The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

            I think I was kind of predestined to analyze The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (in case I believed in destiny at all). I was raised by my parents to like rock’n’roll music and even despite the fact I have never liked heavy metal music, there is a band I just have to respect: Iron Maiden. It is not a typical rock band – the most curious thing is that they are quite intellectual and fancy in history and literature. And so, there is this song called The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, or more like a music composition about fourteen minutes long, retelling the story of the Ancient Mariner. And that is why I chose this poem.

            So, this was my motive before-reading. After I read the poem, I learned my decision had been just right. The poem itself is a perfect example of early romantism, expressed by following means:

• Hero: obviously, there is a kind of asocial lad of a main character. He is alone. And, in addition, he kills the Albatross.
• Background: Full of darkness. It does not have to be an old castle, I think a ship of a Flying-Dutchman-style is sufficient enough.
• Plot: Free from earlier classical moral lessons, there is no fight between the Good and the Evil, nothing like that.
• And, in addition also, there are phantoms, ghosts, spirits and other supernatural powers.

However, the topic of this essay is to tell the realistic from the supernatural in this particular poem. The whole poem is composed as a frame story of the Ancient Mariner who visits a wedding and tells the wedding guests his story about what he experienced years ago. The poem was written in 1798.

According to Andrew C. F. David, certain mister William Wales – who was also a tutor of Mr Coleridge – took part in a journey of James Cook whose goal was to discover the formerly fabled Terra Australis within the south polar territorries. He was not fully successful but he managed to discover South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands in 1774. During the journey, his two ships indeed experienced some fog troubles which separated them. Some scholars argue, that the poem might be also inspired by the voyage of Thomas James and his experiences in the Arctic. Sir Thomas James was the first European voyager who deliberately wintered in the Northern coast of Canada. What is important, he built up some primitive cabins, so his crewmen suffered from low-temperature symptoms. And Mr James carefully registered and took notes about these.

This is the background. Now, let us get back to the story again: the Mariner tells a story about his journey which was more like a continuous series of unfortunate events. His ship is carried by the storm somewhere to the South. I would like to highlight two metaphors at this point: The first is the metaphor of the Sun as a male entity which I find extraordinery from my point of view. The another one is the personification of the storm as someone who chases the ship, literally hunts it down.

It is not unusual for a ship at the open seas to get hit by a storm and get lost in the fog. It is also not unlikely for a ship in the antarctic to meet an albatross. Why the Mariner shoots it down, nobody needs to know – which is the true beauty of romantism: nobody has to know the hero’s motives, nobody has to justify them, nobody is obliged to act in the name of divine morale or the common good.

Eventually, the fog the ship had been stuck in disperses. But then, the ship got stuck again in the sea ,as idle as a painted ship in a painted ocean‘. There are obviously even shallow waters around the Antarctic coast in the direction of Tasmania, more of them are nevertheless on the Pacific side. Still, there can be some true core within the author’s artistic licence.

But then, the phantoms appear. From this point on, the poem is filled with supernatural apparitions, which is caused – according to the sailors – by killing the Albatross that is eventually hung around the Mariner’s neck ‚instead of the cross‘. There are records of hallucination occuring to people exposed to extremely low temperatures, hallucinations caused by hypothermia. The question is, how much likely is it that hypothermia kills all crewmen except of one. And the other, whether hallucinations can sail a ship to safe waters.

Anyway, while the ship is stuck in the middle of nowhere and the sailors suffer from drought, another ship emerged on the western horizon. And as it approaches nearer, without wind or tide, without any crew to sail it, it becomes clearer to the Mariner they are dealing with another apparition. There are only two skeletal beings on board, throwing dice in a game of life or death of the crew, which only the Mariner survives.

He spent a whole week with two hundred of his dead companions when the curse started to break. Here comes another interesting personification of the Moon as a female entity, which I would understand as a metaphor of women virtues needed in this situation: the ability to calm someone down (indeed some women can do that), to give a desperate man the feeling of safety.

While praying to Virgin Mary, the plot twists again. By some divine intervention, the crew of dead men awake and set the ship to float away.

I insist to make a little step aside: since the romantism is typical for egoism, inspiration by nature and pre-christian traditions, there are some interesting topics to talk about. There are no doubts this part is completely supernatural. But there is this strange mixture of non-christian and christian powers. The character of the Reaper, or Death in terms of the poem itself, is extra-christian, global and basically paganic. So are the elemental spirits and phantoms. On the other hand, the Mariner prays to Virgin Mary and the only God, the christian angels descend from the sky upon the earth to inspire and reanimate the sailors‘ corpses. The word reanimate is used for the purpose of differentiation from reviving. One can revive Jesus but the crewmen got reanimated, turned into some kind of angelic zombies and returned back among the dead eventually. Reanimation is necromancy, and therefore not christian.

The Mariner’s horror story ends when reaching the safety by a Hermit (again, such a splendid romantic character, not supernatural this time).

As mentioned above, the poem is (in my humble opinion) early romantic. The features of romantism were explained enough. The meaning of ‚early‘ sticks in the ending part of the poem:
Farewell, farewell! But this I tell

To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!

He prayeth well, who loveth well

Both men and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth best

all things both great and small ;

for the dear God who loveth us,

He made and loveth all.

This is the trace of divine morale of heavenly origin typical for classicism; full of love, life and devotion. Absolutely anti-romantic.

To summarize, there indeed are both realistic and supernatural features in the poem of the Ancient Mariner. Overall, there is a real background of the whole story which is told more than two decades after discovering antarctic islands. Even the mentioned albatross does not have to be a supernatural character. It is unlikely that killing an albatros would have caused weather changes of this extent. Even in case that all the phantoms, ghosts, reapers and angels were just a hallucination caused by hypothermia, the course of things to come would not have been influenced by these hallucinations which usually cannot sail a ship.

What we deal with here is thus a realistically based story full of ghastly beings which could be used readilly hundred years after by A. E. Poe or even today in some kind of horror film.

Sources: I would like to thank my old friend who is a medic now, who came with the idea of hypothermia hallucinations. It is, however, not a literally source.

David, Andrew C. F., Cook, James (1728 – 1779), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 (online edition 2008)

Cooke Alan, Thomas James, Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online