The Genie and the Albatross: Coleridge and the Arabian Nights

Abstract

Any student who has read into Coleridge from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’,¹ having been exercised by what the poem may be about, is bound to have come across this entry in Table Talk:

May 31, 1830

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 that 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 the only, or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the 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 Nights’ tale of the merchant’s sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well, and throwing the shells aside, 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.2