Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The
Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,” told in seven parts, reveals itself to be a
lesson to Coleridge’s readers about the implications of mistrusting God and placing
stock in superstitions and myths.
This message is unsurprising when readers realize that Coleridge lived
his life as a Christian. He first
believed in the doctrine of Unitarianism, which postulates that God is just one
person, starkly contrasting the Trinitarian belief of God as three beings
existing consubstantially as one (“Unitarianism”). Later, Coleridge did actually subscribe to the orthodox
Trinitarian beliefs. According to The Longman Anthology of Gothic Verse,
Coleridge had abandoned belief in one God for belief in the Trinity by the time
he wrote “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” (Franklin). It is, however, difficult to discern
this fact based on the poem’s text.
There is no doubt, though, that Coleridge was promoting Christian ideals
in this verse.
The
plot of the poem, which employs the unique literary form of a frame narrative,
begins with a scene in which an old mariner accosts a guest outside of a
wedding and entices him to listen to a tale. The mariner’s story is of an ocean voyage on which he lost
his entire crew and suffered supernatural torture because he violated a
superstition concerning an albatross, a bird of great size. The crew had been struggling through
fog, mist, ice, and stormy weather.
Then an albatross appeared during the tempest and accompanied them on
their journey, at which point a south wind blew and buoyed them onward. It accompanied them, that is, until the
mariner shot the albatross with his crossbow.
The
crew had varying reactions to this incident. Initially, they feared for their lives that the mariner, upon
killing the albatross, had upset the balance and fate would plague them on
their travels. However, the wind
continued to blow and the sun continued to rise so they determined that killing
the albatross actually rid them of the foul weather. Things took a turn for the worse, however. The wind eventually stopped, the ship
was stuck on the ocean, and drought set in. Then the supernatural curses took effect; a ghost ship
visited the crew, all the men dropped dead, and the surviving mariner realized
his curse to endure a living death.
After days of this and once progress had resumed, a band of seraphs
animated the corpses until they abandoned the bodies to serve as a beacon to a
Hermit on the shore who would help the mariner. The mariner is then destined to relay his story to every
deserving soul so that God’s message may be realized.
The
juxtaposition of superstition and Christianity in this poem sets forth an
interesting situation for readers to consider. The poem deals outwardly with sailor superstitions and their
consequences. Shooting an
albatross, a mythically good omen for sea travelers, supposedly brings
misfortune upon the offenders.
That seems to be the case for the mariner, as the wind stops and travel
becomes impossible following the heinous act. Then things spiral further downward as the crew all die and
play bodily hosts to spirits. In
the mariner’s mind, it is no wonder that he sees all these calamities as a
direct result of his shooting the albatross. He is, after all, a sailor and likely buys into the belief
that the status of a bird can determine the fate of a voyage.
It
is intriguing, however, to view the happenings through a different lens, a
Christian lens. This lens posits
the idea that God controls all of the events of the adventure. God would have been the one treating
the sailors to an array of weather: mist, fog, storms, ice, breezes, and
waves. This would have simply been
following his plan. In other
words, all of the weather would have happened regardless of the presence of the
albatross. The mariner’s killing
the albatross is still a grievance, though not one defying superstition. Rather, it is one that defies God’s
commandment not to kill. It is
because the mariner sins against God’s will that he and his crew must suffer
tribulations. As God is an
almighty being, it would not even be outside of his power to kill the crew and
reanimate them with seraphs, or to conjure a fictitious ghost ship to frighten
the mariner and teach him a lesson.
Fate avenging the superstition-plagued albatross or God punishing the
mariner for his disobedience to the faith could both explain all of the
occurrences in the mariner’s tale.
Evidence
to support the position that God was the cause of the mariner’s mishaps, rather
than the supernatural, comes from a careful interpretation of Coleridge’s
text. First, the circumstances
become really bleak once the mariner employs the albatross in an almost
blasphemous manner. After his crew
decides to blame their troubles on his superstition violation, the mariner
enacts his own form of penance.
“Instead of the Cross the Albatross/About my neck was hung” (Coleridge
137-8). Where upon a good
Christian a cross should be seen, the mariner dons the albatross. This likely angers God even further;
not only did the mariner kill one of God’s innocent creatures, he now wears the
dead creature in place of a cross.
It is immediately following this revelation that the ghost ship appears and
the curse begins to set in, very possibly God’s work.
Further evidence comes with the
fact that the mariner only ever calls upon God in his times of need, when he is
especially trouble-laden. He does
not think, when the breeze is blowing and the sun is shining, to acknowledge
God then. A final supportive
example is in the fact that the Hermit saves the mariner. The seraph-band emerges from the corpses
and gives off a light that beckons to the Hermit, who knows they are a signal:
“’Where are those lights so many and fair/That signal made but now?” (Coleridge
558-9). Fate would have no reason
to guide the Hermit to the mariner for rescue. God, however, would want the mariner to be saved and given a
chance to live out his faith properly.
Thus, God arranges the seraphs to steer the Hermit to the mariner for
redemption.
Coleridge’s intention to portray
the mariner’s misfortunes and eventual salvation as acts of God becomes clear
when the mariner reveals his intentions to the wedding guest at the end of the
poem, when the frame story comes back into prevalence. The mariner confides to the wedding
guest that he has “strange power of speech” which when “anguish comes and makes
[him] tell/[His] ghastly aventure,” men cannot help but listen (Coleridge 620;
617-8). It is his duty to impart
his tale on certain people so that they may become wiser and will know and obey
the power of God. He, and in essence Coleridge, wishes to convey
the message that superstitions are superficial interpretations of God’s actions
and that they serve no redemptive purposes, as God does.
Works Cited
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere in Seven Parts.” Lyrical
Ballads:
With a Few Other Poems (London: Printed for J. & A. Arch, 1798).
Franklin, Caroline, Ed. The Longman Anthology
of Gothic Verse (Great Britain: Pearson
Education Limited, 2011).
“Unitarianism.”
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia.
13 April 2012. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 23 April 2012. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarianism>
Photo Source
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