The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (originally The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere) is the longest major poem by English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, written in 1797–98 and published in 1798 in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. Some modern editions use a revised version printed in 1817 that featured a gloss.[1] It is often considered a signal shift to modern poetry and the beginning of British Romantic literature.[2]
"Ancient Mariner" redirects here. For other uses, see Ancient Mariner (disambiguation) and Rime of the Ancient Mariner (disambiguation).The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere
1797–98
English
fate, doom, seafaring, superstition
abcb
J. & A. Arch
1798
625
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner recounts the experiences of a sailor who has returned from a long sea voyage. The mariner stops a man who is on his way to a wedding ceremony and begins to narrate a story. The Wedding-Guest's reaction turns from amusement to impatience to fear to fascination as the mariner's story progresses, as can be seen in the language style; Coleridge uses narrative techniques such as personification and repetition to create a sense of danger, the supernatural, or serenity, depending on the mood in different parts of the poem.
Interpretations[edit]
On a surface level the poem explores a violation of nature and the resulting psychological effects on the mariner and on all those who hear him. According to Jerome McGann the poem is like a salvation story. The poem's structure is multi-layered text based on Coleridge's interest in higher criticism. "Like the Iliad or Paradise Lost or any great historical product, the Rime is a work of trans-historical rather than so-called universal significance. This verbal distinction is important because it calls attention to a real one. Like The Divine Comedy or any other poem, the Rime is not valued or used always or everywhere or by everyone in the same way or for the same reasons."[17]
Whalley (1947)[18] suggests that the Ancient Mariner is an autobiographical portrait of Coleridge himself, comparing the mariner's loneliness with Coleridge's own feelings of loneliness expressed in his letters and journals.[18]
In Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), Camille Paglia writes that the Bridegroom, Wedding-Guest and Mariner all represent aspects of Coleridge: "The Bridegroom is a masculine persona" that is "integrated with society", and that the Wedding-Guest is an adolescent seeking "sexual fulfilment and collective joy", that must merge with the Bridegroom but is unable to because of the appearance of a spectre-self, a "male heroine" who "luxuriates in passive suffering".[19]
Versions of the poem[edit]
Coleridge often made changes to his poems and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was no exception – he produced at least eighteen different versions over the years.[20](pp 128–130) He regarded revision as an essential part of creating poetry.[20](p 138) The first published version of the poem was in Lyrical Ballads in 1798. The second edition of this anthology in 1800 included a revised text, requested by Coleridge, in which some of the language and many of the archaic spellings were modernised. He also reduced the title to The Ancient Mariner but for later versions the longer title was restored. The 1802 and 1805 editions of Lyrical Ballads had minor textual changes. In 1817 Coleridge's Sibylline Leaves anthology included a new version with an extensive marginal gloss, written by the poet. The last version he produced was in 1834.[21][20](pp 127, 130, 134)
Traditionally literary critics regarded each revision of a text by an author as producing a more authoritative version and Coleridge published somewhat revised versions of the poem in his Poetical Works anthology editions of 1828, 1829, and lastly in 1834—the year of his death. More recently scholars look to the earliest version, even in manuscript, as the most authoritative but for this poem no manuscript is extant. Hence the editors of the edition of Collected Poems published in 1972 used the 1798 version but made their own modernisation of the spelling and they added some passages taken from later editions.[20](pp 128–129, 134)
The 1817 edition, the one most used today and the first to be published under Coleridge's own name rather than anonymously, added a new Latin epigraph but the major change was the addition of the gloss that has a considerable effect on the way the poem reads.[22](p 186)[23][24][20](pp 130, 134) Coleridge's grandson E.H. Coleridge produced a detailed study of the published versions of the poem.[22] Over all, Coleridge's revisions resulted in the poem losing thirty-nine lines and an introductory prose "Argument", and gaining fifty-eight glosses and a Latin epigraph.[20](p 134)
In general the anthologies included printed lists of errata and, in the case of the particularly lengthy list in Sibylline Leaves, the list was included at the beginning of the volume. Such changes were often editorial rather than merely correcting errors.[20](pp 131, 139) Coleridge also made handwritten changes in printed volumes of his work, particularly when he presented them as gifts to friends.[20](pp 134, 139)
