Tit THE ANCIENT MARINER HEN the first signs of the Romantic spint appeared in the eighteenth century, the tme-worn theme of the supernatural took a new character and received a new prominence} The fashionable cult of strangeness turned inevir- tably to this alluring world of the unknown and exploited st with arechless carelessness The result 1s that ghosts and goblins crowd the Romantic poetry of Germany, and in England)the spate of “Gothich” novels spent its none too abundant resources in try- ing to make the flesh creep with death-pale spectres and clanking chams The result, it must be admitted, 1s not very impressive nstead of creating real horror and dread, this literature tends to be factitious and a hittle silly It fails because it has not mastered @ the lessons of the past on how the supernatural should be treated_ Instead of making it a subordinate clement im a wider scheme, as Homer and Shakespeare do, the wnters concentrate on it to the exclusion of almost everything else, and this over-emphasis spol a subject which 3s effective only when at 1s taken in small doses = In the second place, they do not really beheve an the supernatural as the great writers of the past did YIt 1s not an authenuc chapter of human expenence, but an indulgence, an exercise of ghoulish fanev, and therefore unconvineing and dull (When the Romantic movement came to maturity, this cult was already largely dis- credited There are, xt 1s true, traces of ats influence in Shelley's love for chamel-houses,,and it is not entarely absent from Keats’ Lanua, but these are no more than legacies from a past genera- ana, & past §I ton (ht meant nothing to Blake or to Wordsworth, for whom it WS at once too unreal and too foolish But with Colendge at was52 THE ROMANTIC IMAGINATION different It appealed to him with a special power and was respon- sible for his finest work}y In 1797, being then twenty-five years old, Coleridge suddenly found the full scope of his genius The outburst of creation lasted for about two years and then began to faily but not before he had wnitten the first part of “Chnistabel,” “The Ancient Manner,” and “Kubla Khan” He had already composed good poetry, and in the long years afterwards he was to compose it again{But in 1797 and 1798 he wrote three poems which no one elsé could have wntten and which he himself was never again to equal or approach At this tme something set all his powers to worh and brought"to the surface all the hidden resources of his conscious and unconscious self{ The dreamer was able toypiye a concrete form to his dreams,{the omnivorous nodes PA she geneous elements of his reading into magical combinations, and the cntic to satisfy his own exacting ideas of what a poem ought to be Jn hus later years Coleridge too often wrote with only a parf of himself and was unable to speak from, his full expenence or to use the whole range of his powers, but(into the three great poems he put all that he had)Why this happened we cannot say We can do no more than note that here was a young man who suddenly found a voice new and strange and indisputably his own But we can at least say what was not responsible for this 1s wrong to connect the flowering of Colendge’s genius with the formation of the oprum habit, for though he had begun to take oprum, it was not yet a habit, and as yet he took it only at intervals to get rest and sleep It certamly does not explain the prodigious outburst of energy needed to create his unique poems On the other hand, 1t 1s possible that his new acquaintance with the Wordsworths helped to unloose his hidden strength Cole- nidge was always a prey to doubts and afterthoughts and ram- bling speculations, but Wordsworth encouraged and sustained him and hept him to his task And though Coleridge had a re marhable sensibility to physical nature, it is abundantly clear that this was enhanced by the quiet and delicate observation of DorTHE ANCIENT MARINER 53 othy Wordsworth Nevertheless, the genius was Colerndge’s own, and, whatever set 11 to work, it 1s the genius that counts (Cole- ridges supreme contribution to poetry was. the three poems, and ofall Engheh Komantic masterpieces they are the most unusual and the most_romantic “) (all three poems aré concerned with the supernatural “Kubla Khan,” it 1s true, 1s less directly concerned than “Chnstabel” or “The Ancient Manner,” but into its wild magnificence the super- natural has found its way, whether in the “woman wailing for her demon-lover” and the “ancestral voices prophesying war,” or in the magical music of its close when the poet seems to breah the bounds of human hind and become a wild spint of song) in “Chnstabel” the whole scheme is based on the supernatural) evil spit who haunts the body of Geraldine and tres to run the innocent happiness of Chnistabel 1s in the true tradition of vampires, and Colendge infuses a mysterious dread into her In her we see an embodiment of evil powers from another world and realize how helpless ordinary human beings are against them It 1s the last, and indeed the only, trrumph of the “Gothick” taste for the FAn@arsrred by darkness and fear, and it succeeds be- cause Colendge. believes so much in his subject that he relates it to hife and to Hing experience Both “Kubla Khan” and “Chns- tabel” are fragments, and we can only smagine what they might have been “The Ancient Manner” 1s complete In it Colendge did what he set out to do and showed what his powers could be It too deals with the supernatural, on a large scale and in a gen- crous sense)From what divers sources it came may be read in the pages of John Livingston Lowes’ The Road to Xanadu, which shows the strange alchemncal process of its creation To that su- perb work of scholarship there 1s nothing to add What we have to consider 1s not how “The Ancient Manner’ came into exist ence, but what its and what it means (Golendge mtended to mtroduce “The Ancient Marner’ with an essay on the supernatural *)Like so manv of hus projects, this W's never realized, and though Colendge scems to have lectured54 THE ROMANTIC IMAGINATION on the subycct in 1818,? we do not know what he said or what his views were Perhaps it 1s as well, since when Coleridge began to theorize on hitcrary matters, he was apt to forget his own prac- tice or at Ieast to make it out to be more elaborate than it was We have therefore to deduce his theory from his practice and to look at what he actually did (His first idea came from a Mr John Cruikshank, who, according to Wordsworth, had a dream about “a person suffering from a dire curse for the commission of some cnme” and “a skeleton ship with figures in it” * Coleridge spohe of this to Wordsworth, who saw that it was a subject well suited to Coleridge’s genius and would fit into the part allotted to him in the plan of the Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth was to take the subjects “chosen from ordinary hfe,” and Coleridge another class an which ) the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural, and the eacellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real * Z (‘On a walk in the Quantoch Hills on November 20th, 4797, the plan of “The Ancient Manner” was formed *(Wordsworth con- tubuted not only one or two phrases but the part played by the albatross and the navigation of the ship by dead men 9) The rest 1s the work of Colendge, and on March 23rd, 1798, he brought the fimshed text to the Wordsworths at Alfoxden_) In taking the supernatural for his province, Colendge must at the start have had to face a certain degree of preyudice The sub- ject was outmoded in the view of good judges, and any attempt to revive it mght be greeted with suspicion On the surface({"The Ancient Mariner” belonged to a class of poetry which provoked adverse comment Even Hazlitt, who regards it as Coleridge's “most remarkable performance,” adds less kindly that “at 1s high German, however, and in it he seems to ‘conceive of poetry but as a drunken dream, rechless, careless, and heedless, of past, present, and to come’” 7 Charles Lamb responded with greater sympathy,THE ANCIENT MARINER 55 bythe too had his doubts about the use of the supernatural and sad “I dishhe all the miraculous part of it, but the feelings of the man under the operation of such scenery dragged me along lhe Tom Piper's magic whistle "Coleridge set himself a diffi- cult tash To succeed in it he must do a great deal more than reproduce the famiar thrills of hornfic hterature he must pro- duce a poetry of the supernatural which should im its own way ; be as human and as compelling as Wordsworth’s poetry of every- day things Colendge saw these difficuftues and faced them cou- rageously (Though his poem has a supernatural subject, its effect as much more than a thrill of horrorJHe hves up to his own pto- gram and interests the affections by the dramatic truth of what hetells * (The trumph of “The Ancient Mariner” 1s that it presents a senes of incredible events through a method of narration which makes them not only convincing and exciting but in some sense a_cnticism of life No other poet of the supernatural has quite done this, at least on such a scale and with such abundance of au- thentic poetry In his conquest of the unknown, Colendge went outside the commonplace thrills of horror Of course, he evokes these, and his opening verses, in which the Manmer stays the Wedding-Guest, suggest that at first Coleridge followed familar precedents m appealing to a kind of hornfied fear )But as he\’. worked at his poem, he widened its scope and creat something much ncher and more human To be sure, he chose his subject well( The weird adventures of his Manner take place not in the tnte Gothic setting of a mediaeval castle, which Coleridge used once and for all in “Chnistabel,” but on a boundless sea with days of pitiless sun and soft mghts ht by a moon and attendant stars _) Nor are his “ma¢funmg persons” of the same breed as his Geral- dine They aré"spitits of another sort, who may have their home in some Neo-Platonic heaven, but are transformed by Colendge into powers who watch over the good and evil actions of men and tequite them with appropnate rewards and_punishments The new setung and the new persons with which Coleridge shapes56 THE ROMANTIC IMAGINATION the supernatural give to 1t a new character Instead of confining himself to an outworn dread of spectres and phantoms, he moves over a wide range of emotions and touches equally on guilt and remorse, suffering and relief, hate and forgiveness, gnef and joy Noghas-uscreamen-the musty dimness-commonly associated with the supernatural (What he 1magines 1s indeed weird, buf he sees {x with so sharp a vision that it hives vividly before our on each pomt he anticrpateg the objection that his is an outmode land of composition, and othe opposite of what his entics & pest Che first problem for any poet of the supernatural 1s to relate ~ {at to familar experience) So long as it was accepted as part of the scheme of things, there was no great difficulty in this (No doubt f Homer’s audience accepted the ghost of Odysseus’ mother be- | cause they believed in ghosts and saw that they must be hhe this \ and behave in this way But Coleridge could not rely on his read- ers’ feeling at home with his unfamihar theme He must relate it | to something which they knew and understood, something which ( touched their hearts and imaginations, and he did this by explowt- ing some of the charactenstics of dream Here was something which would appeal to them and through which they could be led to appreciate the remoter mysteries which he keeps in reserve doubt Coleridge did this because his first impulse to “The Ancient Marner” came from Mr Crukshank’s dream, but, once he saw this, he made full use of it and shaped his poem in accord- ance with it Dreams can have a cunously vivid quality which 1s often lacking in waking impressions In them we have one e.- perience at a time im a very cgncentrated form, and, since the cnitical self 1s not at work, the Affect 1s more powerful and more haunting than most effects when we are awa we remember dreams at all, we remembet them very clearl¥#¥en though bs rational standards they fe quite absurd and have no direct rela- tion to our waking hfe“ They have, too, a power of stirring elemen- tary emotions, such as fear and desire, in a very direct way, though we do not at the time ash why this happens or understandTHE ANCIENT MARINER 57 it, but accept it without question as a fact It is enough that the umages of dreams are so penetrated with emotional significance that they make a single and absorbing impression Coleridge was much attracted by their strange power In “Chnstabel” he speahs of such perplesuty of mind As dreams too hvely leave behind, and “The Ancient Manner” bears the marks of such a hiveliness (On the surface it shows many quahties of dream’)It moves in abrupt stages, each of which has its own single, dommating char- acter Its visual smpressions are remarkably brillant and absorb- ing Its emotional :mpacts change rapidly, but always come with an ypusual force, as if the poet were haunted and obsessed by the When it 1s all over, it clings to the memory with a peculiar tenacity, just as on waking it 1s difficult at first to disentangle ordinary experience from influences which still survive from sleep ) In the cnticism of “The Ancient Manner” which Wordsworth added to the edition of Lyrical Ballads published in 1800, he complamed that “the events, having no necessary connection, do not produce each other ” Now no one expects the events of dream to have the hind of necessary connection which we find in waking hfe, and Wordsworth’s criticism 1s beside the mark Indeed, he is less than fair to Coleridge, who gives to the world of Is poem its own coherence and rules and logic Things move indeed in a mysterious way, but not without some connecting relations which may/fersonably be called causal (When m a fit of station or anger the Mariner shoots the albatross, he commits a hideous cnme and is punished by the doom _of “hfe-m-death,” which means that, after bemg haunted by the presence of his dead cor n- rades, he carnes a gnawing memory to the end of his days His shipmates, too, are the victims of the same laws when they are doomed to death as accomplices in his crime for saying that he i Y) 58 THE ROMANTIC IMAGINATION was right to hull the bird /In such a system it 1s no less appropriate that when the Mariner feels love gushing from hus heart at the sight of the water-snakes, he bcgins to break the first horror of his spell, and the albatross falls from Ins neck Once we accept the assumption that it 1s wrong to kill an albatross, the rest of the action follows with an inexorable fatality \It 1s true that this as- sumption 1s perhaps the hardest which “The Ancient Manner” demands of us, but of that Wordsworth was in no position to com- plam, since it was he who suggested the idea te Golendey This imagrnary world has its own rules, which are different from ours and yet touch some famihar chord in us )Nor, when we read the poem, do we really question their validity (Indeed, they are more convincing than most events in dreams, and we somehow admut that in such a world as Coleridge creates it 1s nght that things should happen as they do It is not too difficult to accept for the moment the ancient belief that spits Spatch over human actions, and;once we do this, we see that it 1s nght for them to mterferé with men and to do extraordinary things to them Both Seige on the skeleton ship and the spits who guide the Manner on his northward voyage have sufficient real- ity for us to feel that their actions are appropmiate to their charac- ters and circumstances Nor is it absurd that, when the ship at last comes home, 3t sinks, 1t has passed through adventures too ast comes home, if sinks, if has passed through adventures" unearthly for it to have a place in the world of common things ) It and its stncken mmate bear the marks of their ordeal,(and it 3s 5 no wonder that the Pilot’s boy goes mad at the sight or that the a only person able to withstand their influence 1s the holy Herm) , Coleridge makes his events so coherent and so close to much that we know in ourselves that we accept them as valid in their own world, which 1s not ultimately very dissimilar from ours Because it has this inner coherence, “The Ancient Manner” 1s not a phantasmagona of unconnected events but a coherent whole which, by exploitmg our acquamtance with dreams, has 1ts own causal relations between events and lives im its own right as something intelligible and satisfying )THE ANCIENT MARINER 59 Colendge knew that he must make the supernatural convine- mg and human In the Biographia Literaria, after saying that such poetry must interest the emotions and have dramatic truth, he adds that his arm 1s to transfer from our mward nature a human mterest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbehef for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith ° Awe may connect these words with what Coleridge said in 1818 ima lecture on dreams In ordinary dreams we do not judge the objects to be real,—we simply do not determine that they are unreal y) Otis clear that Colendge felt about the creations of his imagma- tion something similar to what he felt about dreams He assumes that while we have them we do not question their reahty “The Ancient Manner” lives in its own world as events in dreams do, and, when we read it, we do not normally ask if its subject 1s real or unreal But this 1s due to a consummate art Each action, and each situation, 1s presented in a concrete form m which the de- tails are selected for their appeal to common expenence Colendge exercises an imaginative realism (However unnatural his events may be, they are formed from natural elements, and for this rea- son we beheve in them )We may even be at home with them because their constituents are familar and make a direct, natural appeal Once we have entered this imaginary world, we do not feel that it 1s beyond our comprehension, but respond to it as we would to actual hfe J In other words, thcugh Colendge begins by appealing to our experience of dreams, he so uses it as to present something which 1s more solid and more reasonable and more human than the most haunting dreams He uses the atmosphere of dreams to accustom us to his special world, and then he proceeds to create60 THE ROMANTIC IMAGINATION freely withm his chosen limits At cach step he takes pains to see that his eery subject 1s real both for the eye and for the emotions, that it has both the attraction of visible things and the significance which belongs to actions of grave import His natural background, for instance, could have been fashioned only by a man who had leamed about nature from loving observation and shared the Wordsworths’ devotion to it Amid all these strange happenings nature remains itself, and its perseverance in its own ways sometimes comes in ironical contrast to what happens on the ship, as when, at the moment when the Mariner is haunted by the look im Ins dead comrades’ cyes, the moon continues her quiet, un- changing course » The moving Moon went up the sky, And no where did abide Softly she was going up, And a star or two beside “Even when nature breaks into more violent moods, it 1s still itself, and each touch of description makes it more real, as when Colendge sketches a storm with something of Turner's delight in wild effects of sky and cloud» — The upper air burst into life! And a hundred fire-lags sheen, To and fro they were hurned about! And to and fro, and in and out, The wan stars danced between ‘ In such scenes there 1s no indeterminacy of dream Each detail comes from the known world and gives a firm bachground to the supernatural events which accompany it 9 ‘This realistic treatment of the setting 1s matched by the appeal which Colenndge makes to our emotions in handling lus human persons The Marmer and his comrades are hardly characters in : any dramatic sense They lack lmeaments and personality ButTHE ANCIENT MARINER 61 perhaps this 1s well, smee what touches us im them 1s the basic humanity of therr sufferings They are more types than differen- uated human beings, and for this reason them agomes are simply and umwversally humian We feel that what happens to them might in similar circumstances happen to anyone, and we re- spond readily to ther pathos and ther msery And these Cole- nidge conveys with a masterly directness He portrays the helpless agony of thirst in the crew becalmed at sea} “And every tongue, through: utter drought, Was withered at the root, We could not speak, no more than if We had been choked with soot When at last the rain comes, and the Manmer’s thirst 1s slaked as he sleeps, Colendge mahes no less an appeal to elementary human and physical feelings, as with a string economy of words he shows how this happens and what a wonderful relief it 1s 2 “My hps were wet, my throat was cold, My garments all were dank, Sure I had drunken in my dreams, , And sull my body drank OF course, physical sensations play a large part in dreams, but Colendge desembes them as we know them m a waking state, and the hvely way m which he handles them creates a powerful emo- tional effect What 1s true of physical sensations in “The Ancient Manner” 18 no less true of mental states The Marmer passes through an ordeal so wend and so fearful that it might seem impossible to make it real for us We shnnk from aslang what such suffering Means in conditions so unfamiliar and so hideous as those in the poem To nse to such an occasion and to give a persuasive and Moving account of what the Manner endures demands a power- ful effort of the imagination Colendge nses to the full claim of62 THE ROMANTIC IMAGINATION his subyect and by concentrating on elementary human emotions makes the most of them (Hs Manner 1s indeed mm a fearful plight, alone on a ship, surrounded by the dead bodies of his comrades, and Coleridge conveys the full implications of his state by draw- ing attention to his sense of utter helplessness and solitude w wv Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide seal And never a saint took pity on My soul in agony (That 1s the authentic anguish of a man who feels himself aban- doned both by God and man and faced with the emptmess of his guilty and tormented | soul Conversely, when the ship at last comes to land, the Marmer sees angels standing by the dead bodies and feels an infinite rehef_The very silence of the celestial presences fills him with hope and joy ve “Ts seraph-band, each waved his hand, 7 No voice did they umpart — x No voice, but oh! the silence sank Like music on my heart “Coleridge understood the eatremes of despair and of joy, and he distilled them into these brief moments Because his poem moves between such extremes 1t has a certain spaciousness and grandeur and reflects through its variations the hight and the shadow of human hife/ (Coleridge expects us to suppose that his situations are real, and to have some kind of human feelings about them This is no doubt easy enough when they belong to ordinary experience, but when the supernatural takes command it demands a more un- usual art Then Colendge mahes it looh as natural as possible because, however strange it may be, he forms it from elements which are in themselves fambar The paradovwcal nature of the Mariner's voyage from England to the Southern Pacific, fromS THE ANCIENT MARINER 63 the known to the unknown, from the familar to the impossible, 1s conveyed an a verse which begins with something dehghtfully fnendly and then, without ado, breaks mto an uncharted, spell- bound world ' Y The far breeze blew, the white foam flew, The furrow followed free, We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea here is perhaps nothing fundamentally strange in the silence of this sea, and yet after the bustle of the waves and the wind it comes with a magical surpnse When dreadful and unnatural things happen, the same art shows how they would look and what impression they would make When the albatross first begins to be avenged, the sea changes its appearance, and hornble things are seen on it | A “The very deep did rot O Chnst! ’ That ever this should be! Yea, slimy thmgs did crawl with legs Upon the shmy sea ( Though this is seen by a man in the last agomes of thirst and has some qualities of dehnous hallucination, it 1s poignantly real It has the nght degree of exactness for such an occasion, and it 1s well that the “shmy things” are not descnbed more precisely But when exactness 1s needed, Coleridge uses 1t with a masterly economy When the dead men stir and begin to do again in death what they used to do in hfe, Coleridge epitomnzes the weird situa- ton in one highly sgmificant action J