Perspectivism in Coleridge

Although Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” is a ballad—it recounts the mariner’s “ghastly aventure” (618) at sea as he retells it in his own words to the present wedding-guest—despite its one-sided story telling qualities, the poem retains multiple perspectives and utilizes several other voices besides just the mariner’s.  This perspectivism is the manner in which the audience is engaged in the story and further asked to observe their own observations.  

The voice of the wedding-guest is a perfect example.  His presence is acknowledged foremost at the beginning of the poem to frame the mariner’s story being told.  The wedding-guest’s actions interrupt the story just a few stanzas later as he “here beat his breast,/ For he heard the loud bassoon” (35-36).  Here, it is the guest’s impatience which is noted; even if he desires to be at the wedding, he is bound both by his own childlike curiosity and by the mariner’s persistence to tell his story.  The emotions of the wedding-guest at the surface of the story properly mirror the reader’s; though the audience/reader has other things to do, we are bound by the entrancing effects of story-telling and are unable to turn away from the start of such a story.

The beginning of part IV, halfway through Coleridge’s ballad, the wedding-guest enters back in at a shocking and disturbing point in the story, when the mariner’s crew drops dead.  This serves to recognize the eeriness both of the story being told and of the fact that the mariner is alive and in front of the wedding-guest/the reader to tell his story to begin with.  It re-situates the reader outside of the context of the story in a manner of reminding us that what we’re hearing/reading is the recount of a strange adventure at sea.  The wedding-guest’s growing fear at the tale being told again reflects the emotions of the reader as events in the poem get stranger.

“‘Marinere!’” explains the wedding-guest, “‘thou hast thy will:/ ‘For that, which comes out of thine eye, doth make/ ‘My body and soul to be still’” (363-365).  It is noted here that throughout the process of the story-telling, the listener and the teller trade places: by the end the listener is agitated instead of the mariner in desperate need of an audience to whom he can relate his tale of loneliness, and the teller is calmer, perhaps from the relief of having a listener, especially since the story is about his desolation and loneliness which was so sever “that God himself/ Scarce seemed there to be” (632-633).  Interestingly, the description of the wedding-guest’s discomfort with the story is noted by stillness—an adjective used to describe the witnessing moon over the sea as well as, at times, the sea itself.  The ocean is irrefutably a symbol of the sublime in its natural unpredictability and fear-inducing uncertainty by sailors and mariners whose lives depend on the ocean while they are traveling.  Consequently, the times it is silent and still in the poem (such as to emphasize the ship’s idleness in lines 111-114 and to describe the approaching harbor “clear as glass” in line 477) re-emphasize the subliminal-ness of the ocean—stillness does not devalue its unpredictability but instead symbolizes wisdom.  The ocean as a natural entity of wisdom in the face of humans is, indeed, an characteristic of the sublime.

The poem ends with a stanza that describes the effects the story has on the wedding-guest, not the mariner, and the effect is that the reader leaves the poem with a sense of their own reflected observations of the poem.  Gothic literature, “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” included, utilizes this perspectivism and self-awareness of the audience to distinguish itself from other romantic works at the time and make a commentary or questioning on values not previously investigated.  This unique quality gives the narrator of a poem the chance to interact directly with the reader.