The French Revolution, which began in 1789, gave idealists like Coleridge hope of a ‘new liberation’ and a new way of life. During the late eighteenth century in France, and to a lesser extent in England, there was growing political unrest. The middle class and other citizens were caught up in ideas of liberalism and freedom from despotic rule. At the time, nobles and wealthy landowners controlled parliament; voting rights were held by men based on how much property they held. Coleridge sympathised with the middle and lower class who wanted a say in the running of the country.
1. Margaret Drabble – The Oxford Companion to English Literature, OUP, Oxford, 1996, p.214
Coleridge’s own life journey may be seen as represented in the sea journey by the main character, the Ancient Mariner. The killing of the Albatross represents Coleridge’s despair, his frustration, and his sense of failure and deep sense of guilt
With my cross-bow
I shot the albatross.
…………………………………………………
And I had done a hellish thing. (lines 81-82 and 91)
The Mariner’s physical suffering expresses Coleridge’s own frustrations as well as his suffering under the effects of opium. Coleridge skilfully creates in the poem a nightmarish world of physical human misery and suffering in a malevolent natural world. This is what Coleridge’s own psychological and spiritual suffering must have been like during his opium-induced dreaming.
The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.
About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch’s oils,
Burnt green, and blue and white. (lines 123–130)
Worse follows in Parts Three and Four, but there comes a turning point in the nightmarish journey of the doomed ship and its crew. Coleridge imagines a miraculous redemptive moment for the Ancient Mariner. At the end of Part Four, the Ancient Mariner, watching the water snakes, has a sudden vision of them as ‘happy, living things’ and he is moved by their natural beauty to love them –
……no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware.
The selfsame moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea. (lines 282-291)
The Mariner’s acceptance of his sin of wantonly, killing one of God’s precious creatures, lifts the curse that was laid upon him and he is freed. Unburdened of his original sin, the Ancient Mariner receives God-granted redemption and peace -
Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing,
Beloved from pole to pole!
To Mary Queen the praise be given!
She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven,
That slid into my soul. (lines 292-296)
The Fifth and Sixth Parts deal with the healing of the Mariner and the safe return of the ship to land. Through the actions of the holy Hermit, the Ancient Mariner is healed and he commences his mission ‘to teach, by his own example, love and reverence to all things that God made and loveth’ (Coleridge’s 1798 marginal notes opposite lines 610-614).
The poem suggests that this is what Coleridge would have wanted - to be redeemed from his suffering and his opium addiction, just as the Mariner was redeemed from sin. By writing the poem indirectly about his life and what he would like his future to hold, Coleridge was able to show to himself, more than to anyone else, that there was hope and that a better and greater way of life was possible.
Coleridge wrote this poem when he was young, and it was not until later in life when Coleridge came to terms with his drug dependence, and openly admitted his opium addiction that he found his own redemption. While the Mariner takes ‘seven days, seven nights’ (line 261) to realise and accept that all creatures are beautiful in God’s eyes, and that he should love them, Coleridge takes most of his life to admit that he is an opium addict. The reason it took Coleridge so long to accept his addiction is that he escaped confronting his problem by running from it. Coleridge spent many years overseas in different countries, and even when he was in England, he still travelled restlessly2. Coleridge was a disconcerted man of political inaction. In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, the Mariner is trapped on the ship in the middle of the ocean, and as a result, he has no means of physical escape. Unlike Coleridge, having no route of escape, the Mariner has no choice but to face the crisis and, in the process, is granted the gift of a better and greater life.
In 1798, at the age of only twenty-six when he wrote “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, Coleridge was not able to make his imagined better and greater world real in his own life. Nevertheless, his ideas were revolutionary and inspiring and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” presents a world where Coleridge could let his imagination run free of limitations and dream of a ‘better’ and ‘greater’ world of love, beauty, redemption through divine intervention and liberation from sin. It is a world of second chances and acceptance. This was Coleridge’s way of expressing his perfect, but as yet, unattainable world.
2. Margaret Drabble – The Oxford Companion to English Literature, OUP, Oxford, 1996, p.214-5
Bibliography:
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Drabble, M, 1996, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, OUP, Oxford
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‘Great Britain’, 1991, The World Book Encyclopedia, vol. 8, World Book, Chicago, pp.336-362
