In Our Time - The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Episode Date: March 4, 2021

In this 900th edition of the programme, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the best known and most influential of the poems of the Romantic movement. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in 1798 after discussions with his friend Wordsworth. He refined it for the rest of his life, and it came to define him, a foreshadowing of his opium-addicted, lonely wandering and deepening sense of guilt. The poem tells of a sailor compelled to tell and retell the story of a terrible voyage in his youth, this time as guests are heading to a wedding party, where he stoppeth one of three.The image above is from Gustave Doré's illustration of the mariner's shooting of the albatross, for an 1877 German language edition of the poemWithSir Jonathan Bate Professor of Environmental Humanities at Arizona State UniversityTom Mole Professor of English Literature and Book History at the University of EdinburghAnd Rosemary Ashton Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College LondonProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programs. Hello, the rhyme of the ancient mariner is one of the best known and most influential of the poems of the Romantic Movement and one of the most loved. Coleridge wrote it in 1798 and refined it over the next 40 years,

and it came to define him. a foreshadowing of his opium-addicted, lonely, wandering life. The poem tells of a sailor compelled to tell and retell the story of a terrible voyage in his youth, this time as guests are heading to a wedding party where he stoppeth one in three. With me to discuss the rhyme of the ancient mariner on this our 900 edition, I asked Sir Jonathan Bates, Professor of Environmental Humanities at Arizona State University, Tom Moll, Professor of English Literature and Book History at the University of Edinburgh, and Rosemary Ashton, Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London.

Rosemary Ashton, can you tell us about the early life of Coleridge? Coleridge was born in October 1772, the 10th and youngest son of the Reverend Don Coleridge, who was vicar of the church at Ottery St Mary near Exeter in Devon, and also headmaster of the local school. His father was 53 when young Samuel was born, and we know very little about his mother from the surviving family letters there's not much about her,

but what we do know from the few remarks that come down from Coleridge himself is that she was a rather cold and distant figure, particularly to young Sam, who was intellectually precocious and emotionally needy right from the start. Now, just days before Coleridge's ninth birthday, in October 1781, his father died suddenly.

And that put the family at a day, a disadvantage because they were not only mourning, but they were poor and they had to move out of the schoolhouse. And what was going to be done with nine-year-old Samuel? Well, he was sent off to boarding school in London to the famous Christ Hospital School in Newgate Street in the city of London, which had been founded in the 16th century. Cooridge, of course, it was already at the age of nine, pretty brilliant, a great reader, a library cormorant, as he said later of himself. The library cormorant. A devourer of books. books. That's what he called himself. He was all set to be a Grecian, not his learn Greek, and go to, and that and of course, and go to university. But he was pretty lonely and unhappy. He never went home for holidays and his mother never came to visit him. And so it's quite extraordinary for a child starting at 9, 10 at school. Never saw his mother or his family. Other children at the school, including his friends.

Charles Lamb lived in London and so could spend weekends, holidays with their families. But Coleridge, who was turfed out on days like Easter Monday, which were public holidays, when others went home, he was turfed out of the school to wander around the city all day, browsing in bookshops, but hungry and lonely. However, even early on, there was something special about young Coleridge, and he cast a spell on those he met. just before his 19th birthday in 1791, up Coleridge went to Jesus College, Cambridge. He soon won the Greek poetry prize for an ode which attacked the slave trade.

Can we move on to his friendship with the poet, Saldi? Can you tell us about what happened between those two? Yes, we can. Coleridge was still a student at Cambridge, but having joined the army on a whim under the name Silas Tompkin-Comba-Batch at the end of 1793, and had to be bailed out by his brothers. He was due to go back to Cambridge and finish his degree, but in the summer of 1794,

he went on a walking tour with a friend. They stopped off in Oxford, and their Coleridge came into contact with another young revolutionary and would-be poet, Robert Southey, who was a student in Oxford. Well, within a few weeks, they had decided to give up their degrees and to plan a community which would live according to the ideals of liberty equality and fraternity.

Sothe was already engaged to a young woman in Bristol, Edith Fricker, and two of his friends were engaged to two more of the Fricker sisters. All it was needed was for Coleridge to marry another sister, Sarah, before the whole group set off for America. Corridge excitedly agreed to the plan, which fell apart the following year in 1795, when Sovey, already cooling towards the American scheme, came into some money,

and that gave him enough money to survive in England and put him off the whole panthasocracy scheme. That's a wonderful summary. What a pace you went through, but a steady but complete, I would say. Jonathan Bates. In 1797, Curlidge met Wordsworth in North Somerset.

People have talked of that, people who know their work have said, that year was a great meeting of two men influenced them both massively and influenced English poetry strongly. Can you tell us about that meeting? They first met briefly picking up from where Rosemary left off in Bristol in 1795. Coleridge was always on the lookout for a poetic partner.

He fell out with Salvy. He met Wordsworth briefly. They'd both been at Cambridge, but not known each other then. And they sort of gradually struck up a friendship. Then in 1997, 1797, Wordsworth is living with his sister Dorothy in a little cottage, not so far from Bristol, just down over the border in Dorset. and Coleridge comes to visit them, so excited to see him, he jumps over a gate and runs across a field,

and they start sharing poetry with each other. And Coleridge says, you've got to come and live closer to me. By this time, he's living in a little cottage in a village called Nether Stowe, also in Somerset, about 40, 50 miles to the west of Bristol. So he arranges for Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, to come and stay with him. It's a tiny little cottage, though, but fortunately they've found, a bigger house nearby, a big house called Al-Foxton, that's available for rent. And William and Dorothy moved there.

Can we talk about when they met and started to put the local balance together? During this year where they're living close to each other in Somerset, they start writing poetry together, admiring each other's poetry hugely, feeding off each other. Wordsworth's, wonderful poetry of nature, Coleridge's Moore sort of mystical and philosophical poetry. Somehow, The two merge together, and they come up with this idea of a jointly written collection of poems, called Lyrical Ballads. And it's there that the ancient mariner is first published. And there's a fantastic story about the origin of the poem.

So Wordsworth and Coleridge would go walking together above the Bristol Channel. And one day they were walking through a valley. It was known as the Valley of the Rocks, a very sort of sublime, romanticly. landscape. And it got them talking about a German poem called The Death of Abel. And they came up with the idea of writing a sequel to it called The Wanderings of Kane, Kane, the first murderer. And Coleridge says, words, you write the first, they're divided into three sections or cantos. You write the first, I'll write the second, and whoever finishes theirs first will write the third. And they get back home, and Coleridge dashes off his canto. It goes.

to see Wordsworth, and Wordsworth hasn't written a word. Wordsworth said this idea writing about Kane and murder, it's not my style. Wordsworth writes about landscape and shepherds and childhood. And Coleridge says the whole scheme broke up in a laugh, and the ancient mariner was written instead. And it's Wordsworth who gives Coleridge the idea for that. The idea that instead of writing about the first human murder, Kane murdering able. They would write about the murder of a bird. Wordsworth has been reading a travel book, a book about

a voyage at the tip of South America. And he reads a story about how this ship, when rounding the cape, encountered storms and albatrosses. These great 12-foot winged birds were there, as if seeming to protect the ship, but the second mate shot the albatross. So Wordsworth says to Coleridge, what about making this the basis of a poem, and that's the origin of the ancient mariner. And a poem he works on one way and another for 40 years. Thank you very much, John. Right. Tom Moe, can you give us the first few lines and then remind us at the story. Jonathan's a bit there, but you might want to fill it out of it. Absolutely. So the poem starts unforgettably, I think. It is an ancient mariner,

and he stoppeth one of three. By thy lot. grey beard and glittering eye. Now wherefore stops thou me? It's the story of an old sailor, the mariner of the title. He stops a wedding guest on his way to a wedding and insists on telling him a story all about a sea voyage that he went on as a young man. Now on this voyage, he shoots, as we've heard, he shoots an albatross that's following the ship in the southern ocean. And after that, and maybe because of that, it's not quite clear, things start to go badly wrong on board the ship. The ship's driven off course. It goes up towards the equator. It's be calmed there, surrounded by all these loathsome, slimy water creatures. And the crew blame the mariner for what's gone wrong, and they

hang the dead albatross around his neck as a sign of his guilt. So they drift aimlessly on the sea, and starving and dying of thirst, until the mariner sees a ship, which he hopes will come to their rescue, but it turns out to be a sort of ghostly weird ship inhabited by these skeletons, skeletal figures. The crew die horribly from thirst, leaving the mariner alone on board. With blackened lips. Black and lips and eating his own blood, drinking his own blood. That's right. A fantastic lines where he said, I bit my arm, I sucked the blood and cried a sail, a sail. So his ship is mysteriously driven. river northwards back home. And then at that point, the mariner finds himself able to pray once again,

which he hasn't been able to before. And he blesses the water snakes, these horrible creatures that he'd previously despised. And soon after that, again, perhaps because of that, it rains and he's revived. Just as the ship is coming back to harbour, it sinks, and the mariner is rescued from the sinking ship by the pilot who's rowed out from the harbour to meet the ship, accompanied a little strangely by a local hermit. And ever since then, the mariner has been compelled to tell the story of his voyage again and again. And so, in fact, this poem isn't just the story of the voyage. It's the story of how he tells the story of the voyage.

Yes. The wedding guest never makes it to the wedding. And the poem ends by telling us that the wedding guests woke up a sadder and a wiser man. Well, thank you very much for that. There's a lot in between that and consequent on that. But let's stick to the next question. How was it first published and how was it received? The poem was first published in Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth and Coleridge's joint book.

They published out anonymously in 1798. It comes out again in the second edition in 1800. And then Coleridge revises it very drastically for his own poetry volume called Sibberline Leaves, which comes out in 1817. and then again in editions of his collected poems up until 1834. And how was it received when it first came out and the first two or three times it came out? The first readers really couldn't make much of it. Robert Sothe, who we've already heard about,

Kowleridge's friend and now brother-in-law, called it absurd and unintelligible. He paid Kowleridge a very backhanded compliment. He said, genius has here been employed in producing a poem of little merit. Even Wordsworth didn't like it much. He described it in the second edition of lyrical ballads as having great defects. But Charles Lamb, Coleridge's school friend, he liked it and he liked it straight away.

He told Wordsworth that after first reading it, I was totally possessed with it for many days. It's worth adding, Tom, isn't it, that in a way the beginnings of the falling out between Wordsworth and Coleridge, they had this fantastic friendship, but eventually falling out. In a way, the beginnings of that can be dated to the bad reception that the ancient mariner got. Because it was such a long poem and came first of all in lyrical ballads, it tended to dominate the reception of the collection. And for that reason, Wordsworth wasn't very happy about it. So when he produced a second edition of lyrical ballads with new poems all by himself,

he arranged with a publisher for the ancient marion to be shoved to the back of the first volume. And it must have been rather a shock for readers to lead. that wonderful introduction by Wordsworth, which defined a new era in English poetry, saying it was a language spoken by ordinary people on ordinary subjects. He said it better than that, but that's the sort of the gist, and then to open to the ancient mariner. Part of the problem was that in the first edition,

the spelling was deliberately archaic, and it was called the rhyme of the ancient with a Y, mariner, mariner, with a knee at the end. And some of the, it wasn't too debarbitative, but a number of the, small number of people who reviewed it, did say, what's all this, why do we need this archaic language? And to be fair on Coleridge, he saw that too. It's in the style of a ballad, Rosemary.

Yes. Why did you want that format? Ballads were actually quite in vogue at the time, but the ballads that were in vogue were traditional balance, anonymous usually, folk tales, not written, not polite literature, written by university men or anything of that kind, and they tend to have been passed over the years

by word of mouth. And that explains the short lines, the short stanzas, four-line stanzas, the repetition, the insistent rhyming. These are all elements of the traditional ballad, and they suit a kind of poem which is going to be heard rather than read and remembered and recited. But by the middle of the century, the literati began to collect folk ballads. The most famous of these collections was Bishop Thomas Percy's relics of ancient English poetry

in 1765. And by the 1790s, when Wordsworth and Corys are getting going, there's quite a lot of interest in ballads. Can we go back to ancient marina? Could you quote, for the listeners, a few lines, perhaps a couple of verses of the way he used the ballot format? We can start right at the beginning where Tom's already done the first verse. But what you have is four lines in a stanza,

lines one and three have four stressed syllables and a varying number of unstressed syllables. And lines two and four are shorter. They have three stress syllables, but they rhyme with each other. I'll do the first couple of verses, and I'll exaggerate the stress just for listeners. It is an ancient mariner, and he stoppeth one of three. By their long grey beard and thy glittering eye, now wherefore stoppest me? The brideroom's doors are opened wide, and I am next of kin.

The guests are met, the feast is set, mayst he. hear the merry din, but still he holds the wedding guest. There was a ship, quoth he. Nay, if thou's got a laughsome tale, Mariner, come with me. So you can hear the insistent rhyming, although the rhyming only takes place in lines two and four, where the other lines don't rhyme, but already Coleridge adapted the ballad form and did lots of variations on it. And one of them is that in the un rhymed lines, he often has an internal rhyme instead. So a bit further on, the ship was cheered, the harbour cleared, merrily did we drop. And Corridge is extraordinarily versatile in his use of rhyming and rhythm and repetition.

Thank you very much. What's significant, Jonathan, about the fact that the mariner shoots the albatross very early in the poem. Well, it really is the kind of set up for the idea of the curse on the mariner. So the ship is rounding Cape Horn down in the south seas. Ice mast high came floating by. It's one of my favourite lines in the poem. This mist and snow, terrifying atmosphere. The ice was here, the ice was there, the ice was all around.

And then this albatross comes out of the fog, and the mariners greet it as if it were a Christian soul. We hailed it in God's name. There was an old mariner's tradition that the souls of dead mariners were contained in the albatross, which of course looks with its long wingspan, rather like an angel. So the albatross is a good omen,

steering them through the terrible seascape, terrible sea environment, and the mariners give it biscuit worms, and then the ice splits, and the helmsman steers them through. A good wind follows. So the albatross is a good omen, and then all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, the mariner shoots the albatross with his crossbow. And clearly there is some heavy symbolism going on there.

The moment you think of a sacrificial death and a crossbow, you think of Christ on the cross. And of course, Coleridge does have this Christian background. So there's something going on here about a primal sin, a great crime, and then there is going to be a need for redemption. Redemption will eventually come, as Thomas told us, when the albatross drops off the neck of the mariner, after Verminner blesses these water snakes. Somehow he sees their beauty, oh happy living things, 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 self-same moment I could pray, and from my neck so free, the albatross fell off and sank like lay. into the sea. While we're on that shooting, do you have any brief reasons why he shot the arbitrage? We're certainly not given a reason. Simply, you know, we know that, I mean, this is one of the

places in the ballad where the wedding guest, who's a kind of framework in the first place, but then he becomes an interlocutor from time to time, because what we have is the wedding guest, oh, why looks thou so? He's obviously, you know, the mariner's looking terrible because got to tell what he did. With my cross bow, there's your internal rhyme. I shot the albatross. But that's it. We are not told why.

The moralising of the story that we just heard a little bit about, you know, sin and then punishment and then redemption is only part of the story, I think, because much, much more worrying, really, the nightmare of it, which I think is essential to Cooridge's thoughts about it and thought about life in general, is that as we heard, he blesses the water snakes unaware. So he doesn't intend to bless the water snakes. And yet, you know, he does so. Well, that's a happy thing.

And then there follows something good. You know, the albatross falls off his neck and things begin to get a bit better, not entirely better. But then if you go back, that's a kind of mirror image, really, of the initial shooting of the albatross, which is arbitrary, it seems. But then what about the punishment?

That might be arbitrary too. And I think it's much, much more worrying than a simple sort of punishment and then forgiveness. What's extraordinary really about this conversation so far is that we're talking about a poem that was condemned by people like yourselves for many, many years, serious literary intellectuals. But let's move on to Tom Moll,

water, water everywhere, and all the boards did shrew. water water everywhere, nor any drop to drink. Perhaps the best known couplet. What do those lines do for the poem, Tom? Well, they're a great example of that very, very effective use of repetition that we've already heard mentioned. Also, another example of that, we might mention is alone, alone, alone on a wide, wide sea.

That's an astonishing couple of lines when you think about it. Six words in a row, starting with the letters A-L, with that same same. alone alone and then all all and then two more alones and then wide wide it really shouldn't work you know you would expect a poet to come up with a more of a variety of language but it really does work it gives their poem a kind of incantatory quality as though it were casting a spell on us and the poem's also really interested in how language can cast us kind of spell how we can be enchanted by the power of stories. So at first, the mariner grabs hold of the wedding guest. He holds him with his skinny hand, it says, and then the guest says, get your hands off me. And then the mariner holds him with his

glittering eye. Coleridge clearly parallels those two lines. So he holds the wedding guest spellbound, that's Coleridge's word, and we're told that he cannot choose but here. The mariner has what he describes himself as strange power of speech. I pass like, night from land to land, I have strange power of speech. That moment that his face I see, I know the man that must hear me, to him my tale I teach. And the wedding guest listens like a three years child. So all this stuff, the strange power of speech, the listening like a three years child, suggests how much Coleridge is interested in kind of tapping into some sort of primal power of stories, making his readers like little children, listening to captivating bedtime,

stories. But still back to water, water everywhere, and all the boards did shrink, water, water, everywhere, not any drop to drink. Why does that seem to so many people to be a central hub of the poem or the central mutter of the poem? That stanza encapsulates the suffering of the mariner and the crew, and it does it in an interesting way poetically because it's putting so insistently in front of us, the word water, making us sort of feel that word in our mouths, at the same time as the mariner is parched, hasn't got any water. I think Tom's absolutely right to stress the importance of that other repetition of alone, alone on a wide, wide sea, because it's so much a poem about loneliness. One of the things we haven't mentioned is that when Kowleridge reprinted the poem in

his collected poems in 1817, he added in these prose notes in the margin. Scholars call them marginal glosses. And one of these is just a wonderful little passage about loneliness. The mariner describes how the moving moon went up the sky and nowhere did abide. Softly she was going up and a star or two beside. So the mariner is alone. He looks up at the moon and the moon doesn't seem to be alone because there are stars as well. And Coleridge writes in the prose margin,

in his loneliness and fixedness, he yearneth towards the journey, moon and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward. And everywhere the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country, and their own natural home, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected. And yet there is a silent joy at their arrival. So he's talking there about somehow the moon and the stars are at home in the sky, and that is like somebody coming home, whereas the mariner in his loneliness is never really going to be able to come home. Even when he does return to his native country, he remains excluded from the wedding,

which is the symbol of community. Why do you revise it so many times, A, and B, I think somebody should talk about the effect or not of laudanum, opium and alcohol usually brandy mixed together, which she was taking at that time, and a little bit later, only two or three years later, it was addictive. it too. So this was a poem that Coleridge just couldn't leave alone. He kept coming back to it, and he revised it substantially in 1800 and again in 1817. And he also kept making small changes in copies of the poem. If Coleridge came round to your house and you had a copy of one of his books on the shelf, there was a pretty good chance that he'd pencil in some changes into the margins.

So the result of this is that scholars have identified, believe it or not, 18 different versions of the poem from Coleridge's lifetime. So what does he do when he's revising several things? He cuts out most of the old-fashioned words, the outdated spellings. He cuts out a couple of moments of humour. We've already heard the bit about the mariners feeding biscuit worms to the bird. That gets cut out. He removes some bits that seem to Gothic or lurid. He improves the accuracy of the descriptions. Coleridge had never been on a ship when he first wrote the poem and then after he'd had an experience of going on a ship, he'd change some things to tighten up the accuracy. But the most interesting thing is this marginal gloss that he adds on, which Jonathan's

already mentioned, which sort of explains what's going on or purports to explain what's going on in the poem. Now, this isn't written in Coleridge's own voice. It's written in another different poetic voice, probably the voice of a sort of 17th century scholar. And it imposes on the poem a sort of moral framework or framework of causality that the poem doesn't necessarily always endorse. So, for example, the marginal gloss says that the crew make themselves accomplices in the crime when they try and justify the mariner's killing of the albatross. So the gloss seeks to sort of create cause and effect or impose cause and effect, but this seems to be a framework that Coleridge has bolted on to the poem later rather than one that was implicit in it all along. Yeah, so he can't leave it alone and he

changed it and he adds to it and so on. And it becomes, in a way, Rosemary, as I've read from No-Nus, he becomes, in his life, without being fanciful about it, very like the wandering mariner, the man with the story to tell, the man with the glittering eye. I would quite like to link that with Lordenum, but if you don't think it's appropriate, then don't do it. The link with Lordenum there, I suppose, is guilt. And the thing about Coleridge is that he suffered terribly from guilt, but it was a guilt that kind of paralysed him. He couldn't do anything about it because of his addiction. In fact, he said at one point to a friend who tried to persuade him to, you know,

get on with doing some work and so on, pull himself together, he said, look, talk to a man paralyzed in both legs and tell him to stand up and walk. He can't do it. And that's what it's like being me, being under addiction. I mean, he knew Virginia Woolf said that he was a terrific self-anourable. a criminaliser holding a mirror up to himself. And he was writing all the time in his notebooks and so on about his terrible guilt and the fact that it just went round and circles in a way to some extent.

Was the guilt to do with leaving his family and three children about that too. Yes, leaving his family, not ever being able to make enough money to look after them, but leaving them because he, well, he didn't love his wife. I mean, he married her after having only met her for a couple of weeks and it was part of the Robert Sothe's Pantysocrisy Plan. and he never loved her and he got even less in love with her as time went on, poor woman.

But yes, he left his family, he couldn't settle down to anything and that is partly why he himself was the first to see himself after the event as the ancient mariner wandering the earth because he really never stuck at home for very long.

He couldn't bear to be with his wife and even his young children whom he loved but hardly saw. So he was always going off, off to give lectures somewhere or off to, in 1803 he left for Malta because everyone, all his friends thought that he was on the point of dying.

He was constantly ill with rheumatic fevers and various other ailments. And he went off to Malta for health. And when he came back a couple of years later, he didn't go back to the family home and never went back to the family home, which by this time was in the Lake District beside Wordsworth and Dorothy.

Instead, he was picked up, and this is the thing about him, he was picked up all his life by people who were astonished at his genius. Talk about the ancient manor having strange powers of speech. So did Coleridge right from the start. Lamb remembers him at Christ's College. Dorothy Wordsworth talks about him as the perfect, when she first met him, the perfect poet's eye with a fine frenzy rolling.

Hazlett, William Haslett met him. Herod Coleridge give a sermon in Shrewsbury. He went on a very long. walk to hear him give the sermon, yes. That's right, he did. And he was a great critic of Coleridge afterwards, particularly of Coleridge's guilty life, of course.

But he said it was like listening to the music of the spheres. He came away thinking this is the only man of genius I have ever met. Thank you very much. Jonathan. People seem to think that, well, I do that the romantic movement was a modern movement in poetry, a modernising

movement. What's modern about this archaic poem? It does sort of feed off that tradition of the Gothic, the sublime, the mysterious, the supernatural, that is a big part of the romantic reaction against sort of the 18th century rationalism associated with earlier poets like Alexander Pope, for example. But also, for me, the key thing that makes the romantic movement so modern is that the, The central theme and meditation of the Romantics is the relationship between humankind, the human mind and human communities, and the natural world. And to me, if we go back to the starting point of the poem,

the idea they were going to write about the wanderings of Kane, Kane, the first murderer. You know, an ancient idea all cultures believe in that murder is the worst crime of all. and in the case of Kane, the murder of a brother. What Conradge does when he writes the ancient mariner is to say that it is also possible to commit a crime against nature, that in some respect it is as bad to shoot an albatross as it is for Kane to kill his brother. And that respect for nature, that sense that we are all part of what we would now call the biosphere or an ecosystem,

that human life and the life of, as he puts it in the poem, the life of every bird and beast are intertwined and interconnected and that we owe ethical obligations to the natural world. That seems to me a key element of the modernity, both of this poem and of romanticism more generally. Tom, Tom, did the illustrations which came along, particularly those of Gustav Dore, much later on, after Colerich's done, did they enhance his reputation immediately and in what way?

They certainly did enhance the reputation of the poem. The poem has attracted lots and lots of illustrators, and I think there must be something that seems unfinished about it, or that people want to interpret it, that makes illustrators want to cry and supplement it. It starts even during Coleridge's lifetime. David Scott produces some illustrations for the poem in 1831, and Coleridge saw those and Scott approached him and asked him if he would help find a publisher for them.

But Coleridge said Scott had made a terrible blunder because he depicted the mariner as already being old while he was on board the ship. Coleridge said, no, he imagined him as a young man on the ship who'd told his story already 10,000 times before he met the wedding guest. And then there were other 19th century illustrations as well. But the Dorae ones, Gustav Dore ones that appear in 1876, they really did. define the poem for a new generation, producing these sort of large, dark, shadowy, intriguing engravings that really kind of renew the poem, renovate the poem for a Victorian audience. Rosemary, Rosemary, what in your view makes the poem so compelling? Is there a central view that you have that you can bring to this?

You've heard so many quotes, because you quote so much more, he conjures up a whole imagined world of improbable. and actually impossible events, supernatural forces, strange happenings and so on. And it's an extraordinary and sustained feat of the imagination that he makes us believe in these things for the time being. And of course, this takes me to Coleridge's most famous prose utterance, which was in his kind of autobiography of his literary and scholarly life

called Biographia Literaria, published in 1817, at the same time that he republished the Ancient Mariner with the gloss. In that, he talks about the Wordsworth and Cooridge agreement on the lyrical ballads and what they should do, and he was going to take romantic and supernatural characters and events, and procure for these, I'm quoting now, for these shadows of imagination, that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith. And that has become rather celebrated as a remark about what poetry, the most imaginative poetry might do,

it tends to be used for Shakespeare, for example. That willing suspension of disbelief? Yes, for the moment which constitutes poetic faith. In the drama, in Shakespeare, it's usually in Othello, one minute, you're in Venice, and the next minute you're in Cyprus or something. I mean, it's that kind of movement of place, but we believe it for the moment when we're in the theatre.

So the theatre is an obvious example of the willing suspension of disbelief. for the moment. But courage as manges it too, endlessly in this poem at the Tom earlier on quoted a line about the strange power of speech he says to the wedding guest at the end.

I move like night from land to land. And you think, oh yes, it's incantatory, it's rhythmical, it's lulling, but it's an extraordinary thing to say. You move like night? How is that? What is that like?

And earlier on in the poem, the sun angry and red like God's own head. Yeah, and well, what is God's own head like? How are we supposed to know? Like the song, right. Yeah, as idle as a painted chip upon a painted ocean. He's constantly being innovative with metaphor and imagery. And all the time, it's partly the form that he sustains,

this rhythmical form, he's carrying us through a whole lot of moods and a whole lot of emotions and we believe them. But I think at the bottom of this also is a psychological exploration of the human condition, particularly the human condition under stress. Why do we do, it's philosophical too, why do we do the things that we do? Why does he shoot the albatross? And can we be sure about cause and effect? Do we know that, you know, the good wind blew up behind because of the albatross coming to the ship?

We don't really. And also how do we make sense of suffering? If there is suffering in the world, how do we understand that in a way that we can make sense of? And the mariner has a way of making sense of that, you know, that is through this kind of structure of atonement. But it's not really clear in the poem that that's actually what's happening. So it's partly about how we try to make sense of suffering in the world. Jonathan, what's your view of what the poem says about man's relationship with nature? The poem is very explicit about the bond between humankind and nature.

I mean, if we sort of answer that question by going to the sort of influence the poem had on other writers, to give two kind of contrasting examples, towards the end of the poem, we have this idea that we need to love all creatures. In 1848, exactly what I was going to say. Mrs. C. F. Alexander, Victorian hymn writer, all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all. She lifts that straight out of the ancient mariner. But that's a bit sickly and pious. Not so long after that, Herman Melville writes Moby Dick, the greatest of all 19th century novels, and is very explicit that the ancient mariner is a major influence on that. Ishmael, the narrator of Moby Dick, like the ancient mariner is the sole survivor of a long sea voyage that involves a crime against nature, killing the whale, Moby Dick. And it seems to me that is where, you know,

one of the things that makes a literary work great is its ability to generate other great literary works. And the ancient mariner is one of the prime sources for this extraordinary novel Moby Dick about the relationship between humankind and nature as embodied in the whale. the whale standing in for the albatross. This is something that gives us today in the 21st century where the seas, the life of the seas, are so under threat because of human intervention. You know, Coleridge, Melville,

they were ecologists, environmentalists, before their time. Before Moby Dick, you have, of course, the fine example of Mary Shelley in Frankenstein. If you read Frankenstein and you know, his journeys, He journeys magically, as it were, from, you know, one end of the earth to the other. And the ancient mariner is quoted really remarkably frequently by Mary Shelley, who, of course, was much more contemporary with Coleridge,

but already an admirer, as was her husband, Percy Bischelli. Finally, can I ask you, why do you think he became so popular and remained so popular? He had a head bursting with ideas. We could go on forever about platonic and neoplatonic philosophy and German philosophy and all the things that he imbibed. But he was also to his fingertips, a poet. So he had all the wherewithal to be a poet and to be a genius and a brilliant man and a brilliant writer. Unfortunately for him, of course, was the whole opium addiction and the poverty and the lying that comes with addiction and his disappearance morally from his family and so on, of which he was only too aware.

So these things got in the way, particularly early on, I think, of people's view of him and his work. But, you know, at this date, certainly, and, you know, we really can just look at the poetry and marvel at it. It's quite marvellous. Right. Tom, you, please? I think it's enduringly popular, partly because it keeps opening itself. up to meet our concerns. So we've already talked about this. There's a kind of ecological reading of this poem

that speaks very powerfully to our current concerns. Coleridge concerns about the nature of suffering, how we make sense of suffering. Those are perennial concerns that haven't gone away. But I think above all, really I agree with Rosemary, we should read the ancient mariner to be reminded of the power of poetry, of the power of language, you know,

in the hands of a master to draw us in, to intoxicate us. So I think before the ancient mariner is a sort of message to be understood or an idea to debate, it's an experience that we can have. And I think people don't tire of having that kind of experience. Thank you. Finally, Jonathan. It's simple. It's an unforgettable story in unforgettable language.

Well, that'll do. Thank you very much. Thanks very much for this edition to Jonathan Bait, Rosemary Ashton and Tom Moll, and to our studio engineer Jackie Marjoram. Next week, it's the late Devonian extinction 370 million years ago, one of the five major extinction events in the history of the earth.

Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. So what didn't we touch on that we should have touched on? The only thing I had in my notes that would have been nice to talk about as well when we were talking about the influence and other writers,

I was thinking about Edgar Allan Poe, who was obsessed with Coleridge, very influenced by that Coleridgean theory of the imagination that Rosemge was talking about. But the poem that really made Poe's name was The Raven, which again, written in ballad form, mysterious, supernatural, and involving an unforgettable bird. Can I just, the thing that we didn't miss much out in a way, but the thing that I would have liked to bring in more was, we know that Coleridge, particularly when he added the gloss in 1817, the gloss, although as Tom I think said, it's not necessarily Coleridge speaking, but it does seem to push towards the kind of sin punishment and then redemption idea.

But then up pops Coleridge in his conversation in 1830, and this is recorded in his publishing. table talk. And it's quite famous. He mentions a minor writer Mrs. Barbold, who once told me that she admired the ancient man in her very much, but that it was improbable and had no moral. And Corridge is quite amusing here. As for the probability I own, that that might admit some question. But as to the want of a moral, I told her that in my judgment, the poem had too much, that there was an abstrusion of the moral sentiment, and it shouldn't have been there. in a work of such pure imagination. This is Coleridge.

It ought, he says, to have had no more moral than the Arabian knight's tale of the merchant sitting down to eat dates by the side of the well and throwing the shells aside. And lo, a genie starts up and says he must kill the aforesaid merchant

because one of the date shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son. And there you have it. You've got Coleridge must kill because and I think that the real sort of nightmare psychological nightmare at the heart of the poem is where is the

why and the because? Where are the cause and effect? How can we be sure of what is a cause and effect? And behind that too lies what's God's will for us? What are we supposed to do? And what does God want for us? God has hardly mentioned in the poem except

ritually by the mariners medieval Catholic mariners but God is behind there too. And Coleridge, the other thing about him is the guilt that he suffered all the time. He was, as Tom said, he was attracted, and Jonathan too was attracted to pantheism and the idea of God in nature and nature and God and so on, as Reusufth was. But in the end, because of his burden of guilt, he needed a personal God who would, he hoped, forgive him. And so there's that aspect of things. But there it is. It's got too much.

moral, he said. And I rather like that. I think that connects up with Coleridge's way of writing as well, that he quite often writes very, very quickly, as in the example Jonathan Gave from the Wondrings of Kane, where he's done the whole canto before Wordsworth has written even a page. But then he goes back and rethinks and tries to sort of impose on what he's written a sort of, you know, he tries to make sure that he can get behind what he's written, that what he's written lives up. to the moral and theological positions that he wants to hold. So there's that very interesting quote where Kodridge says,

I would spend 20 years writing an epic poem. I'd spend 10 years gathering my materials and five years writing it and then five years correcting it. And what's interesting there is that, firstly, this notion of revision as correcting, that's the word Kodredge repeatedly uses for revising his poems. And secondly, the fact that that's going to take almost as long as the writing of the poem. so that he sort of writes very fast and very slow at the same time. It's interesting about the five years gathering material.

I suppose that's something else we maybe didn't fully bring across, although you mentioned, or Rosemary mentioned that lovely phrase, library cormorant. These extraordinary notebooks he kept all through his life. One of the things that I think has led to the poem's enormous sort of popularity among academics is that although Wordsworth gave him the idea for the poem in reading in the book about the voyage to the South Seas. There's all sorts of other aspects of Coleridge's reading that are embedded within it.

And back in the 1920s, there was a scholar called John Livingston Lowe's who wrote a book called The Road to Zanadu, in which he delved into Coleridge's notebook and tried to trace all the sources for both the Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the short unfinished poem Kubla Khan in Zanadadadid at Kubla Khan. And, of course, academics do love that. sort of, that sense that Coleridge had just read everything and tracing the sources, you know, has been a sort of obsession for Coleridgeans for 100 years now. One other thing that that reminds me of as well is, if I might just, is the, the way the poem itself seems to be interested in its own interpretation. So, you know, when we try to interpret

the poem, we're joining in something that the poem has already started doing. So the killing of the Albatross, for example, is an act. that seems to require interpretation as soon as it happens, right? First, the other sailors condemn it, saying that the bird calls the wind to blow and the mariner was wrong to kill it. And then immediately afterwards, they praised the mariner, saying the bird brought the fog and missed,

and it was right to kill it. So the interpretation of that event, the killing of the albatross, is contested, even within the poem, almost as soon as it happens. And so when we discuss the significance of that event, we're sort of joining in a conversation that's already begun within the poem. What did Werswer think of it?

He wanted it cut down for the... Well, there's no doubt that he admired it, but he also recognised that it was a very different style from his own. So he says, you know, and sort of giving this account of its origins, he says, our respective manners proved so widely different, it would have been presumptuous of me to do anything more for the poem,

but separate myself from an undertaking upon which I could only have been a clog. So he had enormous admiration for Coleridge's linguistic skill, for his intellectual brilliance, for his vision. But he just came to see that this style of poetry was very different from what he was trying to do in his lyrical ballads poems. And so that's why when it came to the second edition in 1800, the whole of the two volumes is attributed to words,

alone and sort of poor old Coleridge gets marginalised. Yes, he gets marginalised and also Wordsworth writes in the preface to this second edition about the defence of the poem. He also, which is really mean. But what he also does, of course, is says that the author himself, i.e. Coleridge, agrees. And although it was said earlier in the programme that this is the beginning of what became quite a large rift between them, actually it wasn't quite, what it was the beginning of was Coleridge. He was a grown man,

so a grown man who hadn't really grown up in many ways, but you look back at his child and perhaps you understand why. Coleridge abased himself. Everybody said this. Sothea rather grimly said, you know, he's made a god of Wordsworth Lamb the same. All his other friends, they were slightly jealous, of course, because Wordsbeth Picay did become a kind of God to Coleridge. And Coleridge abased himself and said,

oh, I don't mind about the changes and so on. and didn't at all make a fuss about it. In fact, it's rather sad, really. I mean, it's just one of those things. Wordsworth was a wonderful poet with a very strong sense of self and a happy family life. And Coleridge was a wonderful poet with a very rather weak and worrying sense of himself.

He knew himself, but he didn't always like it and he was anxious about himself, and he did not have a happy family life. And we've got him writing not long after the second edition. In fact, he's writing about it, about Wordsworth in 1800, so the second edition

written just by Wordsworth's really with the ancient mariner put to the back of the volume instead of the beginning. Have you seen the second volume of lyrical ballads? He's writing to Godwin, actually, William Godman here. If I die and the booksellers

give you anything for my life, be sure to say, Wordsworth descended on him like the Gnothi say out on as Greek for know thyself from heaven. By showing him what true poetry was, he made him, i.e. Coleridge, know that he himself was no poet. So, Wordsworth's, and Coleridge was a genuine, the first genuine admirer of Wordsworth poetry. And so he felt that Wordsworth was the great poet. And by contrast, he himself was no poet, which of course is an exaggerated self-abasement,

but part of that neurotic personality, the addictive personality that he had. Thank you very much. A lot of people enjoy that massively. Thank you. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hello, I'm Matthew Side and just before you go, I wanted to tell you about my new podcast. It's called Sideways. Each week, I'll be telling you stories that I hope will make you see the world differently. We've got a story about a rebellious pilot who changed the way we fight wars. We'll hear how a misunderstanding about probability led to a group of mothers being wrongfully convicted of killing their children.

We'll meet a tribe described as the most selfish people on the planet. I'll be revealing the true story of Stockholm syndrome. And we'll also hear how a change in our sexual behaviour 2,000 years ago, revolutionised the way we innovate. So if you want to hear about the big ideas that are shaping our lives, please come and join me by listening to Sideways on BBC Sounds.