European Romantic Review

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Unspeakable Discovery: Romanticism and the

“Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

Matthias Rudolf

To cite this article: Matthias Rudolf (2013) Unspeakable Discovery: Romanticism and
the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, European Romantic Review, 24:2, 185-210, DOI:
10.1080/10509585.2013.766401

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2013.766401

Published online: 20 Mar 2013.

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European Romantic Review, 2013
Vol. 24, No. 2, 185– 210, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2013.766401

Unspeakable Discovery: Romanticism and the “Rime of the

Ancient Mariner”
Matthias Rudolf∗

University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA

Coleridge’s investment in aesthetics and criticism has broadly been understood as

an attempt to overcome the Kantian bargain by which knowledge of the world is
gained by relinquishing the thing in itself. This paper seeks to supplement that
understanding by recasting the stakes of Kant’s critical philosophy in terms of a
conflict over the limits and possibility of “discovery.” Drawing on contemporary
accounts of discovery by Captain Cook and George Shelvocke, the essay
explores the critical role discovery plays in the “The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner” as an historical practice of maritime expansion and mapping, as a
textual event, and as an integral moment in the practice of literary criticism,
which is to say, of “reading.” Maritime discovery in the Rime, the essay argues,
allegorizes literary criticism, revealing both the promise and the limits of the
romantic conception of literature as containing its own criticism.

This essay reads Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as a poetic engage-
ment with discovery as well as a critical reflection on it. Discovery in the Rime concerns
not only the history and problematics of maritime exploration, but extends more
broadly to the relation of literature and criticism. The Rime has come to be accepted
as a paradigmatically romantic poem, one in which Romanticism and romantic aes-
thetics lie ready to be discovered by a critical reader.1 Coleridge continually revised
it, called it a “poem of pure imagination,” and in closing the Biographia Literaria’s
chapter on the imagination promised to make up for its missing derivation of the
“powers and privileges of the imagination” in an essay “prefixed to the poem of The
Ancient Mariner” (1: 306). The essay never did appear, its place taken instead by the
epigraph from Burnet with which he replaced the earlier “Argument(s)” of the Rime.
That Coleridge, as so often in his life, did not deliver on his promises does not
detract from the Rime as an exemplary poetic and romantic work; on the contrary, it
rather suggests that the Rime stands in for, and in some relation to, the difficulties Coler-
idge encountered in his endeavor to provide literary criticism with a solid philosophical
foundation. Coleridge’s philosophical project and his investment in the literary aes-
thetic has often been read through the critical lens of Kant and the questions that ani-
mated German Romanticism; indeed the Biographia Literaria parallels the attempts of
Kant’s successors (Fichte and Schelling, whom Coleridge’s failed deduction translates
to the point of plagiarism), as well as the early German Romantics around the Schlegel
brothers, Novalis and Hölderlin in Jena, to complete Kant’s critical system by positing
literature and the literary aesthetic as the locus where the supersensible could be pre-
sented substantially, rather than merely analogically as Kant had insisted. To this
new conception, the disciplinary formation of literary studies and criticism owes its
∗
Email: mprudolf@ou.edu

# 2013 Taylor & Francis

186 M. Rudolf

historical beginnings.2 This paper does not abandon that perspective, but seeks to sup-
plement it by reading the relation of Romanticism, literature, and criticism through the
topos of “discovery.”3 Indeed, I suggest that maritime discovery in the Rime allegorizes
literary criticism, and moreover that the material and literary practices of discovery,
especially maritime discovery, participate in the formation of the romantic conception
of literature as containing its own criticism.4
Discovery harbors an epistemological difficulty rooted in the non-identity of the
“event” of discovery and the “matter of fact” it makes available. To take the well-
worn example of Newton’s apple, although the event – Newton’s discovering – is dis-
tinct from what is discovered – gravity – the discovered matter of fact nonetheless only
becomes available in and through the event of discovery. Conversely, while the event
of discovery is contingent on the prior existence of the matter of fact discovered, it is
not determined by the characteristics of the discovered object, just as Newton’s disco-
vering, apples notwithstanding, is not determined by gravity itself. The predicament
constitutive of each discovery, which is also its challenge and difficulty, is that the
“event” and “matter of fact” of discovery are inextricably and contingently linked
even as they remain irreducibly discontinuous. The claim to have discovered – that
a discovery was made, that it took place – requires the exposition and representation
of this non-identity. Since discoveries need to be recognized and attested by others
as matters of fact, and since the claim to have been “the first” necessarily excludes
those others from the event of discovery, representations of discovery involve a para-
doxical task: they must produce the conditions for the iterability and verification of the
discovery, divorcing it from its “first” event, while they must at the same time secure
their claim to that discovery by portraying the event as the condition of possibility of
that knowledge. Discoveries are in this sense always “poetic,” precariously constituted
in the representation of the relation of the “event” and “matter of fact” that occasioned
them – not only by their discoverers, but also by those to whom the discoveries are
addressed and others who verify, repeat, and transmit that discovery.
The form of the Rime allegorizes, even presents itself as, a compendium of this
poetic process of discovery; it is not just a first-hand account of the Mariner’s discov-
ery. That the Mariner, compelled by an agony that returns “at an uncertain hour” (ll.
419) tells the tale over and over again, that it is then again retold uncounted times,
written down, redacted, glossed, modified by others, indicates both the Rime’s multiple
authorship (by minstrels, balladeers, editors), and its constitution by the multiple forms
of recognition and transmission of that discovery.5 The question of discovery in the
Rime concerns not just the Mariner’s discovery of the silent sea, but also the question
of how the Rime represents discovery and what it is the Rime discovers (which is not
necessarily the same thing the Mariner discovers). The difficulty lies therein that each of
its layers – the Mariner’s voyage; the telling of the tale to the Wedding Guest; the bal-
ladeer’s recounting of the event of that telling; the 1798 written record of the ballad; the
revisions of the poem from 1800 to 1830; the addition of the editorial gloss in 1817 –
rewrites the previous ones, entails erasures and supplements, and so blurs the distinc-
tions and boundaries between them. Hence the event of discovery always appears mul-
tiply; it is plural, spread across the fabric of the text by a network of references, by
figural displacements, repetitions, erasures, and supplementations.
To read the Rime as a poem of discovery rather than as a poem of guilt and redemp-
tion or a work of “pure imagination” is not a new undertaking. When William Empson
observed in 1972 that “[the Rime] is about adventure and discovery; it celebrates and
epitomizes the maritime expansion of the Europeans,” he recapitulated what John
 European Romantic Review 187

Livingstone Lowes in 1927 left implicit in his Road to Xanadu: that Coleridge’s “poem
of pure imagination” was rooted in the historical experience and logic of maritime and
colonial expansion (Poems 28).6 In Lowes’ eyes, Coleridge’s Rime epitomized the
“assimilating power” of the imagination: its capacity to “transmute” and “metamor-
phose” – “translate” – “fragments picked up from books of travel” and the “flotsam
and jetsam of seafaring and shipwreck” into the “immortal shapes compact of the uni-
versal truth of poetry” (115–16). In The Road to Xanadu, a text curiously devoid of
interpretation, Lowes set out “to discover how . . . out of chaos the imagination
frames a thing of beauty” (xi) and in the process meticulously documented the
sources of the Rime, to the point of demonstrating its word-for-word indebtedness to
contemporary travel narratives. But whereas Lowes regarded the Rime as “the compen-
dium and symbol of a process of immense significance” (116), metonymically aligning
the work of the imagination with the discoveries of maritime expansion and a narrative
of human progress, modern historicist criticism, conscious and suspicious of the ten-
dency of the romantic imagination to elide, repress and aestheticize the violence of
the colonial encounter and its aftermath, has instead focused on the ways the Rime
takes up and reflects Britain’s imperial and colonial involvement. Over the last two
decades, following Empson’s lead, and seeking to counter the reception of the Rime
as a symbolic parable of sin, guilt and redemption or as psychological allegory, a
series of assiduously researched historicist and post-colonial readings resituated the
poem in its social, political and historical contexts, drawing out the intertextual connec-
tions of the Rime to (not only Coleridge’s statements on) colonialism, the slave-trade,
and colonial disease.7 In the process, they have enriched our understanding of the
Rime’s and, by extension, Romanticism’s ambivalent and difficult engagement with
the legacy of colonial conquest and discovery.
Yet historicist readings have taken it as a matter of course that the question of dis-
covery in the Rime, beginning with, but not limited to, the Mariner’s claim that “We
were the first that ever burst / Into that silent sea,” is first and foremost a question of
its engagement with and reference to the social, political, and historical conditions
and effects of the discovery of the New World. Taking the Rime as “a composite
voyage alluding to the originary moments in European maritime exploration . . . from
Magellan . . . to Cook,” in Levy’s elegant formulation (694), these readings sought
the meaning of discovery in its intertextual relation to the historical archive. Hence
the labor of the historicist critic itself became a labor of discovery: to unearth and recon-
struct a historicized network of discursive references, textual borrowings and influences
that relate the Rime to the projects of geographical and scientific discovery.8 Reading,
as a (disciplinary) practice of discovery, thus all too easily became a matter of identify-
ing references and of mapping the text onto a pre-existing field of reference. This
essay’s focus on discovery as both an historically contingent and institutionalized prac-
tice of maritime colonial expansion and as an integral part of the practice of literary cri-
ticism, which is to say, of “reading,” traces a different but related itinerary. Inasmuch as
modernity is made possible and even actualized by the Cartesian idea of method, as
Pfau argues (961), and inasmuch as discovery designates the radical contingency of
the event of the new entering into knowledge, discovery appears as an always prolifer-
ating site of the struggle to define the conditions and terms in which modernity comes to
characterize itself, its past, and its future aspirations. In this sense, the Rime figures as a
literary and historical site in and over which that struggle is carried out.
At the close of the Critique of Pure Reason’s transcendental analytic, Kant, in a
passage that seems to echo Coleridge’s Mariner before the fact, raises the question
188 M. Rudolf

of criticism’s task in terms of a contest between mapping and maritime discovery. The
passage follows on the transcendental analytic’s argument that the grounds of all poss-
ible knowledge, and so the “source of all truth” (354), were the principles of pure under-
standing. Mapping, in the sense that Kant uses it, involves the “empirical use of the
rules of the understanding,” which represent “the agreement of our cognition with
objects of possible experience,” i.e. “matters of fact” – phaenomena, appearances,
or beings of sense (355; 360). Maritime discovery, on the other hand, denotes the
“transcendental use” of the a priori principles of the understanding, an employment
that would extend their reach beyond all appearances to “things in general and in them-
selves” – to the very being of things as things, Kant’s noumena, about whose meaning
Coleridge was so skeptical.9 Kant wrote:

We have now traveled through the land of pure understanding, and carefully inspected
each part of it, but we have also surveyed it and determined the place for each thing in
it. But this land is an island, and enclosed in unalterable boundaries by nature itself. It
is the land of truth (a charming name), surrounded by a broad and stormy ocean, the
true seat of illusion, where many a fog bank and rapidly melting iceberg pretend to be
new lands and, ceaselessly deceiving with empty hopes the mariner [Seefahrer]
looking around for new discoveries, entwine him in adventures from which he can
never escape and yet also never bring to an end. But before we venture out on this sea,
to search through all its breadth and become certain of whether there is anything to
hope for in it, it will be useful first to cast yet another glance at the map of the land we
would now leave, and to ask, first, whether we could not be satisfied with what it contains,
or even must be satisfied with it out of necessity, if there is no other ground on which we
could build; and, second, by what title we occupy even this land, and can hold it securely
against all hostile claims. (Kritik 267 – 68; Critique 354; translation modified).

Kant imagines a scene in which, poised on the shores of the land of pure understanding,
“we” are about to set foot on a ship hoping to make new discoveries and to extend the
reach of our understanding and knowledge. Kant hesitates and, unsure not merely of the
voyage’s necessity but even if it might be necessary to forgo the voyage for the sake of
preserving the knowledge already gained, glances at the map – at the transcendental
analytic – he had drawn up. Discovery holds both a promise and a threat, and the “criti-
cal investigation” (355) Kant proposes is to bring the former closer to fulfillment and
guard against the latter. “We” might say two things here: first, any discovery that
might occur will already be constrained by the map, and, second, Kant’s gesture
turns a question of maritime discovery into a question of reading, where what is to
be discovered is the possibility of discovery itself.
Should “we” set sail, then? Kant first points out that even if the map were the source
of all truth, it doesn’t seem to us enough to be lectured merely on what is true. And were
the “critical investigation” to provide nothing more than what we already know to be
true, if it would produce only more maps of what is already known, the undertaking
“would not be worth the expenditure and preparation” (355). Yet no curiosity is
“more disadvantageous to the expansion of our knowledge” than that which presumes
to know the use of its discoveries in advance. And that is exactly the risk of reading the
map. An understanding that is content with truth, i.e. one that occupies itself only with
its empirical use, with maps and mapping, “does not reflect on the sources of its knowl-
edge” and for this reason cannot “determine for itself the boundaries of its use and
knowing what may lie within and without its whole sphere” (355). Ultimately uncriti-
cal, such reading inevitably oversteps its “natural boundaries” and can never “be sure of
its claims and possession” (355). Yet much the same thing turns out to be true about
 European Romantic Review 189

discovery. Not content with what has merely been expounded as true and seeking “that
which one has desired to know,” discovery deceives itself by “substituting the logical
possibility of concepts for the transcendental possibility of things” (358), and so envel-
opes itself in tautologies and contradictions from which it cannot escape.10 Given over
to the desire to know and left to their own devices, neither mapping nor discovery pro-
duces secure or true knowledge, since both transgress and abandon the “unalterable
boundaries” of the land of pure understanding.
The task of criticism thus consists in tracing the limits of the true, and it will involve
a limitation and redefinition of discovery in relation to mapping. We can catch a
glimpse of this in Kant’s aside that “the deep inquiries we have undertaken [are] requi-
site to that end [of determining the boundaries of the true]” (355). Insofar as these “deep
inquiries” refer to the transcendental analytic, the voyage of discovery has already been
made, the map “we” are glancing at charted during its course, which (for us) has yet to
come to an end (we are discovering discovery, as it were). With Kant, and as readers of
his map, “we” are always in two places at once: still on the island waiting to set sail and
already on his ship, reading and testing the limits of maps. On the other hand, and as the
figure of “rapidly melting icebergs” already suggests, Kant goes on to argue that dis-
covery ought not to be concerned with “objects of our senses” but with the absolutely
negative entities he calls noumena: that which is left of the iceberg as iceberg once it
has melted away, as it were (360). Located beyond the domain of sensibility, noumena
function as “boundary concepts,” and designate a radically empty form of possible
knowledge into whose possibility even discovery can have no insight. A critical discov-
ery thus marks the event of an “unknown something” in thought that, despite and
because of its radical negativity, does not repudiate all knowledge as such. Rather,
the event of this discovery (it is a mere event, with no matter of fact proper to it)
results in a “negative expansion” that limits the mapping activity of the understanding
and simultaneously “sets boundaries for itself” by only thinking things “under the name
of an unknown something” and refusing the temptation to knowledge to cognize them
as such (363).
Kant’s “critical investigation” thus effects a figural reversal: discovery finds itself
enclosed by the very “boundaries” that delineate the “land of truth” (no wonder,
then, that discovery happens on the map), while the mapping activity of the understand-
ing encounters a limit, not of sensibility, but of critical thought. Discovery takes the
place of mapping, and mapping that of discovery. Criticism, we might say, translates
discovery into mapping and, in so doing, enables the mapping of discoveries and safe-
guards the possibility of knowledge by limiting the reach of reason. But inasmuch as it
takes place at the limit of knowledge, criticism exposes itself to an encounter with that
which can neither be posited nor grasped as such by thought, to an event of discovery
that in limiting the understanding inscribes itself in the representation of the “true.” In
this sense, discoveries are unspeakable – they cannot be articulated or substantially pre-
sented but as the figure of a boundary that “encloses” a truth it does not as much reveal
as make possible. They appear, we might say, as figures of translation, as the outline of
what they are not but yet make possible.
In a general sense, to translate is a matter of reading and giving an account of that
reading, of giving an equivalent of a text, of saying (or writing) what one thinks in the
words of others (we do not ever own the words we employ). But it is also to carry a
something – an “it” – from one place to another, as if across a divide, over an obstacle,
geographical, textual, or otherwise. In both of these senses, to translate is to represent
for the first time something that was elsewhere, but not yet here. Translation discovers
190 M. Rudolf

– it carries over and makes intelligible in a familiar idiom what was unknown, even
foreign and strange, much as Cook’s A Voyage Towards the South Pole translates
first-hand observation, nautical data, log-book entries, daily sextant readings, and
water-currents in order to discover, to “represent, for the first time,” Terra Australis
Incognita. As representation, discovery is the always provisional result of a practice
of a translation that is already underway. Yet as the “first time,” as the event of the
appearance of the new, discovery interrupts the process of translation, causes it to
stutter, to begin again, and altering its course, to continue. The difficulty with
regards to the Rime, and perhaps more generally, lies therein that these two dimensions
are irrevocably intertwined, that they have no common origin, transcendental or other-
wise, and that the possibility of the one demands the legibility of the other – in the same
text.

Mapping the Voyage

In 1817, Coleridge replaced the argument to the Rime, which he had already changed
for the 1800 edition of the Lyrical Ballads, with an epigraph taken from Thomas
Burnet. These changes mark a significant shift in the presentation of the Rime, from
a nearly exclusively geographical description of the poem in the 1798 Argument, to
an endorsement of the moral value of the Rime in the revised 1800 Argument, and
finally to the metaphysical speculation signaled by the Burnet epigraph. All three
head notes provide the reader with different maps of the poem: a physical geography
in the 1798 Argument, which charts the course of the ship; a moral geography in the
1800 argument, where the killing of the albatross takes the place of the second leg
of ship’s voyage; and a cognitive geography in the Burnet epigraph, which speaks of
“contemplat[ing], in the mind, as on a tablet, the image of a better and greater
world.”11 Burnet’s epigraph’s distinctions between invisible and visible beings, as
well as its interest in the contemplation and interior composition of a “better” world,
figure an implicit counter to Kant’s notion that the realm beyond the reach of experience
was substantially empty. The passage echoes the practices of a cartographic tradition
that, as Alfred Hiatt has shown, dates back to the Middle Ages and fills in blank
spaces on maps with “a mixture of fantasy, curiosity, mystery, and authority” (224).
Hiatt argues that while medieval cartographers relied primarily on Greek and Roman
geographical theories and histories to fill in and illustrate what lay beyond the
known world, from the fifteenth century onward cartographers increasingly relied on
information returned from voyages of discovery, even though they continued to fill
in blank spaces on the map – the interior of Africa, e.g., and the then fictional southern
continent, “Terra Australis” – from an amalgam of travel narrative, conjecture, and
metaphysical speculation. In this context, Coleridge’s quotation of Burnet – particu-
larly the mention that “the human mind has always desired the knowledge of these
things, but never attained it . . . [; it] is helpful sometimes to contemplate in the
mind, as on a tablet, the image of a greater and better world” – suggests that the
Rime not only looks beyond the limits of the known world, as if across Kant’s
“broad and stormy ocean,” but that the Rime itself figures as a map of that world.
While the Rime drew from a wide variety of sources, as Lowes demonstrated, the
most influential one may well have been Captain George Shelvocke’s 1726 Voyage
around the World.12 The frontispiece to the book contained a map, unironically cap-
tioned “A correct map of the world,” that differs quite a bit from the one we know,
especially in the region of the Pacific (Figure 1). New Holland is connected to New
 European Romantic Review 191

Figure 1. The map from the frontispiece of Shelvocke’s A voyage round the world by the way
of the great South Sea, perform’d in the years 1719, 20, 21, 22, in the Speedwell of London, of 24
guns and 100 men, (under His Majesty’s Commission to cruize on the Spaniards in the late war
with the Spanish crown). (G420 .S53 1726). Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.

Guinea by a land bridge and has no eastern boundary; Baja California is an island off
the coast of California; Alaska and Northern Canada, their coastlines breaking off, are
uncharted; Antarctica doesn’t exist. In its mixture of hypothetical and exploratory cor-
rectness, Shelvocke’s map leaves the unexplored territories – the “Terra Incognita” of
early modern maps – blank. Earlier mapmakers had filled out these blank spaces on the
basis of conjecture and legend, but late eighteenth and early nineteenth century maps
were more “correct” in that they either left the unexplored literally blank or explicitly
marked it as “unknown.” Shelvocke’s map, although it treats some commonly held
assumptions as true (such as the supposed course of the Niger River), largely
follows the latter practice, leaving blank spaces in accordance with the progress of dis-
covery. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Pacific appears on Shelvocke’s
map as the single, largest blank space on the earth, uncharted and largely unexplored –
“a silent sea” indeed. Less than a half a century later, Shelvocke’s map was already out-
dated. Captain Cook’s successive voyages into the Pacific had established the bound-
aries of Australia, the existence of Terra Australis Incognita, or Antarctica, and the
separation of Alaska and Russia by the Bering Strait.13 The blank spaces on the map
had been filled in, turned into known territories, made into possessions. If we think
of the blank spaces on the map as the white of an empty piece of paper, as if awaiting
and inviting its inscription, we might also say that Cook’s voyages – and those of
others like him – literally wrote those spaces out of and into existence. Discovery
“worlds the world” in writing, and writing in turn discovers the world and makes it
available to others to discover.14
If Cook’s legacy is one of the discovery of new lands and charting the limits of the
endless expanse of water that enveloped the earth, then the Mariner’s voyage seems to
bear little resemblance to those of Cook. Although his ship passes through the “land of
mist and snow” where ice-bergs dwarf the ship, the Mariner discovers no new lands:
there is no landfall, not even a sighting of land. Yet, Cook’s discovery of “the great
southern continent,” and the Mariner’s voyage mirror each other in some significant
192 M. Rudolf

aspects, beginning with the circumstance that, like Coleridge’s Mariner, Cook did not
“discover” Terra Incognita as much as he deduced its existence.
For his second voyage, Cook was given secret orders “to proceed to the southward
in order to make discovery of the continent [Terra Australis] until you discover it” and
then to explore the coast, observe the nature of the land and the “natives.”15 The orders
were never fulfilled. Cook, thwarted by the lack of supplies and pack-ice that “so
petered [the sea] that the land is thereby inaccessible,” did not even lay eyes on
Terra Australis Incognita. He is often credited with its discovery because he inferred
its existence from the irregular latitudinal distribution of icebergs and pack-ice, of
which he supposed the “great southern continent” to be the absent cause (2: 230).
Cook’s reasoning proceeded negatively. “If no such land exists,” it would follow
“that the cold ought to be everywhere nearly equal around the pole” and that conse-
quently he “ought to see ice every where under the same parallel, or near it” (2:
230). Since the contrary had been found to be the case, Cook concluded that there
ought to be a “track of land near the pole which is the source of most of the ice,”
and that “the greatest part of this southern continent must lie within the polar circle”
(2: 230). Cook’s discovery of the existence of the southern continent takes place as
an event of thinking in accordance with concepts that posit Terra Australis Incognita
as the “unknown something,” the absent cause and origin of the empirical phenomena
– icebergs, currents, weather patterns – whose appearance he had mapped.
Having mapped what was possible and sailed as far as he dared in the great and
stormy seas of the southern ocean, Cook stakes his claim that Terra Australis existed
on its very inaccessibility to discovery. “No man will ever venture farther than I
have done” and “the lands which may lie to the south will never be explored,” Cook
wrote, nor would their actual discovery “have answered any end, or have been the
least use, either to navigation and geography, or indeed to any other science” (2:
231). And yet this abandonment of actual discovery, even of its possibility, seamlessly
leads to its entirely imaginary event. Cook moves from describing the dangers of dis-
covery to a description of a country that lies beyond the horizon of what he had experi-
enced from the deck of his ship:

Thick fogs, snow storms, intense cold, and every other thing that can render navigation
dangerous must be encountered; and these difficulties are greatly heightened, by the inex-
pressibly horrid aspect of the country; a country doomed by Nature never once to feel the
sun’s rays but to lie buried in everlasting snow and ice. The ports which may be on the
coast, are, in a manner, wholly filled up with frozen snow of vast thickness. (2: 231)

No landfall, not even a sighting of Terra Australis, and yet Cook gives a description of
precisely what he hasn’t seen, and calls it “inexpressibly horrid.” The inexpressible is
most definitely not Terra Australis, but rather Cook’s idea of it, the both rational and
fanciful figuration of an “unknown something” he imagines to have discovered in
the phenomenal appearance of a world that points back to and beyond itself. Cook enti-
tles his book A Voyage Towards the South Pole, and – nomen est omen – his text itself
moves toward that largest remaining blank part of the map. And then, after it has
reached its southernmost point, the text jumps back beyond that limit, and what it
encounters there is too horrible, too savage, to even be worth being discovered:

If this imperfect account of the formation of these extraordinary floating islands of ice,
which is written wholly from my own observations, does not convey some useful hints
to an abler pen, it will, however, convey some idea of the lands where they are formed.
 European Romantic Review 193

Lands doomed by Nature to perpetual frigidness; never to feel the warmth of the sun’s
rays; whose horrible and savage aspect I have not words to describe . . . If any one
should have resolution [the name of Cook’s ship] and perseverance to clear up this
point by proceeding farther than I have done, I shall not envy him the honour of the dis-
covery; but I will be bold to say, that the world will not be benefited by it. (2: 241 –42)

Cook discovers by inference, observing the ice islands, recording their locations and
patterns of appearance, logging the weather, and then deducing from these outward
signs – contingent happenings beyond the ship – the existence of something he has
“not words to describe” that is yet savage and horrid, “alien.” At the outer limit of the
known, language can both not apply to Terra Australis and proclaim its existence, as if
there were something beyond the reach of words that nonetheless could be shown in
language. The “words” that would describe the “aspect” of the unknown more properly
will come from an other, “abler pen,” which, as Cook’s pun on the name of his ship (Res-
olution) implies, would in turn have access to Terra Australis only by following the hints of
Cook’s pen – that which is “written wholly from my own observations” – and the path
charted out by the course of the Resolution’s voyage. The implication is clear: what
Cook has “not words to describe” is nonetheless inscribed in his account, such that any
further discovery of Terra Australis Incognita will merely repeat, literally in other
words, his figural discovery: even a landfall on the shores of Terra Australis, the “descrip-
tion of its soil and animals,” would be but a translation of what Cook had already written,
the event of whose discovery is prescribed as an event of reading: of Cook’s Voyage
Towards the South Pole, as a literal following in the figural wake of Cook’s ship.
If Cook’s knowledge of extreme southern geography is grounded in the world of
empirical fact and based on the application of laws of cause and effect and the scientific
accumulation, mapping and translation of nautical and meteorological data, the Rime
has generally been read as taking place in an imagined, rather than real geography. Yet
the geography of the Rime is not entirely fantastical. Mapping the course of the Mariner’s
voyage in the context of eighteenth-century discovery literature reveals that the Mariner’s
discovery of the silent sea appears as a repetition of Cook’s “discovery” of Terra Incognita,
as the crossing of an imaginary line that both requires and resists its later translations.
Superimposed on Shelvocke’s map, I have reconstructed the Mariner’s ship’s route,
and marked the spots where central events of the poem take place (Figure 2). The ship
leaves Britain, sails south through the Atlantic, crosses the equatorial line, and, driven
by “A wind and tempest strong / For days and weeks” (ll. 46–47), moves on towards
the South Pole. The first circle marks the Mariner’s slaying of the albatross with his
crossbow. The ship then sails north – “The sun came up upon the right” – aided by
“a good south wind” (ll. 81; 69), how long we know not, until it reaches the equator,
where it is becalmed. Somewhere in the interval – where we cannot tell – the ship
and its crew discover the Pacific Ocean (gestured towards by the two parallel lines):
“We were the first that ever burst / Into that silent Sea” (ll. 101–2). In the very next
stanza, but at quite a geographical remove from the presumed boundary to the silent
sea, the ship is becalmed at the equator, “stuck, . . . / As idle as a painted ship /
Upon a painted Ocean” (ll. 111–13). A dotted circle traces the ship’s languishing in
the doldrums, indicating that the ship, as if drawn magnetically back to the land of
ice and snow, drifts imperceptibly southwards (later, the ship will have to sail north
again to reach the equator [ll. 327–90]). It is a period of inexpressible suffering: the
Mariner’s shipmates blame him and hang the albatross around his neck; there is the
encounter with the spectre ship and the ensuing death of the entire crew who curse
194 M. Rudolf

Figure 2. The course of the Mariner’s voyage, superimposed on Shelvocke’s map [A voyage
round the world by the way of the great South Sea, perform’d in the years 1719, 20, 21, 22, in the
Speedwell of London, of 24 guns and 100 men, (under His Majesty’s Commission to cruize on
the Spaniards in the late war with the Spanish crown). (G420 .S53 1726). Special Collections,
University of Virginia Library.]

him as they die followed by the “seven days and seven nights” the Mariner suffers in
agony “Alone, alone, all, all alone / Alone on a wide wide sea” (ll. 224–25) which
come to an end when he “blesses” the water snakes “unaware” (ll. 277–79). The
ship begins to move north towards the equatorial line again, where it comes to a
halt, and “With a short uneasy motion – / Backwards and forwards half her length”
(ll. 391–92) makes “a sudden bound” into a magical, spirit-aided voyage home, to
whose route the Rime gives no clues. We might speculate that the voyage goes straight
through China and Asia (or America, for that matter), or that the ship sails through the
undiscovered Northwest Passage (a route Cook tried and failed to find on his last
voyage in 1778 because of the northern ice-packs). It is also possible (but the
Mariner says the ship heads north) that the ship takes the conventional route taken
by Shelvocke around the Cape of Good Hope.
The geographical glossing over and blurring of the Mariner’s return is peculiar for a
poem that claims both in the 1798 and 1800 “Arguments” to be about “the manner in
which the Ancient Mariner came back to his own country.” The manner of returning
home the Rime portrays is that of a passage through a geographical and temporal
lacuna, as if ship and Mariner passed through a vacuum – the Rime says “The air is
cut away before, / And closes from behind” the ship (ll. 429–30). The possibility of
this passage is the condition for the Mariner’s arrival on the (properly geographical)
shores of his “own countrée” (l. 472) and the telling of his tale. Miraculous as it is
unmappable, the Mariner’s return voyage links the geographical discovery to his
account of it to the hermit by way of a translation – a carrying over, across or
through a blank space on the earth.16
The ship emerges from this space itself translated, transformed into a figure of the
spectre-bark. And then, having crossed the “harbor bar” (yet another line), its passage
home is interrupted as if by its own shipwreck, going down in a whirlpool just as the
pilot’s boat with the “hermit good” arrives to guide it to its mooring place. If this is
 European Romantic Review 195

the end of the ship’s voyage, it is also the beginning of the Mariner’s rescue, a rescue that
appears as a translation, as a passage from one vessel to another, for the Mariner “finds
himself” in the pilot’s boat which ferries him to the shore of his country, where he entreats
the hermit to shrive him. The hermit complies, the Mariner tells his tale – translates his
experience, represents his discovery for the first time – and is then left “free.” But the
Mariner’s tale, like the translations that enabled it, remains incomplete, and his
freedom is only ever temporary, leaving him to wander the earth in search of the man
who will, again for the first time, hear his tale. And this wandering, too, is a passage
as if through a blank space: the Rime gives no account of it, and inasmuch as the
Mariner emerges with the beginning of the Rime and disappears at its end, we might
say that the Rime itself emerges from that blank space, as if a testament to and
representation of it.

“We were the first”

The discovery of the “silent sea” is the only geographical discovery in the poem. It is
simultaneously over- and underdetermined, and appears as a symptomatic point of con-
densation: ostensibly the inaugural event of the historical sequence of all voyages into
the “silent sea,” it signals the beginning of the Mariner’s penance, locates his tale in the
history of maritime exploration, and marks the Rime’s and the Mariner’s entry into an
uninscribed space, as if into an invisible or noumenal world. Moreover, it also repeats
and reworks Cook’s “discovery” of Terra Australis Incognita, however ironically, and
comes to pass as the event of a translation.
The two stanzas that precede the discovery of the “silent sea” link that discovery to
the Mariner’s killing of the albatross, and parody from a distance the empirical pro-
cedures of Cook’s discovery of Antarctica.

And I had done a hellish thing,

And it would work ’em woe:
For all averr’d, I had killed the Bird
That made the Breeze to blow.

Nor dim ne red, like God’s own head,

The glorious Sun uprist:
Then all averr’d, I had kill’d the Bird
That brought the fog and mist.
‘Twas right, said they, such birds to slay,
That bring the fog and mist. (ll. 89 – 98)

Like Cook, who catalogs temperatures, sea currents, the location and number of ice
islands in order to discover their source, the mariners too look to the phenomenal
appearance of things beyond the ship – the wind and the fog and mist – except, of
course, that what the mariners are trying to establish is less the source of ice islands
than the Mariner’s character. They act as if the weather patterns would reveal the Mar-
iner’s morality, reading them as the effect of an absent cause: the slaying of the alba-
tross. Like Cook’s “discovery” of Antarctica, their discovery would be an inference
rather than a matter of fact. Yet quite unlike Cook, the Mariner and his ship-mates
do cross the threshold of an actual discovery and they literally encounter the “horrible
and savage aspects” of that which awaits the discoverer. But there is also another differ-
ence. Cook’s account of his discovery, which translates the writing of others (the first
mate’s chart references, entries into various ship logs, etc.), utilizes the plural “we”
196 M. Rudolf

when it renders daily events – “we stood to South;” “what we had seen, was either a
group of islands or the continent” (Cook 230) – but as soon as Cook begins musing on
what, or whether anything, had been discovered, he uses the singular “I,” e.g. when he
writes “I can be bold enough to say that no man will ever venture farther than I have
done” (242). The captain’s right to claim discovery was a commonplace, but in the
case of the Rime, where, as Stevenson has pointed out, the ship has no captain, the dis-
covery of the silent sea is collective, the claim to being the “first” belonging to a plural
“we:” “We were the first that ever burst / Into that silent sea” (ll. 101–2).17 The lines in
which the mariners appear as exceptionally bad and superstitious discoverers (but dis-
covers nonetheless), establish a pattern of inclusion and exclusion that the communal
“we” that discovers the Pacific sublates: “They” first exclude the Mariner because
the Mariner killed the bird that made the breeze to blow (even though it is still
blowing), and then “they” laud him for the slaying because the bird had brought the
fog and mist (even though the bird appeared well after of the fog and mist). So in
saying that “we were the first,” the Mariner performatively asserts his (re)integration
into the community of men on the ship, making himself an “accomplice,” to use the
gloss’s terminology, to his shipmates’ superstitions, just as the shipmates make them-
selves “accomplices” to his crime when they justify it. Thus the discovery of the silent
sea sutures two narratives onto each other – that of the ship’s voyage into the hitherto
unknown, and that of the Mariner’s character, which is also, but not only, a question of
the moral valuation of his slaying the albatross.
The Rime represents the discovery of the silent sea in terms of these two narrative
strands. The event of discovery – be it that of the Mariner’s shipmates or that of the
silent sea – appears retroactively as the condition of possibility of their relation,
which rearticulates the Mariner’s in- and exclusion from the discovering “we.” But
the discovery is unmappable, occurring at a geographical point whose location disap-
pears at the moment one would want to pinpoint it. The Mariner, in other words, can say
that and what “we” discovered, but he cannot say where that discovery happened.
The breezes blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow follow’d free:
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea. (ll. 99– 102)

The first two lines figure the motion of the ship cutting through the sea – albeit without
the literal presence of the ship, which is figured as the invisible node in or absent
mediator of a causal chain it holds together.18 The latter two lines, by contrast,
declare the occurrence – the mere having happened – of a past event: somewhere
along the way, there was a discovery. The moment of discovery is figured as “bursting”
through an (invisible) barrier, as a passage from one space into another, as the crossing
of a threshold or of a virtual line. The two phrases are linked by a colon, so the second
phrase would seem to expand on, translate, or illustrate the first. But how is a “bursting
into” to represent a continuous line? Given that a line – a continuous extension of the
ship’s path cutting through the sea – appears as a series of points, all of which are alike
– at every moment, the breeze was blowing, the foam was flying, the furrow was fol-
lowing freely – the point at which the ship “bursts into that silent sea” disappears into
the sameness of the line. Discovery here occurs as casually as it is noted by the past
tense of the verb (“we were”), indistinguishable from the narrative temporality in
which it is related. Somewhere, “we” might say, “we” discovered, and this somewhere
could be anywhere on the ship’s path. The event of discovery remains phenomenally
 European Romantic Review 197

indistinguishable from the path of the ship, even as the Mariner proclaims its epistemo-
logical and historical “firstness.”19
If the event of discovery is figured as the path of the ship, it is characterized by a
peculiarly vacillating, doubled perspective. The Mariner says that the “furrow followed
free,” yet a furrow only appears to “follow” a ship when that ship, like the sublimity
of Kant’s pyramids in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, is regarded from a particu-
lar distance, such that its wake appears detached from the ship. From the deck of a ship,
its furrow would seem to flow away from rather than follow the ship. Simultaneously in-
and outside of the communal “we,” the Mariner is both on the ship “burst[ing] into the
silent sea” and beyond it, looking back on, indeed reading that “we” – himself, the crew,
the ship – discovering. The relation of the ship and the Mariner appears as a giddy oscil-
lation between two unlocatable points: the point at which the ship, the Mariner, and the
crew “burst” into the Pacific, and the point beyond the ship where that “bursting” is
matter-of-factly called “the first.” The gaze of the Mariner’s “we” traverses a space
that contains, sublates, and collapses within it his own temporal distance to the discover-
ing “we,” and in that movement incessantly translates the matter of fact of discovery into
its event, and the event of discovery into its matter of fact. Marked by the belatedness of
the discovery’s translation, the vantage point of the “we” becomes indistinguishable from
that of the text, inscribed in it as the very condition of possibility of discovery: “we were
the first” is a “zero figure,” absolutely literal, non-figurative, self-referential, a matter of
fact that designates the space of a literal translation, pointing to itself reading the ever-dis-
appearing event of discovery in the flight of the figure of the ship.20 This space of trans-
lation, suspended between two points (the one within, the other without the ship), touches
on the literality of a “we” that is also the “we” of reading. If the phrase “we were the first”
is the matter of fact of discovery, its event is always also the multiple event of its reading.
In this sense, the discovery of the silent sea comes to pass as a literary event that can be
located neither in the text of the Rime nor on any existing map, but rather traverses both as
the figural event of its translation.

Agony and Discovery

If the discovery of the silent sea establishes the poem’s engagement with the event of
discovery, then the Mariner’s shriving by the hermit figures the moment where discov-
ery enters into representation and becomes, as it were, a matter of fact. The shriving
stands at the end of the Mariner’s voyage of discovery: it marks his return to the
shores of his “own countrée” (l. 603), and contains the tale’s first telling.21 Yet the
Rime does not tell us what the Mariner says, laconically noting only that the Mariner
was “forced to begin [his] tale” and then was left free. The closest account of the Mar-
iner’s tale as he tells it to the hermit is “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the record-
ing of a telling that is itself the “n-th” telling of this first telling, of which no account is
available. The first telling, if there ever was one, is always in danger of becoming a
mere product of the reader’s – which is also to say, the critic’s – imagination.
In keeping with the impossibility of finding a first beginning to the poem, the Rime
does not begin with the shriving, but rather with an account we “hear” from the pen of
another. Moreover, this beginning is double, or rather: it begins twice, as if there were
two stories to tell. The first line is justly famous: “It is an ancient Mariner” sets up a
phantom reference – the Mariner is an “it,” a name before the name, the referent of
something that has always already happened or been said (compare Lipking, 614ff).
There is more to be said about this “it,” to which we will return. Here, we should
198 M. Rudolf

remark that the Rime begins with a pointing gesture toward the Mariner, even if the gaze
of the text – wary of his glittering eye? – looks past him. The Mariner’s tale begins a few
stanzas later, with the line “There was a ship” (l. 10). Again, “there” is a pointing gesture
to a necessarily empty place, present only in its absence, as Hegel demonstrates in the
opening sections of the Phenomenology of Spirit (59ff). If “there” is the always plural
place of sublation in Hegel, in the Rime “there” points to a plurality of ships: the ship
of the Mariner, the spectre-bark, and the pilot’s boat.22 (In the 1798 version of the tale,
the Mariner has to say “ship” three times before the tale gets under way.) In saying
“There was a ship,” the Mariner might be referring to the ghost ship, as most critics
believe; we could also take it as the Mariner’s ship, or the pilot’s boat. That it can be
either at once is part of the difficulty; in any case, his tale begins by pointing to an
(absent) ship. The two beginnings figure two intertwined narrative strands of the Rime:
that of Mariner (and his character) and that of the ship (and its voyage of discovery).
The hermit’s shriving of the Mariner marks a break or rupture in these two tales. It
separates the Mariner’s voyage from sea to sea from his ensuing wanderings from
land to land. Having become a figure of the ship to whose course he had been subjected,
without choice or a will of his own, the Mariner acquires a “strange power of speech,”
imposing his will on others.23 The shriving also marks the point where the Mariner’s pro-
pensity to misrecognition turns into a capacity for instant and certain recognition; before
the shriving, the Mariner misrecognizes nearly everything he encounters: his recognition
of community (the “we” of discovery) turns into his ostracization from that community
when the albatross is hung around his neck and he is later cursed; the sailing ship on the
horizon promising salvation turns out to be a mysteriously propelled ghost-ship that
brings death and agony. In contrast, afterwards he recognizes with infallible surety:
“the moment that his face I see / I know the man that must hear me” (l. 622). And if
before the shriving the Mariner was, as Wordsworth put it, “continuously acted upon,”
afterwards he acts upon others, buttonholing wedding guests, stunning them so that
they will rise “sadder and wiser [men] / . . . the morrow morn” (ll. 656–57).
In being shriven, the Mariner tells his tale for the first time. It is a first narrative turn
to or gaze back on his voyage, a moment that is repeated again and again, as if its very
repetition were necessary to verify the tale. The shriving figures as the moment of rec-
ognition when a second look makes available for the first time the matter of fact of dis-
covery, when it is translated for an other.

“O shrieve me, shrieve me, holy Man!

The Hermit cross’d his brow.
“Say quick,” quoth he, “I bid thee say –
“What manner man art thou?

Forthwith this frame of mine was wrench’d

With a woful agony,
Which forc’d me begin my tale
And then it left me free. (ll. 607 – 14)

The shriving is preceded by a scene of failed recognition, in which the hermit appears like
Rousseau’s natural man, unable to recognize the being before him. The hermit’s reply to
the Mariner’s plea calls into question not only the Mariner’s identity, but also his belong-
ing to the species man at all. “Say quick,” the hermit blurts out, and then, as if becoming
aware of the office of confessor he is to fulfill, reformulates what sounds like an injunc-
tion to the Mariner to literally say that he is “quick,” i.e. not dead, as a bidding. But the
 European Romantic Review 199

hermit’s uncertainty resounds in the question he puts to the Mariner. The prosodic hesita-
tion the apposition “quoth he” marked resounds in “What manner man art thou,” turning
it into the homophonic “What man, or man, art thou?” This paranomastic splitting makes
the hermit ask twice as much as he does, turning a question about the Mariner’s character
into one about his being man, as if he were asking “What manner of man art thou or art
thou man at all?” It is an unanswerable question (the gloss notes that the question makes
the “penance of life fall on him,” as if life itself only could answer the question).24 In this
way, echoing across the silent sea and across distant continents, the hermit’s questioning
repeats the pattern of social inclusion and exclusion that constituted the communal “we”
of the discovery of the silent sea.
If the hermit’s query reopens the social wound the discovery of the Pacific had
sutured, the Mariner’s response is not, at first, verbal – his “frame” is wrenched by
an “agony” that forces him to begin his tale. This “agony” points to a discovery (of
the silent sea), but it also points to a being discovered (in the silent sea). “Agony”
appears in a single other passage in the poem – when, in the aftermath of the encounter
with the spectre-ship and the ensuing death of his crew-mates, he had been left “Alone,
alone, all all alone / On the wide, wide sea,” his “soul in agony” (ll. 224–27). The
hermit’s question thus recalls that “there was [another] ship” – a ship the Mariner mis-
recognizes, a ship whose crew discovers him (and his life in death) as if by chance (and
in advance), and then, having separated him out of his community, darts off as suddenly
as it came – much as the agony that wrenches his frame forces the Mariner to discover
his self to another man, and then leaves him free.
The encounter of the two ships repeats the figural structure of the discovery of the
silent sea, where the Mariner had been both on and off the ship, looking back at it burst-
ing into the Pacific. When he is becalmed in the doldrums, Life-in-Death and her “flesh-
less Pheere” on the spectre-ship take the very same position as the Mariner’s “we”
claiming the discovery of the silent sea, as if they were playing dice from the place
of utterance beyond the Mariner’s ship from where it had been possible to say “we
were the first.” But here, the Mariner is discovered from an other ship, and that
being-discovered literally deprives him of community, refiguring his specular in- and
exclusion from that community as a life-in-death, the “ghastly figure” of which he
will become in time to meet the pilot’s boat. The Mariner’s deprivation is hence
double, both of man and of character: when the spectre-bark appears, his shipmates
are killed while he is arbitrarily singled to live a life in death, and as they die, each
curses him. If their last judgment of him had closed the sequence of his in- and exclu-
sions by the community of man on the ship and so precipitated the agony of his soul, the
return of the agony simultaneously denies closure to and terminates the sequence of
events from which the Mariner had emerged a member of community – as a
“manner man,” one of the “we” who had discovered – retrospectively disarticulating
an historical series, the terrors of which the Mariner can neither evade or overcome.
The Mariner’s agony thus points both to a discovery (of the silent sea) and to a being
discovered (in the silent sea), both to his reintegration into community and his being
excised from it. That the agony is both the translation and the translator of the Mariner’s
tale,25 and that we cannot tell whether the one or the other – the Mariner’s tale of dis-
covery or the agony of having been discovered discovering – leaves him free, suggests
a kind of structural reciprocity or isomorphism, as if the two narrative strands collapsed
into or touched each other, and so made it possible to discover the discovery, as it were:
in discovering, the Mariner is reintegrated into community, whereas in being discov-
ered, he is excised from it; both the discovery of the silent sea and the encounter
200 M. Rudolf

with the specter-bark enjoin discovery with the hermit’s question; the ship appears as a
repetition (a discovering ship) and as a prefiguration of the Mariner (who is returned
home as a skeletal, ghastly figure). If the figure of the ship in general enables discovery,
and if discovery ends up being a question of being a “manner man” or being man at all,
then the ship bursting into the silent sea marks the beginning of a process of agony in
which an other ship becomes its agonistic supplement, both enabling discovery and
undoing the reciprocity of the knowledge it promises by the figural displacement in
inaugurates. In the Rime, the serial appearance of ships, each of which promises to
rescue the Mariner from the vicissitudes of discovery, comes to end with the appearance
of pilot’s boat. At that very moment, after the Mariner’s ship has crossed another line,
the “harbor bar” (l. 473) – when the pilot’s boat bearing the “hermit good” (l. 509)
appears promising rescue, as if to ensure the reciprocal stability of discovery, as if
the Mariner could arrive at the knowledge of his own experience, as if he could
unite character and man by his difference from “death in life” – the voyage is inter-
rupted, the ship, which is now but the spitting image of the spectre-bark, the very
figure of the Mariner’s agony, sinks, and the Mariner is saved.

Translation: Turning A Figure Into a Trope

In the epistemo-critical prologue of his Trauerspiel book, Walter Benjamin dis-
tinguishes between origin and genesis by means of an image that in the Rime figures
the end of the Mariner’s voyage:

Origin [Ursprung], although an entirely historical category, nevertheless has nothing in

common with genesis [Entstehung]. Origin is not meant to describe the coming into
being of an existent, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becom-
ing and disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and it pulls into its
rhythm the material involved in the process of genesis. That which is original is never
revealed in the naked and the manifest of the factual; its rhythm is apparent only to a
dual insight . . . There takes place in every originary phenomenon a determination of
the form in which an idea will constantly confront the historical world, until it [the
form] is revealed fulfilled, in the totality of its history. Origin is not, therefore, discovered
by the examination of actual findings, but it is related to their pre- and posthistory [Vor-
und Nachgeschichte]. (Ursprung 1: 226; Origin 45– 46; emphasis added)

The eddy figures a beginning, but one that, as the German Ursprung suggests, is always
double: an archaic (Ur-) leap that is also a break (the two senses of Sprung) – a jump
into time from beyond time, and so one that has no existing beginning. In the Rime, we
find the figure of the eddy at the moment when the Mariner, having “crossed the harbor
bar” on the ship, is rescued by the pilot’s boat. The Mariner’s ship has decayed into a
figure of the spectre-bark, with the Mariner as the “nightmare Life-in-Death” and the
dead crew as her “fleshless pheere,” “Death.”26 The hermit exclaims “[the ship] hath
a fiendish look,” “The planks look warped, and see those sails / How thin and sere
they are,” and compares it to a “skeleton,” evoking the “Ribs [of the spectre bark]
through which the Sun / Did peer as through a grate” (ll. 571, 562–63). In a thunderous
rumble of sound that “split the bay,” the ship sinks “like lead” into the sea:

The ship went down like lead.

Stunn’d by that loud and dreadful sound,

Which sky and ocean smote,
 European Romantic Review 201

Like one that hath been seven days drown’d

My body lay afloat;
But swift as dreams, myself I found
Within the Pilot’s boat

Upon the whirl, where sank the ship,

The boat spun round and round;
And all was still, save that the hill
Was telling of the sound. (ll. 583 –92)

The passage from the ship to the pilot’s boat allegorizes the Mariner’s voyage of discov-
ery and his supernatural, spirit-aided return home: the sinking of the ship into the sea refi-
gures the discovery of the Pacific – the point when the ship “burst into that silent sea”
only to later emerge as a skeleton of its former self. After the sinking, the Mariner
takes the place of the ship, lying afloat on the water “Like one that hath been seven
days drowned” a line that recalls his days spent “Alone, Alone, all, all alone” in agony
after he is cursed by his crewmates: “Seven days, seven nights I saw that curse, / And
yet I could not die” (ll. 253–54). His rescue arrives “swift as dreams,” just as the ship
“swiftly, swiftly flew” back to his own country (l. 587; l. 465). But this return is momen-
tarily suspended, interrupted a second time, when the pilot boat is pulled into the eddy. As
if going backwards in time even as the narrative moves forward, the image recalls the
earlier scene of the albatross circling the Mariner’s ship:27
And round and round it flew:
The Ice did split with a Thunder-fit;
And the Helmsman steer’d us through. (ll. 66 – 68)

The boat takes the place of the albatross circling the Mariner’s ship, beneath which
the ship sinks into the silent moonlit bay, much as the dead albatross “sank / like lead
into the sea” when he blesses the water snakes. Thus the albatross appears doubly: the
pilot’s boat figures the bird as alive, while the ship figures it as dead. We might say with
Benjamin that the eddy “swallows the material involved in the process of genesis,”
where the material is nothing other than the narrative that extends between the
Mariner killing the albatross and his being freed from the burden of that killing. The
eddy, in other words, also figures for us the Mariner’s becoming free of his guilt.
Hence the scene concerns neither the killing of the albatross nor its disappearance
into the sea as much as it does its resurrection, for it is the boat as the trope of the
live albatross that survives while the ship and its dead crew sink. As if endorsing
this spectral resurrection, the gloss laconically notes “The ancient Mariner is saved
in the Pilot’s boat,” transmuting the resurrection of the bird into the salvation of the
Mariner from his life-in-death. Yet this restorative reading is also imperfect and incom-
plete, for it at the same time tropes the pilot’s boat as the substitute of the ship, as if the
Mariner was unable to separate himself from his prior existence, as if he would have to
once again rid himself of the figural albatross hanging on his neck.
Thus, it is hardly a surprise that the Mariner’s ensuing mini-voyage – the eddy’s
Nachgeschichte – to the shore repeats in condensed metaphorical fashion the previous
voyage – with the small but crucial difference that the hermit occupies the place of the
Mariner (albeit an improved version, for unlike the Mariner, he is able to pray), while
the Mariner appears in the role of the “Nightmare Life in Death,” wrecking havoc on the
boat: the Mariner “move[s] his lips” and the “Pilot [falls] down into a fit,” while the
Pilot’s boy, “who doth crazy go,” identifies him as the devil.
202 M. Rudolf

What emerges from the eddy simultaneously reflects and reverses the preceding
voyage of discovery. This emergence is not a genesis, but rather stands precisely as
the figure that separates the two beginnings in the poem, that extends between “there
was a ship” and “it is an ancient Mariner.” In this abysall structuration of beginnings,
Coleridge’s Rime suggests that the connection between the two is always figural. Yet
Benjamin also reminds us – as does the structure of the Rime – that if we are to dis-
cover their origin, they have to be dissociated from the first moment of their occurrence,
precisely because they always pre-figure what is yet to come. “Origin,” Benjamin
writes, “is related to their pre- and post-history [Vor- und Nachgeschichte],” to the
history out of which the event emerges, and the history of the disappearance of that
event. What makes the Rime perplexing is that the pervasive repetition of figures
tempts one to turn the figure into a trope. If the eddy is the central figure of discovery
in the Rime, a moment of suspension that leads to yet another turn of the tale, we might
say that inasmuch as the image is that of a turn turning on a turn, discovery in the Rime
is a constant, but never completed, “turning into trope.” In this multiplicity of turns – a
turning into a figure of transformation, an indistinguishable point at which a transform-
ation becomes a figure of itself, the moment at which a circuitous path (e.g. the Mar-
iner’s voyage of discovery) turns into an outline of something else, where one
narrative turns into another, as if by a piercing, much as the Mariner’s arrow pierced
“the bird that lov’d the man / Who shot him with his bow” (ll. 418–19) or the ship
“burst into that silent sea,” – we, like the Mariner, are always on the verge of being
dragged into an endless search for beginnings, “from which [we] can never escape
and yet also never bring to an end,” to quote Kant. And it is this predicament, the
Rime seems to suggest, that is the very condition of possibility, not only of the
Rime, but also of literary criticism.
The Rime’s engagement with discovery as always leading to a crisis of origin
emblematizes the romantic event tout court – the conception of the critical act, the
act of critique, as the origin of writing or the production of literature.28 Indeed, the
Rime figures its own beginnings as the absence of the poem: all the Rime tells us is
that the Mariner tells his tale in response to the hermit, who figures the constitutive, sup-
plementary role of criticism. I interpret the hermit’s question as the corollary of the
Kantian question that animated Romanticism: “who or what is man?” If for Kant,
the question was famously unanswerable, Romanticism sought to fill “the hiatus at
the heart of the subject” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 32) by means of the literary pres-
entation of the subject’s freedom. To shrive, as Cavell points out, is not only to hear
confession, but also to impose, prescribe – “to write (in advance)” (62) – a particular
kind of penance or self-critique for the Mariner.29 “Shriving” blurs the boundaries
between reading (hearing confession) and writing (the prescription of penance),
placing them alongside each other much in the same way as Jena Romanticism con-
ceived of the critical act as being both first and second, as “blurring the boundaries
between the primary and secondary text, author and reader, and the temporality of
prior (or past) and present” (Bernstein 846). The Mariner’s tale would then amount
to the self-reflective writing of criticism, or “literature as the production of its own
theory” (12).
Reading the “it” in “and then it left me free” as referring equivocally to both the
agony and the tale, and taking the meter’s emphasis on “then . . . left . . . free” to indicate
that the agony and the tale in their leaving the Mariner’s body themselves also become
free, figures “it” as a sort of absolute freedom. The Mariner is freed from the agony,
itself free, freed from the tale, itself free, freed even from the telling, which was,
 European Romantic Review 203

however, quite unfree. That the freedom brought about by the “it” translates into the
freedom of all that is “it” figures “it” as a translation that leaves the Mariner free: the
agony forces the Mariner to begin his tale, and “then,” translated in and by the tale,
“it” leaves the Mariner, “free.” An interrupted translation, brought to a premature
end, “it” is nevertheless complete in its incompletion: complete in that the Mariner is
left free, incomplete in that the Mariner is bereft of the very “it” that set him free.
As a figure of the Mariner’s freedom from agony and the tale, “it” figures the trans-
lation of the two narrative strands of the Rime. Determined by the mostly vagrant,
unchartable trajectory of that ship, the Mariner’s voyage ends with a step onto
another “ship” (albeit one better called a boat) – an ending that is not one because
the Mariner does not in fact return home; an ending that is the beginning of a subjection
to an agony that “returns . . . at an uncertain hour” (ll. 581–82) and can only be alle-
viated by beginning, again, with a ship. If this ending is an ending, it is the ending
of “the ship,” not of the Mariner; an ending of a beginning that, as it turns out, will
never end.

The ship went down like lead

...
Like one that hath been seven days drowned
My body lay afloat
But swift as dreams, myself I found
Within the pilot’s boat (ll. 582; 585– 89)

The Mariner finds himself translated, carried over, between two ships. His passage,
“swift as dreams,” echoes the ship’s fantastic voyage home – “swiftly, swiftly flew
the ship” (l. 465) – and is troped as a passage of life through death: suspended
between the ships, he is like one “seven days drowned.” As translation, this passage
points backwards, not forwards either in time or in the text, as if it could not yet
produce what it would discover. “Like one seven days drowned” recalls the “seven
days, seven nights” the Mariner’s soul is “in agony” on the becalmed ship (ll. 253;
224–27). The Mariner’s release from the curse and agony is figured as a movement
onto a ship that in turn opens onto a moment of freedom:
Beyond the shadow of the ship
I watch’d the water-snakes:
They mov’d in tracks of shining white;
And when they rear’d, the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes.

Within the shadow of the ship

I watched their rich attire:
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire. (ll. 264 –73)

The movement from beyond to within the shadow of the ship pre-figures his being
carried over from the ship to the boat, and likewise tropes the passing of death: the
“blue, glossy green, and velvet black” of the water snakes are the colors of Death in
the 1798 version of the poem, whose bones are “Jet-black and bare, save where with
rust / . . . / They’re patched with purple and green” (ll. 183–85). The Mariner’s recog-
nition of the water snakes’ beauty repeats the encounter with the ambiguously sexed
spectre-bark that brought death to his shipmates and a life of inexpressible guilt to
204 M. Rudolf

him – with the small but important difference that the Mariner’s being discovered here
appears translated into the recognition of an unspeakable beauty that figures his being
“left free”:
O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gusht from my heart,
And I bless’d them unaware!
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I bless’d them unaware.

The self-same moment I could pray

And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea. (ll. 274 – 83; my emphasis)

The Mariner’s spontaneously blessing the water snakes “unaware” appears as the
immediate cause of his being left free, of the burden of the albatross as well as of
his shipmates’ curse. Most commentators read this scene as the Mariner becoming
free of his guilt for killing of the Albatross, but the literal Gestalt – the outline or typo-
graphical shape of the stanzas – repeats and recalls a quite different scene: the Mari-
ner’s discovery of the silent sea. Like the blessing of the water snakes, these stanzas
point to a moment of recognition, albeit one of a different order:
Ne dim ne red, like God’s own head,
The glorious Sun uprist :
Then all averr’d, I had kill’d the Bird
That brought the fog and mist.
’Twas right, said they, such birds to slay
That bring the fog and mist.

The breezes blew, the white foam flew

The furrow follow’d free:
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea. (93– 102; my emphasis)

The homology between this passage and the blessing of the water snakes is offset by the
contrariety of their content. If there is translation involved here, it is not one in terms of
movement between ships, but a unidirectional movement into a silent and unknown sea.
It is paralleled by the crew’s (naı̈ve critics?) reading the breezes, as if their effects trans-
lated into a judgment of the Mariner’s slaying of the albatross, which is as much a criti-
cal misrecognition as is the claim that the “furrow follow’d free:” the Mariner’s
freedom from guilt is as illusory as the furrow’s freedom from the ship. Unlike the bles-
sing of the water snakes, the lines do not open up onto a moment of freedom, but onto a
discovery. One could draw the parallel between the albatross and the mariners, both of
whom move “into the sea,” marking difference in the ways in which that movement
occurs: a “sinking” in the former case, a “bursting” in the latter. One could then associ-
ate the Mariner with the albatross and the curse laid upon him by his shipmates, or one
might point out that the discovery of the Pacific is as much of a misrecognition as is the
mariners’ erroneous moral judgment. One could – and as literary critics, that is what we
are to do. Yet precisely this association reaffirms the discovery of the Pacific, and not
the slaying of the albatross, as the point where the line from the agony of the shriving, in
which the Rime finds its belated beginning, disappears. In its figural referral through the
 European Romantic Review 205

text, the communal, plural event of discovery marks the outer limit to which one can
read. The Rime fuses the two strands of the hermit’s question – “What manner man
art thou?” – by staging their translation as a discovery: the question of the Mariner’s
character is taken up by his shipmates and ends in the confirmation of his belonging
to the species “man” as one of the “we” who discover. The discovery of the Pacific
emerges as the impossible figure of translation the Mariner is returned to “at an uncer-
tain hour,” whose impossibility in turn discovers the Mariner as agony, and which,
translated into the tale, leaves him free. In this way, “it” is the discovery of the
Pacific – unlocatable and unmappable but in the terms of the Rime itself – that
leaves the Mariner free.

Acknowledgments
The present essay has benefitted greatly from the suggestions of others. I would like to particu-
larly thank Jacques Lezra, Sara Guyer, Terry Kelley, Jen Hill, and Keja Valens for their com-
ments on the various early drafts of the essay, as well as the two anonymous reviewers of the
piece.

Notes
1. At least since Warren’s reading, the Rime has functioned as the legitimatizing vehicle for
critical claims about Romanticism and the romantic aesthetic, its value, meaning and con-
temporary relevance. Compare Warren, Christensen, H. O. Brown, Perkins.
2. On the influence of Romanticism’s conception of literature as containing its own criticism,
cf. Susan Bernstein, who writes that the point has been made so often as to be “well worn”
(834). In her excellent introduction to Romanticism, Cynthia Chase writes that “what are
still the most widely-held current assumptions about literature – such as the idea of
‘organic form’ and the inseparability of form and content, and the conception of good
poetry as the fusion of thought and feeling – derive . . . from romantic texts” (1).
The most influential account of this aspect of the romantic project is Lacoue-Labarthe and
Nancy’s The Literary Absolute, in which they show how the overturning and reversal of
Kant was a philosophical rejection of the Kantian bargain by which knowledge of the
world was obtained at the price of ceding knowledge of the thing in itself (33). In a
similar vein (although following a philosophical trajectory largely prescribed by Schelling),
Coleridge wrote in the Biographia Literaria, “I could never believe, it was possible for
[Kant] to have meant no more by his Noumenon, or Thing in Itself, than his mere words
express” (1: 155; original emphasis). If Kant insisted one could secure truth only by
giving up any pretension to knowing its being, Coleridge repeatedly insisted that “Truth
is the correlative of Being” and that they were “identical and co-inherent” in the act of
knowledge – the absolute “I AM,” the “common principle of being and of knowing”
which the promised deduction of the imagination was to “discover” (Biographia 1: 142–
43; 281n2; 299).
For responses to the broad theoretical and historical claims of The Literary Absolute, see
Gasché, Newmark, Bernstein, Critchley (99 – 161), Redfield, and N. Brown.
3. Of all the readings of the Rime I am aware of, only Stanley Cavell’s in In Quest of the Ordin-
ary takes up the Rime directly in relation to Coleridge’s grappling with Kant’s critical phil-
osophy. Cavell interprets Coleridge’s rejection of the Kantian bargain by which the
knowledge of the world is gained at the price of ceding knowledge of the thing in itself
also to be a rejection of the world as it is made by Kant’s faculty of the Understanding.
Thus become merely reflective, the world is dead rather than alive. If it is this predicament
– a predicament similar to that which Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy locate at the center of
Jena Romanticism – that the writing of what Coleridge calls “genuine poetry” is to over-
come, then, Cavell writes, “the calling to poetry is to give the world back, to bring it
back, as to life” (45). Such an overcoming and call to poetry, this paper suggests, is
staked on and mediated by discovery.
206 M. Rudolf

4. Jerome McGann’s “The Meaning of the Ancient Mariner” similarly assumes the Rime as an
allegory of literary criticism, but locates it in Coleridge’s exegetical High Church Tradition.
5. Cf. McGann, whose historical schema of the redaction, mediation and translation of the
Mariner’s original tale I refer to in the following discussion, albeit with the difference
that while McGann insists on the singular denominations of the character he names – as
if there were one minstrel, a single editor – I use the plural to suggest a less controlled
mode of (however fictional) dissemination.
6. Acknowledging Empson’s work, J. R. Ebbatson makes the connection explicit: “The right
starting-point for an interpretation of The Ancient Mariner,” he writes, “lies in a return to
Livingston Lowes’ great study” and “the perspicuity [of its] emphasis upon The Ancient
Mariner as a supreme crystallization of the spirit of maritime expansion” (175). The
themes of maritime expansion and discovery are notably absent from readings of the
Rime in the new critical tradition, as well in those informed by deconstruction and psycho-
analytic approaches. All of these take the killing of the albatross as the pivotal event of the
Rime, with the notable exception of Susan Eilenberg, whose chapter “Voice and Ventrilo-
quy in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’” in Strange Power of Speech focuses on the poli-
tics of writing and the (non-) attributions of authorship that traverse the poem. Possibly the
most influential reading of the Rime, Robert Penn Warren’s canonical “A Poem of Pure
Imagination,” casts the killing of the albatross as “the original crime against the sacramental
conception of the universe” that is atoned for by “the poetic imagination [which] appears in
the poem in a regenerative and healing capacity,” and which provides aesthetic access to the
moral law (27). In a similar vein, Boulger argues that “before the Mariner can accept faith,
repentance, and a true sense of the spiritual order behind the phenomena or objects, he must
be frightened out of the easy, vulgar, and commonplace assurance of the ‘reality’ of things”
(16). These readings implicitly invoke a sacrificial economy: the albatross (often figured as a
Christ figure) is sacrificed, and so sets the stage for the later blessing of the water snakes and
the final covenant of love between God, man and animals. More recent interpretations of the
poem (e.g. by Ebbatson, Keane, Kitson, and Maniquis) have read the Rime as an engage-
ment with the French Revolution and British politics.
7. See Empson [“Ancient Mariner”], Ebbatson, Watkins, McKusick, Keane, Stevenson,
Kitson, Bewell, Modiano, Lamb, Lee, Moss, Murphy, Rubinstein, and Ware.
8. For yellow fever, see Lee; for “scurvy,” Lamb; for slavery and colonial expansion, Ebbat-
son, Empson, and Ware; for the French Revolution, Kitson; Keane reads the Rime as a nego-
tiation of the political imbrications of both slavery and the French Revolution.
The methodological assumptions of historicism – that discovery can be discovered, as it
were – entail an implicit and often selective reduction of the figurative and literal meaning
of the Rime to a narrowly contextualized referentiality, as Thomas Pfau has argued in “The
Philosophy of Shipwreck: Gnosticism, Skepticism, and Coleridge’s Catastrophic Moder-
nity.” Pfau examines new historicism’s “largely unexamined ideological commitment” to
a “paradigm of knowledge as the institutional synthesis of so much impersonal, specialized,
and dissociated information” in the context, and as symptom, of modernity’s “catastrophic
. . . espousing [of] a means/end model of rationality as the sole way of being in the world”
(955, 990, 980).
9. See note 2, above.
10. “[T]he possibility of a thing can never be proved merely through the non-contradictoriness
of a concept of it, but only by vouching for it with an intuition corresponding to this
concept” (Kant 361). The possibility of discovery – the extension of the understanding
beyond the land of truth – therefore turns on the possibility of a purely intellectual intuition
(an intuition other than a sensible one). Hence the problem: All concepts depend on the
existence of the logical form of a concept of thinking and on the possibility of giving the
concept an object to which it is to be related (356). Kant grants that pure intellectual intui-
tions are possible a priori as the mere form of empirical intuitions, but even these require an
empirical intuition – data for possible experience – to have any objective validity; without
such data, they would be a mere play of the imagination. What is necessary, in other words,
is “for one to make an abstract concept sensible, i.e., to display the object that corresponds to
it [the pure or intellectual intuition] in [empirical] intuition, since without this the concept
would remain . . . without significance” (356). While mathematics accomplishes this task by
producing figures (Gestalt), other disciplines, particularly discursive ones such as
 European Romantic Review 207

philosophy, cannot follow suit since discursive figures operate according to rules that
exceed and disfigure those of the represented concepts. Yet despite this prohibition, and
as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy point out, Romanticism sought to make intellectual intui-
tions available precisely through such an impossible mathesis (111).
11. All quotations the Rime are taken from Martin Wallen’s edition, Coleridge’s Ancient
Mariner: An Experimental Edition of Texts and Revisions 1798 – 1828. Unless otherwise
noted, the quotations are from the 1798 edition of the poem.
12. Wordsworth had been reading Shelvocke’s Voyage “a day or two before” he and Coleridge
came up with the plan for the Ancient Mariner in November 1797, and Wordsworth culled
from it the pivotal act the Rime would turn on: the killing of the albatross. George Soule
argues that Coleridge almost certainly also read the book (it was in Wordsworth’s
library) and points to a number of other details (the color of the water snakes, the “slimy
things [that] did crawl with legs / Upon the slimy sea” [ll. 121– 22]) Coleridge borrowed
from the account, including, grosso modo, the ship’s route (287 –88).
13. An avid reader of adventure stories and tales of the unknown, Coleridge had read both
Captain Cook’s Voyage into the Pacific Ocean (1784) and the earlier Voyage Toward the
South Pole (1777).
14. Cf., e.g., Gayatri Spivak, who describes such writing as an insistent trope of the imperial
project: the “worlding of a world on a supposedly uninscribed territory . . . is also a
texting, textualising, a making into art, a making into the object to be understood” (1).
Irwin similarly aligns unexplored white space with the space of writing and inscription:
“It is writing, then, that constitutes the originality of the first man to enter an unknown
region, whether the writing is . . . a journal of the expedition brought back to civilization
or a narrative written after the explorer’s return” (70 –71).
15. Cook’s orders were secret, and he only paraphrased them in his account of the voyage. The
full extent of the orders, from which the quotation stems, only became known with their
publication in the Navy Records Society’s Naval Miscellanies (Perrin 343 –45).
16. The gloss’s reference to “the invisible habits of the element” links this nautical and textual
passage to Burnet’s “image of a greater and better world” contemplated “as on a tablet” in
the mind – an invisible mapping indeed.
In his detailed reading of the Mariner’s journey home, Sitterson notes the “critical per-
plexity” both “over parts five and six of the poem” and over its “Neoplatonic machinery,”
pointing out that very few critics maintain the passage is essential to the symbolic coherence
of the poem (17). He argues that “the machinery is functional but not interpretable” (n25),
concluding that “the inaccessibility of [its] meaning to human understanding . . . is an inte-
gral part of [the Rime’s] meaning” that points to “a fundamental mystery at the heart of
human knowledge” This mystery is perhaps geographical rather than human, inasmuch
as it involves the possibility of returning knowledge home at all.
17. Stevenson does not refer to the discovery of the silent sea, but notes that the Mariner’s ship-
mates would have, were the Mariner captain, been charged with mutiny when they first con-
demned and then absolve him. The Mariner stands in for this power-vacuum, writes
Stevenson, and “is the paradox of a mutinous putative captain, a self-willed lost leader”
whose slaying of the albatross makes him a “psycho-sexual” emblem of “Revolution,” “a
new kind of leader” (13).
18. Put simply, the chain runs “wind – ship – foam – ship – furrow.” The wind blows on the
ship, propelling it forward so that the foam flies as it plows through the sea, and the furrow
follows free.
19. If the Mariner were the first to enter the Pacific, the discovery would predate Magellan’s
1519 – 1522 voyage around the world. But there is no record of such a voyage, clearly,
which makes its temporal location merely “before,” in an unreachable anteriority to Magel-
lan and, ultimately, to any dating scheme. Geographically, the circumstance that the ship has
been sailing northward from the land of ice for at least a number of days and that the dis-
covery of the Pacific is immediately followed by the becalming of the ship at the equator at
best allows the location of the discovery “somewhere” between the Antarctic ice and the
equator. The declaration “we were the first that ever burst / Into that silent sea” takes on
the characteristics of a fiat, an act that asserts its own truth without accounting for its
where and when. Even if we were to suppose that the Mariner was aware that he was dis-
covering the Pacific (which one can), the Rime does not allow for the location of the where
208 M. Rudolf

and when of its discovery. The self-reflexivity of the two lines’ speech-act apodictically
posits its own truth.
20. I take the term “zero figure” form Gerard Genette’s Figures of Literary Discourse, where he
relates the term to the “phenomenon of the zero degree, in which an absence of signifier
clearly designates a known signified; [it] is the infallible mark of the existence of a
system” (47 –48). Here the system in force would be that of (maritime) discovery; I use
the term to designate the absence of figure in the stanza. “Figure,” Genette writes, “disap-
pears only when the present signifier is literalized by an anti-rhetorical or terrorist con-
science, . . . and when the absent signifier remains impossible to find” (50). In the lines
discussed above, the absent signifier is the ship, the literalized one “we were the first.”
21. Eilenberg argues that “there was never a first time the Mariner recited his ‘Rime,’” because
the tale was “from the outset . . . a repetition – of the experience itself . . ., of the words in
which he retells it, and of other words, with which Coleridge and Wordsworth had been
telling or trying to tell tales during the last half-dozen years” (43). I would add that the
Mariner himself never recited the Rime: the balladeer’s recitation of the Rime tells us that
the Mariner is “forced to begin [his] tale.”
22. For Hegel deictics such as “now,” “here,” or “this” – and so, also, “there” – point to a
something that has been, and that as such is not, but which having been, is nevertheless dia-
lectically sublated [aufgehoben] in the deictic as “something that is reflected into itself, or a
simple entity which, in its otherness, remains what it is: a Now [There] which is an absolute
plurality of Nows [Theres]” (64).
23. The ship decays into a skeleton, and the Mariner turns into a “ribbed” skeletal shape of his
former self. As if anticipating later historicist readings of the Mariner as an agent of conta-
gion (in, e.g. Bewell and Lee, respectively), Susan Eilenberg sums up this figural tendency
in the formula “[i]n the Rime you become what you meet,” arguing that “[t]his principle dic-
tates the poem’s structure and plot” (52). My paper follows Eilenberg’s perceptive
emphases of the Mariner’s various metamorphoses.
24. Stanley Cavell similarly reads the gloss as a response to the hermit’s question (62).
25. The Rime does not indicate whether or when the Mariner finishes his tale, only that the
agony forces its beginning, and that he is “then left free” by an “it” – an “it” that might
be either the tale or the agony, or both. The indeterminate ending of this first telling of
the tale leaves the relation of the Rime’s two narrative strands – that of the (two) ship’s
voyage(s) of discovery and of the “manner man” the Mariner is – in abeyance. Insofar
the onset of the agony precipitates the telling of the Mariner’s tale and its departure
figures its (arbitrary) abruption, the agony would is coextensive in time with the telling
of the tale,
26. This point has been made by numerous critics, most eloquently by Eilenberg (52ff).
27. Eilenberg observes that “both ships together thus reenact in sinister fashion the scenes in
which the playful albatross first comes across the frozen ship” (53), but she does not
develop the implications of this figural repetition, nor does she link the scene to the Mari-
ner’s becoming free of the albatross as he blesses the water snakes.
28. Cf. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy and Bernstein.
29. The OED gives “shrive” as an Old English term that means “to impose penance upon a
person; hence, to administer absolution to; to hear the confession of.” Its etymological
root is the Latin scribere, to write, such that the imposition appears as the prescription of
penance. Cavell reads the Hermit’s role vis-a-vis that of the Mariner as the poet maudite,
casting writing as a “kind of self-redemption, which fits with the fact that the Hermit’s pre-
scription is of a confession the very telling of which constitutes penance” (62).

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