clean of his sin, to “wash away the Albatross’s blood.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is the premier poet-critic of modern English tradition, distinguished for the scope and influence of his thinking about literature as much as for his innovative verse. Active in the wake of the French Revolution as a dissenting pamphleteer and lay preacher, he inspired a brilliant generation of writers and attracted the patronage of progressive men of the rising middle class. As William Wordsworth’s collaborator and constant companion in the formative period of their careers as poets, Samuel Taylor Coleridge participated in the sea change in English verse associated with Lyrical Ballads (1798). His poems of this period, speculative, meditative, and strangely oracular, put off early readers but survived the doubts of Wordsworth and Robert Southey to become recognized classics of the romantic idiom.

Coleridge renounced poetic vocation in his thirtieth year and set out to define and defend the art as a practicing critic. His promotion of Wordsworth’s verse, a landmark of English literary response, proceeded in tandem with a general investigation of epistemology and metaphysics. Coleridge was preeminently responsible for importing the new German critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich von Schelling; his associated discussion of imagination remains a fixture of institutional criticism while his occasional notations on language proved seminal for the foundation and development of Cambridge English in the 1920s. In his distinction between culture and civilization Coleridge supplied means for a critique of the utilitarian state, which has been continued in our own time. And in his late theological writing he provided principles for reform in the Church of England. Coleridge’s various and imposing achievement, a cornerstone of modern English culture, remains an incomparable source of informed reflection on the brave new world whose birth pangs he attended.

After praying, the Ancient Mariner thanked the Virgin Mary for finally allowing him to sleep. He dreamed that the buckets on the ship were filled with dew, and awoke to the sound of the falling rain. He drank and drank after so many days of thirst, and became so lightheaded that he thought he was a ghost. Suddenly he heard a loud wind far off, and the sky lit up with darting “fire-flags” that could be interpreted as lightning (electricity visible in the atmosphere that sailors consider a sign of bad luck). The rain poured from a single cloud, as did an unbroken stream of lightning. The ship began to sail, although there was still no wind. Just then, all the dead men stood up and went about their jobs as a mute, ghostly crew.

The Wedding Guest proclaims again: “I fear thee, Ancient Mariner!” but the Ancient Mariner quickly assures him that the dead sailors were not evil. At dawn, they even gathered around the mast and sang so beautifully that they sounded like an orchestra. When they stopped singing, the ship’s sails sang instead. The ship sailed on miraculously in the absence of wind, moved instead by the spirit that had followed it from the icy world. Once the ship reached the equator and the sun was directly overhead, it stopped moving and the sails stopped singing. Then it began to rock back and forth uneasily until it suddenly jolted, causing the Ancient Mariner to faint. He lay for an indeterminate period of time on the ship’s deck, during which he heard two voices. The first voice swore on Christ that he was the man who betrayed the Albatross that loved him, and that the spirit from the icy world also loved the Albatross: “The spirit who bideth by himself / In the land of mist and snow, / He loved the bird that loved the man / Who shot him with his bow.” The second voice, softer than the first, declared that the Ancient Mariner would continue to pay for his crime: “The man hath penance done and penance more will do.”

The Sun came up upon the left,
Out of the sea came he!
And he shone bright, and on the right
Went down into the sea.

(The Sun came up upon the left, 
Out of the sea came he!) – This the metaphor I’ve chosen.

This metaphor means that the sun has risen. It doesn’t just mean that but also means the way we see the sun rising. We see the sun rising like it it’s coming out of the water and that is the way the poet has wrote it.

• In the rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, the Mariner was cursed and was not able to speak or pray.
• When the Mariner killed the albatross, the spirit of the albatross was following him. It was in a way a sign of his curse still being with him.
• When the gambler had won the gamble, all of the sailors had died. When all of the sailors died they were all lying down on the floor dead with all of their eyes being fixed on the Ancient Mariner.
• Quite a while later the albatross had fallen from following him and was now free from the curse, although there were a few twists about it. There was a cloud of rain following him whilst he was on the boat. Although he really needed the rain it was more than a light drizzle, it was a thunder storm. He really needed the rain because when he was cursed it made his mouth really dry, so he couldn’t speak. He couldn’t even speak when he was free from the curse.
• The Ancient Mariner heard a particularly strong wind in the distance but did not feel a hint of it.
• Because the Ancient Mariner was sailing on a sailboat, it was unlucky for him to have no wind supporting him so he was stuck.