The Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Coleridge is partly to blame himself for these attempts to ‘make sense’ of The Ancient Mariner as he added marginal notes to the poem in 1817 that appear to do just that. For example, the punishment of the mariners is ‘justified’ thus: ‘His shipmates cry out against the ancient Mariner, for killing the bird of good luck…But when the fog cleared off, they justify the same, and thus make themselves accomplices in the crime.’ And for this they die!
The point of the Mariner’s ‘moral’ at the end of the poem is psychological, not theological. He has returned ‘above the Line’ to the world of comforting secure truths in which God, man and the natural world are bound in a unity of love. He has been ‘shriven’ by the Holy Man and healed (though only partially, it is clear). Now that he has the ‘kirk,’ the ‘rock’ and the ‘lighthouse top’ again in his world, he can believe such things, but he is still driven to repeat and relive his terrible ordeal again and again, when he recites his story to those marked out to hear his voice. The necessity of this catharsis for him proves the inadequacy of his own interpretation of his experiences: he is not over what happened, but still, at times, he is ‘Alone on a wide wide sea.’ He feels that he is spreading his conventional Christian moral to those who need to hear it; in fact, the terrible darkness he shares with others serves to isolate them from the joys of the rest of humanity: they may be ‘wiser’ about what lies ‘across the Line,’ but they are also ‘sadder’ in their new knowledge.
Given these basic premises, what does the reader find ‘below the Line’? The answer is not always nightmare, but it is nearly always arbitrary. The clearest examples actually stem from the Mariner’s own psychology. Why does he kill the albatross? No explanation is given by Coleridge, and the slaying of the bird could reasonably stand for those indefinite but consequential actions that we look back upon, but cannot explain. There is certainly no suggestion of ill-will towards the bird in the poem. The mariner simply acts in this way with no apparent motive. Similarly, when he blesses the sea-creatures later in the poem, he does so ‘unaware.’ Suddenly, the albatross is loosed from his neck and sinks in the sea ‘like lead,’ but it is important to recognise that there is no conscious repentance in the Mariner’s actions. He acts inexplicably in a way that brings about his downfall early on in the poem, and then, later on, acts inexplicably in a way that seems to bring about his restoration. There is no moral regeneration here, but something more akin to magic, and something that the reader senses would make more sense in a dream than in the waking world. It is as though the mariner has found a magical ‘key’ to release himself (in blessing the water-snakes). Shooting the albatross might easily have been a good thing in the logic of the poem, as the mariners themselves contend: ‘Twas right, said they, such birds to slay,/That bring the fog and mist.’ It just so happened that it wasn’t.
The point of the Mariner’s ‘moral’ at the end of the poem is psychological, not theological. He has returned ‘above the Line’ to the world of comforting secure truths in which God, man and the natural world are bound in a unity of love. He has been ‘shriven’ by the Holy Man and healed (though only partially, it is clear). Now that he has the ‘kirk,’ the ‘rock’ and the ‘lighthouse top’ again in his world, he can believe such things, but he is still driven to repeat and relive his terrible ordeal again and again, when he recites his story to those marked out to hear his voice. The necessity of this catharsis for him proves the inadequacy of his own interpretation of his experiences: he is not over what happened, but still, at times, he is ‘Alone on a wide wide sea.’ He feels that he is spreading his conventional Christian moral to those who need to hear it; in fact, the terrible darkness he shares with others serves to isolate them from the joys of the rest of humanity: they may be ‘wiser’ about what lies ‘across the Line,’ but they are also ‘sadder’ in their new knowledge.
Given these basic premises, what does the reader find ‘below the Line’? The answer is not always nightmare, but it is nearly always arbitrary. The clearest examples actually stem from the Mariner’s own psychology. Why does he kill the albatross? No explanation is given by Coleridge, and the slaying of the bird could reasonably stand for those indefinite but consequential actions that we look back upon, but cannot explain. There is certainly no suggestion of ill-will towards the bird in the poem. The mariner simply acts in this way with no apparent motive. Similarly, when he blesses the sea-creatures later in the poem, he does so ‘unaware.’ Suddenly, the albatross is loosed from his neck and sinks in the sea ‘like lead,’ but it is important to recognise that there is no conscious repentance in the Mariner’s actions. He acts inexplicably in a way that brings about his downfall early on in the poem, and then, later on, acts inexplicably in a way that seems to bring about his restoration. There is no moral regeneration here, but something more akin to magic, and something that the reader senses would make more sense in a dream than in the waking world. It is as though the mariner has found a magical ‘key’ to release himself (in blessing the water-snakes). Shooting the albatross might easily have been a good thing in the logic of the poem, as the mariners themselves contend: ‘Twas right, said they, such birds to slay,/That bring the fog and mist.’ It just so happened that it wasn’t.
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