I… never exist wholly present to any Sight, to any Sound, to any Emotion, to any series of Thoughts received or produced / always a feeling of yearning, that at times passes into Sickness of Heart.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notebooks 1804-1806.
A flash of joy… And terror follows. From Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s gloss to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1817 edition.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge does not represent a Keatsian poetic humanism, but more a deeply vexed poetic transcendentalism, closer to the trembling pathos of Christian atonement than the balanced calm of classical eudaimonia. And yet, like Keats, Coleridge also believed in the place of individuation seeing it as an essential key to understanding human nature. He put it like this: There is in the heart of all men…the instinct and necessity in each man of declaring his particular existence and thus of singling or singularizing himself. The narrative of one of his greatest poems, The Ancient Mariner, offers a myth of individuation in which a kind of anti-hero (severed from both the collective and the cosmic) discovers who he has to be. Without doubt, the notion of Bildung – of the self, through trial and error, struggling to locate its true identity – lies at the heart of the drama. In the story of the self the poem remains a canonical work of daring navigation.
The plot of the ballad is relatively simple. The ancient mariner stops a man on his way to a wedding to tell him of his momentous sea voyage, a journey which starts in England, moves to the South Pole and then into the Pacific Ocean before, finally, returning to the very place from which it started. At the South Pole an albatross befriends the boat and loyally follows the vessel through the ice and mist only to be suddenly and inexplicably shot by the mariner. A curse falls on the boat and it is driven north to the Equator, where it is left stranded under a scorching sun. The sailors, suffering from dreams and hallucinations, place the dead albatross round the mariner’s neck. A skeleton-ship approaches in which Death and a female phantom Life-in-Death throw dice for the lives of the crew and the mariner. When the spectral boat vanishes the sailors die leaving the mariner alone in a state of despair until he finds himself spontaneously blessing the glittering water-snakes that surround the stationary vessel. The albatross falls from the mariner’s neck. The ship finally returns to the harbour it had left. The angelic spirits of the dead men leave their bodies and, as the boat sinks like lead into the sea, the mariner is pulled from the water by the pilot and a lo- cal hermit to tell his tale and seek forgiveness for his crime.
It is clearly an archetypal story of the pilgrim self; of exile and homecoming, of a returning to the same place but seeing it through the eyes of a transformed consciousness.
But such a wikipedia summary verges on banality, and is misleading. It robs the poem of its high voltage. It conveys nothing of the dazzling expressionist colours of the poem, nothing of the two dimensional immediacy of its canvas, nothing of the hypnotic cadences that slow the narrative down then drive it forward. It overlooks various ambiguities and, at times, the surreal nature of the action: the dream-like modality through which the poem oper- ates. The story may appear linear and simple, but its meanings are tangled and refractory, leaving more vexing riddles than crystalline reasons. Coleridge, like Wordsworth, was never satisfied with the poem. Sometimes he saw it as an allegory of the soul in the tradition of Dante; at other times, he seemed to regard it as a tale of magic, as if it was a late addition to the spell-binding Arabian Nights. His later prose gloss for the poem, emulating the format of theological commentaries on the Bible, so rare in the tradition of secular literature, only dramatises the actual heteroglossia of the poem. Was it so obscure and unwieldy or so deeply personal it needed the author to intervene with a supplementary text? Was Coleridge incapable, as Keats suggested, of living with poetic mysteries and metaphysical uncertainties?
There are many ways of reading the epic poem – it is, surely, an ecological poem as much as a theological poem – but, perhaps, the most inclusive way of reading the story is through the lens of automythography: to see it as an uncanny symbolic crystallisation of Coleridge’s own life. Such a reading makes the best sense of the poem’s unresolved tensions and puzzling ambiguities which Coleridge’s own prose gloss tends to hide and rationalize. The poem needs to be brought more fully into relationship with dark and unresolved elements in the author’s own anxious and confessional life.
A year before the composition of The Ancient Mariner in a letter to his brother Coleridge had already depicted himself as a wandering outcast, estranged from his own home:
My soul is sad, that I have roamed through life
Still most a stranger, most with naked heart
At my own home and birth place.
A year later in a poem addressed to the nightingale he had, once again, repeated the same image, seeing himself as:
Some night-wandering man whose heart is pierced
With the remembrance of a grievous wrong.
In miniature, these lines enact the predicament of the literary mariner, the isolate, full of remorse for the hellish crime he has committed. Much later in his life, Coleridge claimed he had made a mistake representing the mariner as an old man saying that the voyage had actually taken place fifty years before in his early youth, adding that he had told his tale of remorse ten thousand times since. The remark is doubly revealing. It brings out the obsessional and confessional nature of the man – ten thousand retellings of the same crime! – and also suggests that the mariner was the same age as the author when he was writing the poem. The literary figure and the poet begin to fuse. The (young) mariner is the young Coleridge! The ballad is the author’s unconscious self-portrait and self-prophecy. The poem was a traumatic confession which, as the years past, Coleridge could more and
more consciously acknowledge as his. Whatever the conflicts, contradictions and confusions in the poem it was his allegory, his existential truth.
Certain similarities between the two figures strike the reader at once: a compulsion to talk, the glittering mesmeric eyes, a superstitious cast of mind, the lonely disposition of the pariah. But, of course, there were many other deeper subterranean connections and continuities between Coleridge and his literary projection. The poet’s private journals touch on many of these inner affinities and affiliations. They reveal a solitary and inwardly tormented man wracked by remorse and propelled by an anguish he can neither fully comprehend nor easily control:
Oct.1803…o me! My very heart dies – This year has been one painful Dream/ I have done nothing…
April 12 1804…this for ever/ I have no rooted thorough thro’ feeling – & never exist wholly present to any Sight, to any Sound, to any Emotion, to any series of Thoughts received or produced / always a feeling of yearning, that at times passes into Sickness of Heart.
June 7th, 1806… O me! Now racked with pain, now fallen abroad…with a sense of intolerable Despair / & No other Refuge than Poisons that degrade the Being, while they suspend the tor- ment, and which suspend only to make the Blow fall heavier /
Coleridge’s extreme condition is emotionally identical to that of the mariner. It is as if Coleridge had, without fully realizing it, stumbled upon a character who carried his own myth:
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony…
I look’d to Heaven, and tried to pray;
But or ever a prayer had gusht,
A wicked whisper came, and made
My heart as dry as dust.
As for the mariner, so also for its tormented creator.
But what then does the albatross represent in an autobiomythographical reading of the ballad? As a broad symbol, of course, the bird signifies a number of qualities linked to goodness and holiness. Perhaps it is even linked obscurely to the dove of the Holy Ghost. Its meanings are polysem- ic. But what personal and traumatic feelings may Coleridge have brought to his symbolic creature? Where was the inner wound? What was the psychic connection between the outer symbol and the hidden life? Who or what had Coleridge murdered, and with such dire consequences?
Coleridge, like most of the Romantic poets, was aware that much in the life of the psyche had its deep roots in infancy and childhood. In a perspica- cious analysis of the nature of sorrow conducted in one of his private jour- nals, Coleridge attempted an examination of the ‘misty medley’ underlying any dominant feeling: Perhaps at certain points, a single almost insignifi- cant sorrow may, by association, bring together all the little relicts of pain & discomfort, bodily and mental, that we have endured even from Infancy. The sentence articulates a major pioneering insight into the life of feeling and sensibility, and it invites an inevitable question. Was there a powerful childhood experience lying underneath the sea-voyage metaphor of murder and exile, of remorse and alienation?
In a series of long autobiographical letters sent to Thomas Poole in the autumn of 1797, a few months before the conception of The Ancient Mariner, Coleridge located just such a moment. He recalled how, when he was seven years old, his mother had prepared some special sliced cheese for him, and how his elder brother, Frank, had rushed into the room and envi- ously minced it up. Coleridge continued: I returned, saw the exploit, and in an agony of passion flew at Frank…. he leaped up, & with a hoarse laugh
gave me a severe blow in the face – I seized a knife, and was running at him, when my Mother came in and took me by the arm – I expected a flogging – & struggling from her I ran away, to a hill at the bottom of which the Otter flows – about one mile from Ottery. After the violent clash between the two brothers, Coleridge had run away. He had stayed out all night in the bitter cold in a state of lonely terror. Exhausted, he had finally fallen asleep by the river’s edge under some thorn bushes until he was discovered by a search party to be warmly comforted by his aging father: I remember, & never shall forget, my father’s face, as he looked upon me…so calm and the tears stealing down his face. There is a reconciliation with the father, but Coleridge was so distressed by the episode he was driven to tell the story again and again – in his journals and poems, in his many letters and compulsive conversations.
The narrative of The Ancient Mariner is all there: the sudden impulse to murder (his brother), the fear of punishment (expecting a flogging), the desire to escape from kith and kin, the return of the beloved father, the neu- rotic compulsion to keep telling the story. It also illuminates why the first idea for the long ballad came to Coleridge in the form of The Wanderings of Cain, the Biblical story of the first person to kill his brother, to go into exile and suffer eternal remorse. Does the nomadic Cain mutate into the voyag- ing ancient mariner, and the murdered brother into the albatross, whose life was taken in a fit of unpremeditated passion not with a knife from the kitchen table, but with a crossbow? Is it possible that the disturbed energy of the poem and its warring ambivalences derive from this complex matrix of feelings going back into Coleridge’s childhood?
One other deep anxiety in Coleridge’s troubled life may also be involved. It concerned another murder in his life.
The apprehension that he had destroyed his poetic genius tormented Col- eridge. It is analysed in Dejection: an Ode, where he expresses a dread that he himself has killed his own shaping spirit of imagination and that the cultivation of his cerebral intellect had only further increased his alienation from the creative life:
And haply by abstruse research to steal
From my own nature all the natural man –
This was my sole resource, my only plan:
Till that which suits a part infects the whole,
And now is almost grown the habit of my soul.
It is another profound piece of Coleridgean self-analysis. Through the de- vious powers of his mind he has found a way to survive, but at the cost of feeling and imagination, the very springs of creative life. Much later in his autobiographical memoir, Biographia Literaria, Coleridge once again juxtaposed the intellect with emotions, quicksilver mines of metaphysical lore with the feelings of the heart. Could it be that the albatross not only represents the brother who Coleridge had wanted to kill but, also, the animating poetic life – the shaping spirit of imagination – which he felt he had violently suffocated in himself?
And I had done a hellish thing
And it would work ‘em woe:
For all averred I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
Of course, the two interpretations do not easily lock together, but an en- compassing symbol is always spacious. It allows multitudes and can house contradictory energies. It is most likely that the albatross, while still carrying all the religious and theological associations from the collective culture, also carried for its author a tense cluster of private terrors, hopes and apprehensions. What is certain is that Coleridge had created a larger myth than he realized, both for himself and for his reader. It was prophetic both of his own life and of his own epoch. For soon the idea of some catastrophic murder was to permeate the air, and with it came the feeling that the old maps provided by Christianity no longer fitted the terrain, the terra incognita towards which humanity floated. It was this apprehension that was to change the whole Romantic sensibility to augur in a different form of self-consciousness, inviting new metaphors and narratives for understanding and working on the self.
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The death of Coleridge in 1834, two years after the death of Goethe, ten years after the death of Blake, thirteen years after the death of Keats, marks the end of Romanticism. Coleridge had been one of its last towering figures, as his friend Charles Lamb phrased it, he had been its archangel, if a little damaged. His unruly multiform genius had expressed itself in a whole variety of genres: in poems, plays, sermons, essays, political and philosophical tracts, autobiographical-philosophical memoirs, as well as sixty private journals and nearly two thousand letters. As in The Ancient Mariner, the prolific work constantly probed the elusive nature of identity or what he called the flux and reflux of consciousness. Coleridge held up a bright glass to catch his own frowning existence: the submerged feelings, the free-floating anxieties, the nebulous half-thoughts. In the story of the self his autobiographical poems and his many journals form (like Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations and Montaigne’s Essays) rare and invaluable deposits. His mind was both a telescope and a microscope; it probed the furthest reaches of outer space and, at the same time, penetrated the darkest nooks and crannies of his disturbed psyche. In his spirituality he resembled Blake; in his love of Nature, Goethe. And, true to the spirit of Romanticism, he yearned for what he could not achieve: an all-encompassing unity in which the self could be joyously housed.
Yet, not infrequently, his life and work implode, exposing black holes, in- explicable matter, the blind motion of contingency:
O wedding guest! This soul has been
Alone on a wide wide sea;
So lonely ‘twas, that God himself
Scarce seemed to be.
Not design, but oblivious chance; not spiritual belonging, but existential loneliness. Weirdly, the Ancient Mariner not only prefigured much that was to follow in the author’s life, but much that was to follow in the wider cul- ture. Like Petrarch, Coleridge hovers between two cultural worlds. A Janus at the crossroads, his conscious work points back to the all encompassing theology of Christianity and the idealist philosophies of Plotinus and Plato; but the ‘accidental’, half-unconscious work – the many contradictions and tense ambivalences – points forward to a world shorn of metaphysical cer- tainty or any master narrative. The figure of the ancient mariner looms before us as an early outsider, an isolate severed from society and haunted by an inexplicable guilt, a disenchanted soul, one of the first reflexive anti- heroes in western culture.
In his next essay Peter Abbs will look at the self in relationship to the philosophy of Heidegger. For further details of the story of the self see: peterabbs.org