The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

"They’re very popular quite quickly. They’re published all over Europe. I think it’s one of the most memorable illustrations of any poem. The nineteenth century loves illustrating poems, but ‘The Ancient Mariner’ gets treated spectacularly by the standards of the illustrative nineteenth century. Coleridge only lived to see one illustration of the poem done by Michael David Scott, and he wasn’t terribly impressed by them. One of the things he said Scott got wrong was portraying the ancient mariner as an old man at the time of the story—the whole point, Coleridge said, was that when the events of the poem happened, he was a young man. He’s an old man now , but a young man then . It’s not just a poem about terrible things that happen, it’s a poem about how you remember terrible things that happen, narrativise them, and try to make sense of them. It’s a very powerful, extraordinarily perceptive poem about coping with trauma. How do you write a poem about making sense of experiences you can’t rationalise fully? Doré is a wonderful artist and a brilliantly intuitive reader of poetry, it seems to me. Some of the illustrations of key moments in The Ancient Mariner— like the arrow heading towards the heart of the bird and all the rest of it—are brilliantly and memorably done. “How do you write a poem about making sense of experiences you can’t rationalise fully?” The thing I most admire about the Doré illustrations is the last one, something which isn’t in the poem at all: the ancient mariner spotting the next person he’s going to tell the story to. That’s not in the poem, but it’s a wonderful piece of literary criticism on Doré’s part. It’s happened before and it’ll happen all over again. There’s no final expiation of the burden of this dark, psychological stuff the mariner is carrying around in his head. Doré gets that. Yes, that’s a good thought. It’s also a remarkably open poem. It’s like a Shakespeare play—what makes it so compelling is the mystery or enigma at the heart of it. So it’s interpretable in all sorts of ways. Having said that, there’s a huge amount in The Ancient Mariner which involved the deepest, darkest and most tumultuous bits of Coleridge’s soul, which is why he could never leave it alone. It’s a very, very heavily revised poem, and whenever he re-prints it he goes back and changes, adds and tweaks things. If you count the versions in a very strict way, there are something like seventeen or eighteen distinct versions of the poem. He’s still tinkering with it in the 1830s when he’s quite an old man. That’s a very, very good question. I suppose there are two basic answers, and they might both be true. One is that the notes in the margin are genuinely meant to clarify what’s going on in the poem, because the poem seems to have confused many of its initial readers, who didn’t see a moral shape or structure to it. When the albatross is shot, it brings down a curse upon the mariner. Then, later on in the poem, the marginal note says “The curse is finally expiated”—so there’s a kind of Crime and Punishment redemption structure the notes seem to emphasise and clarify. A second interpretation of those notes would be to say that they make the poem look a good deal more simple than it actually is emotionally. If what the ancient mariner is going through at the end of that poem is the experience of someone who’s had a curse lifted from him, then it’s a bit mind-boggling to think what it might be to have a curse on you. He seems just as tortured at the end as he ever was. Doré’s great insight is that he never gets rid of the stuff. He just has to go download it again in a few days’ time. If you pursue that line of enquiry, then the possibility arises that the marginal notes aren’t written in Coleridge’s own voice as such, but perhaps in the voice of some fictive editor. The ancient mariner pretends to be a medieval ballad, and medieval ballads in the eighteenth century often came with editors’ notes—the paraphernalia of the sort you get in Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). It may be that Coleridge is doing something a little bit more like Nabokov—something incredibly sophisticated, with many textual layers. I think that’s right. The idea the poem is partly about interpretation—how you interpret and misinterpret things—is an intriguing one. Quite a few of the marginal notes either seem to be irrelevant, or digressive. Some very beautifully: Some quite comically. Some are just wrong. I had a student once who went through and categorised all the marginal notes into those which were wrong, those which were right, and those which were ambiguous. I now can’t remember what the pie-chart looked like, but a large section of the pie-chart were notes that looked erroneous. That’s quite interesting, isn’t it? If that floats the idea of erroneousness and misinterpretation being one of the things that the poem is interested in, it invites us to think about our own reception of the poem. Having the marginal notes is a way of dramatising, as it were, a reading of that poem just as we’re reading the poem. But also it invites us to think about the way the mariner is an interpreter, or possibly a mis-interpreter, of his own experience. That’s absolutely right. And one thing the ancient mariner is completely convinced about is that because he shot the albatross, all this terrible stuff happened. If you had to paraphrase the story, telling someone who had never read the poem what it was about, that’s what you would say. But the more you look at it, the more it seems like after the bird is shot, the weather improves, and everyone on board the ship tells the mariner he’s done a really good thing. Then the weather turns, and everyone turns their back on him. So the causal link is actually very precarious, and it’s most entrenched in the mariner’s own mind. It’s about the power of narratives to make sense of what’s happened to you."