Uncertain Hour: The Ancient Mariner’s Destiny

Abstract

‘It is’ … Coleridge’s poem starts from the present tense, active, and, as it turns out, irresistible; the tense of absorbed narrative and compulsive confession. It is as if the whole poem is here in embryo: narrative vividness, fixed and immediate; human encounter, intense yet trancelike; questions, asked in terror or nightmare, needing answers but getting none, for whatever ‘answer’ there is comes obliquely. It is as if the story comes loose from time, gravitating towards that somehow eternal quality which haunts all its parts — the dramatic violence of sudden storms and appearances, sudden actions. ‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye’ — strange invocation, as if feared and hypnotic qualities could be somehow besought! From the start, there is curious double vision; everything is fated and necessary, everything startling and dreadful. Whether ‘it is’ an ancient Mariner, or an albatross, or a ship of death or a hermit, we encounter the object and it encounters us as in a dream. Everything seems perfectly alive, perfectly unexplained, perfectly inescapable, terribly intense. The poem is full of elementals. Its setting, perhaps the only one possible, is the sea. Its images are calm and storm, sun and moon, life and death; its values are loyalty and betrayal, fear and hope, guilt and deliverance. Everything is extravagant — the extreme case, the ultimate possible image :

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 !

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