Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Anti Modern Epic

Hinzugefügt: 2026-06-04

[00:00:01][music] >> And so, as part four begins, we get another interruption from the wedding guest, and he is very understandably concerned about the fact that the Mariner has just told him about all of the crew have dropped dead before him. And so, the wedding guest naturally assumes that he is actually being visited by some animated corpse, right?

[00:00:24]He's actually seeing a ghost or that the Mariner himself has died and come back to life for some foul purpose.

[00:00:32]But, the Mariner assures him, he says, "Be calm, wedding guest.

[00:00:36]You know, this body did not drop. I stayed alive." And then we get to another very famous stanza, which is the one that reads, "Alone, alone, all all alone, alone on a wide wide sea, and never a saint took pity on my soul in agony."

[00:00:55]And once for the final time on this occasion, I just want to read something from Malcolm Guite's Mariner because I think, once again, it's a terrific passage.

[00:01:06]And well worth putting on your radar, where he talks about this particular stanza and says, "The poem was written at the end of the 18th century, but in some respects, the loneliness evoked in this verse may strike us even more deeply in the 21st century than it did its first readers.

[00:01:26]Loneliness of this profound kind, utter isolation, a sense of being cut off not only from other people, but from the cosmos itself, has come to be one of the most common experiences, even perhaps a defining experience of our own age. And this is not simply the loneliness of the increasing numbers in our societies who are living alone, from the bereaved or abandoned elderly to the middle-aged divorced to singles in their minimalist studio flats, but a deeper, more endemic kind of loneliness, a sense of disconnection, anime, alienation, that even when we are with people, we are somehow all the more isolated in our own tiny, absurd, islanded consciousnesses, separated and marooned in the concavity of our own little schools with a wide, wide sea of nothingness between us and any other.

[00:02:25]Ironically, this feeling of isolation is actually deepened rather than relieved by the plethora of online social networks and the almost manic fury with which we acquire virtual friends only to find that no one actually knows us, not even we ourselves. The root cause of this loneliness is philosophical. It reflects the shifts at the birth of modernism from the living sacral view of the cosmos as an interconnected web of human and angelic consciousness, all participating to a greater or lesser degree in an all-pervasive divine presence expressed in and through the physical, to the modern, mechanistic, instrumental view of nature, in which matter is dead, inert, and essentially meaningless. Its motion caused by blind mechanism and its apparent flashes of beauty and meaning no more than the mirage. Coleridge was living in the midst of this shift and he felt it from within, understood its consequences, and turned to resist it with every effort of the his being. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a poem of resistance. It prophesies the consequences of this loss of sacral vision, but it also prophesies a recovery of vision. That recovery is, I think, beginning in our own midst in these opening decades of the 21st century, the reductive enlightenment modernist project is disintegrating all around us. And although it is not yet clear what will replace it, Coleridge, especially in this part of the poem, which speaks so tellingly of our present condition, points to some exciting possibilities. And so we see the mariner here at his his true nadir. Um all alone on that wide wide sea. And we also see as well the fact that he is genuine as uh guy describes, cut off from the cosmos itself. In dis- destroying that which is horizontal, you know, works horizontally on the world around him in his plane is of existence, he's also cut himself off from the vertical as well.

[00:04:45]Um he doesn't understand or appreciate the powers at work beneath the sea with the polar spirits with the ship. And he also was which is really uh the thing that is cursing him for uh killing the albatross because it's described as the fact that he loved the bird, that he, being the polar spirit, he loved the bird that loved the mariner.

[00:05:09]And so within this you you have this constant biblical allusion to the fact that uh Jesus God loved Jesus and Jesus loved the people who crucified him. And this entire theological order of love that the mariner has severed himself from in his sin. And once more we get um that dust imagery being employed by Coleridge where he describes his heart being as dry as dust. So once again, he doesn't have the breath of God within him. He is in a state as before uh God's breath ever touched the human soul. And the direct quote from Genesis on this part is and the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils a breath of life and man became a living being.

[00:05:59]And so without God's breath he is his heart has retreated to dust again. It is he is truly spiritually barren. But it's when we're at our lowest point that we're sometimes open to the greatest metamorphosis and this is exactly what the mariner is about to go through and he doesn't even go through it consciously. It's kind of a position that he finds himself in with as he's there seven days, seven nights with all of these cursed men still looking at him and honestly just the the monotony and the torture is incredible the way that Coleridge describes it where the mariner is there on the deck of the ship and all he can do for these seven days is just keep looking into the sea and the water that you can't drink and keep looking at these slimy, slimy things that live on along with him which again speaks to how he now sees himself as well as this wretched, wretched creature.

[00:06:59]And also when he's not looking at those things all he can do is cast his eyes towards his dead shipmates and it's to this, to the slimy things, to the dead shipmates, to the slimy things, to the dead shipmates for seven days in this this grueling experience. And it's here that we get this genuine metamorphosis from our mariner where he begins to understand what he'd failed to understand all along where his instrumentalist philosophy begins to fracture and we see him begin to adopt the sacral view, the personal view of humans, of humanity. And here I just wanted to borrow from the gloss at the side of the poem that was written by Coleridge in the 1817 version, which instantly as well by the way I don't think I've mentioned this yet, is the fact that the 1817 version was actually the first time that Coleridge's name was ever actually put to the publication of the mariner. Before then it had always been published anonymously. Though of course people knew it was Coleridge, but he actually put his name to it in this one. But in the gloss by the side of the the passage where he's going through this experience and then it goes on to say, "The moving moon went up in the sky and nowhere did abide. Softly she was going up and a star or two beside." And then in the gloss Coleridge has elaborated on the stanza and he says, "In his loneliness and fixedness he yearns towards the journeying moon and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward. And everywhere the blue sky belongs to them and is their appointed rest and their native country and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced as lords that are assuredly expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival." And so he looks up to the heavens and he see and he envies the fact that these stars will move from place, that they will disappear and return home to their natural home in the sky. And he yearns for that, that power that the moon possesses to come and go.

[00:09:21]And this way that Coleridge writes it of the moving moon, it's not just a moving of the in the physical sense, but it's also a moving of the mind. It's a moving of philosophy. And that's finally what the mariner encounters here as he looks down into the moonlit waters below and he says, "Now all of a sudden these are not slimy, slimy things. These are water snakes." And their attire is is no longer slimy, but um something wondrous.

[00:09:52]And actually the mariner begins to to see the beauty, the natural beauty, the divinely ordained form of these creatures and the fact that they do have an intrinsic value of their own and that there is some creative design behind them. And the fact that in his present state the mariner comes to appreciate them and find some companionship in this other ecosystem that once before he had found no value in. And so in finding this ability to move forward to to spiritually elevate himself and truly love truly love God's other creatures, this spring of love burst from his heart and he blessed them all aware.

[00:10:36]Because now he's not looking at these water snakes from an instrumentalist perspective. He's not looking at what they can do for him. He's not looking for any way to exploit them. He's just appreciating their existence for what it is and for the joy and the love that it can actually bring.

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