“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

Abstract

With “The Ancient Mariner,” Coleridge found a medium in which the accumulated energies of his imaginative and intellectual life tried to speak at once. The poem soaked up planned works on the “Wandering Jew,” the “Origin of Evil,” Swedenborgian “Reveries,” the “excursion of Thor,” the “Ode on St. Withold,” the “Hymns to the Sun, the Moon, and the Elements,” the “Adventures of Christian, the mutineer,” and the “Hymn to Dr Darwin—in the manner of the Orphics” (CN I 45, 161, 165, 170, 174, and nn).¹ Science and politics blended with poetic aspiration, diffuse metaphysics, and spiritual desire. With so much of the poet pouring into the poem, there is some truth in Leslie Stephen’s suggestion that the “germ of all Coleridge’s utterances may be found—by a little ingenuity—in ‘The Ancient Mariner’ ” (Stephen 335).² As a representative matrix of Coleridge’s thought, it is characteristically multi-valent; House remarks that the “poem’s very richness at once tempts and defeats definiteness of interpretation” (House 93), which allows the poem’s vivid open-endedness to be part of its authority. Coleridge makes that elusiveness central to the poem through devices that purport to enclose it: as a story told to the wedding-guest, in the partial, religious explanation of events by the mariner himself and, after 1817, the gloss.