He replied that he thought “the poem had too much: and that the only, or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of such pure imagination.
The Ancient Mariner is a man reduced to his simple, bare essence, and that essence is simply the obsessive memory of what brought him to this extremity.Ĭoleridge later said that Anna Laetitia Barbauld complained of the poem that it had no moral. This comment is perhaps the single best thing ever said about the poem. the Ancient Marinere undergoes such trials as overwhelm and bury all individuality or memory of what he was-like the state of a man in a bad dream, one terrible peculiarity of which is, that all consciousness of personality is gone” (letter dated January 30, 1801). I dislike all the miraculous part of it but the feelings of the man under the operation of such scenery, dragged me along like Tom Pipe’s magic whistle. After first reading it, I was totally possessed with it for many days. What new idea is gained by this title but one subversive of all credit-which the tale should force upon us-of its truth!” He goes on, “For me, I was never so affected with any human tale. In a letter to Wordsworth about the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, which Wordsworth had just sent him, Charles Lamb had foreshadowed just this language in a deeply insightful comment on the poem: “I am sorry that Coleridge has christened his Ancient Marinere, a Poet’s Reverie. Thus, he wrote in perhaps the most famous passage in Biographia Literaria, “it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” Both procedures would meet in the attention they focused on the reactions, psychological and expressive, to be represented (as Wordsworth put it in the preface to the 1800 volume) by “fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation.” For Wordsworth, the vividness of sensation would be communicated by intensity of language in the naturalist poems for Coleridge, the intensity of language would reflect the vividness of sensation that the supernatural elements would necessarily produce, but it was the sensation of real people and not its supposed supernatural occasions that was the source of the poetic language. The idea was that Wordsworth would treat natural events as though they had the special interest that ballads had traditionally found in the supernatural while Coleridge would do the converse, which is to say he would treat supernatural events as they would be experienced by psychologically real human beings. In chapter 14 of his intellectual quasi-autobiography, Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge describes how he and William Wordsworth decided to split the writing of Lyrical Ballads so that Coleridge would do the so-called supernatural poems and Wordsworth the entirely naturalistic ones. Nevertheless it would probably be better to see the different versions of the poem as essentially true to the same vision and to regard them as presenting that vision with the slight stereoscopic differences that allow us to see depth.
It opened the 1798 first edition of Lyrical Ballads, where it first appeared Coleridge revised it for the 1800 edition and undertook further revisions later, after his sea voyage to Malta (where he went to recover his health), revisions that include the wonderful marginal glosses. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s most popular poem.
Analysis of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Marinerīy NASRULLAH MAMBROL on Febru
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