Coleridge's Longaevi

:1:

This is a pendant to my previous post on the ‘Antiquus Marium’. My larger aim in that piece was to spin-out some thoughts on the double nature of the word ancient, as per the title of Coleridge's most famous poem. It's a word that can mean either that one is old, declined into the vale of years, heading towards death; or, as in the Biblical phrase Ancient of Days, it can mean that one stands outside time altogether, that one is wholly untouched by age, death and mortality—ancient in the sense of preceding time altogether, as seems to be the Biblical meaning. Two quite different things! In my previous post I was trying to pull the argument together that the Rime orchestrates itself, as one of the most enduring examples of Romantic mythography, in relation to this strange tension, and that it does so because STC has an ambiguous relationship to the concept of personal survival after death. The Rime is, in one sense, clearly a poem ‘about’ death, so I wondered what its fascination with creatures who are neither conventional mortals not yet immortals, beings liuek djinns and demons, Greek gods or strange monsters, has to say about that. You can read the post for yourself, but the answer I propose is that, so far as I can see: Coleridge was conflicted about the church doctrine of individual eternal afterlife: that he couldn't quite believe it and couldn't bear to disbelieve it either. This left him in a strange position, not so much theologically (where he could trust to faith) but intellectually and more important imaginatively.

Now: in that post I quote William Empson quoting C S Lewis concerning the sorts of intermediary creatures, neither immortal spirits (like God and His angels) nor ordinary mortals like thee and me, that populate the worlds of medieval romance, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, as well as of the Rime: daemons, Nine-Fathoms-Deep monsters, Nightmares-Life-in-Deaths and so on, and suggest that. Like the Greek gods Empson thinks they memorialise, these entities exist as neither-mortal-nor-quite-immortal rebuses for that Coleridgean uncertainty about individual survival after death.

Then my friend Alan Jacobs emailed me to point out that Empson was actually being (as he often was) cavalier with the Lewisian truth. ‘Lewis,’ Alan notes, ‘has a lot to say, in various places, about the “intermediary” creatures that Empson quotes him on—and quotes him out of context and therefore inaccurately—but his lengthiest treatment is probably in The Discarded Image, where the sources he cites seem (to me anyway) to call into question Empson’s claim that they arise as a way to ensure what Seznec called “the survival of the pagan gods.”’ Here's the echt Lewis:

I have put the Longaevi or longlivers into a separate chapter because their place of residence is ambiguous between air and Earth. Whether they are important enough to justify this arrangement is another question. In a sense, if I may risk the oxymoron, their unimportance is their importance. They are marginal, fugitive creatures. They are perhaps the only creatures to whom the [Medieval] Model does not assign, as it were, an official status. Herein lies their imaginative value. They soften the classic severity of the huge design. They intrude a welcome hint of wildness and uncertainty into a universe that is in danger of being a little too self-explanatory, too luminous. I take for them the name Longaevi from Martianus Capella, who mentions ‘dancing companies of Longaevi who haunt woods, glades, and groves, and lakes and springs and brooks; whose names are Pans, Fauns … Satyrs, Silvans, Nymphs …’ . Bernardus Silvestris, without using the word Longaevi, describes similar creatures—‘Silvans, Pans, and Nerei’—as having ‘a longer life’ (than ours), though they are not immortal.

Alan adds: ‘Lewis was not just grudgingly acknowledging their “neutrality,” he thought that the most fascinating thing about them. They were simply not involved in the drama of human sin and redemption — they were, rather, as Lewis has a character in That Hideous Strength say, “going about their own business.” (Though the same character insists that at some point they will be required to declare their allegiance, as we all will).’ That seemed to me very interesting from a Coleridgean point of view, because STC, whilst mired psychologically and poetically to an unusual degree in ‘the drama of human sin and redemption’, so rarely found a way from the first of those two key terms to the second (psychologically, or poetically).

So perhaps it is the fact that the longaevi stand outside the drama that makes them so appealing, imaginatively speaking, an appeal that has the added savour of that ominous ‘not yet’-ness of that at some point they will be required to declare their allegiance.

This then led to me asking myself: what did Coleridge believe about the afterlife? I was startled to realise I wasn't entirely sure. If pressed, I would probably have muttered something about how he doubted more forcefully during his quasi-Unitarian 1790s, but that he moved back towards Anglican orthodoxy on the topic through the eighteen-teens and twenties (when he was revising the Rime). The thing is: though he was a prolific author on all kinds of theological matters, he wrote relatively little on the subject of the afterlife. The trinity? Yes. Will? Yes. The day-to-day practice of faith? Very much so, especially as it intersected with questions not only of individual but of social morality and politics. But the afterlife?

:2:

So I've been nosing around this question a little bit. As, perhaps, is the case with young people generally, young Coleridge seems to have had little interest in what might happen after he died, because his focus was elsewhere. As he aged—and, again I'm sure this is common enough—he began to think more about death, and about the possibility of personal or individual survival afterwards. A useful article on this topic is Anthony John Harding's ‘Coleridge, the Afterlife, and the Meaning of “Hades”’ [Studies in Philology, 96:2 (1999), 204-223], which I find myself uninhibited from quoting, at some length:

Coleridge's questioning of the belief in an afterlife became particularly intense after he passed the age of fifty. He certainly did not question it in the sense of doubting whether there was an afterlife, as his friend Charles Lamb evidently did. Indeed, Coleridge thought that belief in an afterlife was one of the two essential ‘Constituents of all true Religion’ [Aids to Reflection, 356]. All the passions, fears, thoughts, hopes, ideas, and longings that fill a person's mind and soul in this life could not simply vanish, and become as nothing, when the last breath is drawn. Expressing this conviction in a note of February or March 1829, Coleridge asserts that immortality is ‘The inevitable Rebound of the I am.’ He continues: ‘the moment that the Soul affirms, I am, it asserts, I cannot cease to be.’

In the 1828 draft essay ‘On the Passions,’ Coleridge asks the question Plato asks in the Phaedrus: ‘Think'st thou that thou canst understand (the nature of) the Soul without an insight into the Soul of Nature?’ Mystical as this may sound to us now, Coleridge means the question entirely seriously, and in a sense that owes less to Plato than to some of the scientific enquiries of his own time. This way of putting the question has all the force of Coleridge's major intellectual effort in his Highgate years, which was to work out a credible, informed, critical, and personally satisfying position on the two questions of deepest interest to most philosophers, scientists, and religious believers at the time: how far human consciousness was dependent on, or even defined by, organic life, and whether consciousness implied an afterlife. [Harding, 205-06]

The answer Coleridge offered to that second question was basically: probably yes, but there's no way of knowing if it entails the survival of a personalised, individual consciousness. The following Notebook entry from those years, on the subject of Jewish ideas of death, sums up STC's late view:

That the Body relapsed into its original Dust, and the Spirit returned to its Origin, viz. to the God who had inbreathed it, was common to all, in all periods of the Hebrew Nation. / This, however, goes but a little way towards the Belief of a Future State: for it leaves the main question undecided / whether the Individuality was inherent in the Spirit, or whether it was the continual (quasi-functional) product of the combination of the Spirit with the Substance of the Body.... I must content myself for the present in having laid the simple foundation—namely, that the Soul may & probably must survive the Body; but in what state and condition is another question depending on the state of the Soul itself—Shall its Life meet with Life? or shall it be Life in Death and in a World of Death? (Notebook 37 [BM Add. MS 375321, ff 28^r 28^v, 3]

‘Life in Death’ is a curious and interesting phrase, don't you think? Especially in relation to the Rime. I'll come back to that in a moment.

But interesting though the Highgate years are, I'm more interested here in the young Coleridge, the Coleridge who was writing the Ancient Mariner. And so far as that's concerned I wonder if Coleridge's later position—in effect ‘we will probably survive our deaths, but what survives may well not be a we in the sense that we recognise ourselves now’—is inherent in the symbolic imaginary of this poem. The poem is saying that death, which truncates mortal life so cruelly, lacks the power to destroy it entirely, or that it has not yet acquired that power; but that the forces or the beings that are not subject to ordinary death are strange to the point of uncanny inhumanity.

Coleridge's longaevi, in other words, are his way of articulating, and perhaps of attempting imaginatively actually to derive, his sense of his own personal extinction as at once an inevitability and an impossibility.

Indeed, reading the Rime in this light throws up some (I think) interesting things, both in terms of Coleridge and more broadly. According to one reading the Mariner is himself a longaevus, cursed to wander he land telling his tale like the Wandering Jew. But every reader agrees that the poem is full of longaevi: the Nine-fathom-deep Spirit, living in the ocean; ‘DEATH’ and his ‘mate’ (perhaps shipmate, perhaps sexual partner) ‘Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH’ (‘she/Who thicks man's blood with cold’); the ‘water-snakes’ who, placated by the Mariner's blessing, release the albatross from his neck (if that's what happens); and the ‘seraph-band’, each member of which is a figure like ‘a man all light’, which reanimates the corpses of the other sailors, and finally the voices the Mariner hears in the latter portion of the poem, which belong, according to STC's own gloss, to ‘the Polar Spirit's fellow demons, the invisible inhabitants of the element.’ That's enough to be longaevi to be getting on with for the moment, but before I address them I'm going to take a little detour by mentioning another crucial element in the poem: water.

:3:

Water, water, everywhere in this poem (everywhere except the wedding feast with which it starts and closes, of course). A couple of Notebook entries that date, almost certainly, from 1797—which is say, immediately before or perhaps actually whilst he was drafting the Rime—pick out passages to do with the Greek conception of water that interested Coleridge. In one he copies out Homer's line from Iliad:

Ὠκεανόν τε θεῶν γένεσιν καὶ μητέρα Τηθύν.

‘Ocean is the father of all gods, and their mother is Tēthys.’ [Notebooks 1:245]

Homer actually uses this line twice in the Iliad, once at 14:201 and again at 14:302. In another entry, with the heading ‘Water’, STC copies out the following passage from Aristotle's Metaphysics:

Ὠκεανόν τε γὰρ καὶ Τηθὺν ἐποίησαν τῆς γενέσεως πατέρας, καὶ τὸν ὅρκον τῶν θεῶν ὕδωρ, τὴν καλουμένην ὑπ᾽ αὐτῶν Στύγα τῶν ποιητῶν: τιμιώτατον μὲν γὰρ τὸ πρεσβύτατον, ὅρκος δὲ τὸ τιμιώτατόν ἐστιν. [1:983b in modern editions]

‘[Some think] Ocean and Tēthys the parents of creation, and because of this the oath that the gods swear is by water—Styx, as they call it. For what is most ancient is most revered, and what is most revered is what we swear by.’ [Notebooks 1:246]

Father and mother, the oceanic parents of us all (if you're interested, part 3 of this post discusses the place of fathers in the Rime). Coleridge found both these passages quoted in Cudworth's True Intellectual System, which he was reading at the time; but I suspect they float free of Cudworth's Christian Platonism where Coleridge's imaginative response is concerned. Ocean, STC was reminding himself, was also a longaevus—a Titan, like Tēthys his wife, a creature more than mortal without, quite, being a god.

What is water, in Coleridge's poem? The desert Ocean, vast and hostile to life, salt and drear, death in endless motion? Or perhaps: the ocean, teeming with life (like the water-snakes that moved in tracks of shining white, the blessing of whom frees the Mariner), the pathway to adventure, empire and freedom, the sublime and beautiful waters? In Genesis the deep predates the cosmos, and Coleridge's own God broods over it before speaking the universe into being.

What about Tēthys? She's an intriguing figure. According to Hesiod she was the daughter of the Sky and the Earth (that is, Οὐρανός [Ouranos] and Γαῖα, [Gaia]), although according to other traditions she was herself the mother of all the Titans and all the gods, as per the two passages Coleridge copied into his Notebook, quoted above. But beyond that we know very little about her. There are no specific mythic stories or cycles associated with her and no descriptions of her in the surviving classical corpus. Indeed, so removed is she from the usual Greek mythic cycle that some critics (M. L. West is one such) posit a lost narrative in which she separated from her husband Ocean in order to represent the divergence of the ‘lower’ oceanic and the ‘upper’ atmospheric waters (also something that happens in Genesis, of course). That sort of speculation postdates Coleridge's time, but he was likely well-read enough in eighteenth-century comparative mythography to know that Tēthys has an etymological and conceptual relationship with the Babylonian goddess of oceanic chaos and creation Tiamat, both names deriving ultimately from the Akkadian word for sea, tâmtu, the word also behind Θαλάττη, and (if Walter Burkett is to be believed) a word cognate with the Hebrew tehom (תהום) (the deeps) mentioned in Genesis 1:2. I don't want to get lost too far down this particular rabbithole except to note two things relevant, I think, to the imaginative underpinning of Coleridge's Rime. One is that as he was planning, or perhaps writing, the poem he jotted down two passages identifying both a sacred male marine ancient-ness—Oceanus—and a sacred female marine ancient-ness: Tēthys. The Rime opens and closes at a marriage feast, where a male and a female principle are sacramentally joined; although of course the poem's main story concerns separation, isolation and death.

Which brings me to the second Tēthys-related relevance. We know almost nothing about her from ancient literature (we don't know, for instance, whether her lips were red, her locks were yellow as gold or skin was as white as leprosy), but there's one myth where she sort-of appears, and that's the transformation of Aesacus or Aisakos (Αἴσακος in the Greek) from a bereaved lover into a great white-gold seabird. You'll find the story in Ovid's Metamorphoses, 11.749-759. Aesacus is a Trojan prince, the brother of Hector, who falls in love with the nymph Hesperia, daughter of the river Cebren. Aesacus chases after her, full of amorous intent, but she is bitten on the foot by a snake as she flees and dies on the spot. Aesacus, overwhelmed by grief, leaps from a sea-cliff hoping to commit suicide; but his wishes are thwarted by Tethys, who transforms him into a seabird. Here's an illustration from Arthur Golding's Elizabethan translation of the Metamorphoses.

In the foreground there you can see Aesacus running along, and the nymph Hesperia dead on the ground; and in the background you can see Aesacus about to jump off the cliff, and watery Tethys, in her royal robe and crown, ready to receive him. I can't discover if Coleridge read Golding's Ovid, but the ways the Elizabeth translated the lines are certainly interesting in the context of the Rime. For example: Ovid frames his retelling of the tale by having two old men (senes) observing seabirds, and one telling the other the story behind a particular kind of bird. Golding calls this speaker ‘an auncient father’ and specifies the type of bird (in the Latin it's a mergus) as ‘the wydegoawld Cormorant’. The adjective looks like ‘white-gold’ but actually, if you refer back to the Latin, it must be ‘wide-gulled’. In Golding's version ‘Eperie’ runs and Aesacus pursues, until ‘an Adder lurking in the grasse’ did ‘byght her foote with hooked tooth’ causing her to ‘cease her flyght and soodein fell downe dead’. Aesacus bewails his loss (‘Alas it irketh mee, it irkes mee of this chace!’) and resolves to kill himself. This, though, Thetys will not let him do:

                                                               With that at last
Downe from a rocke (the which the waves had undermynde) he cast
Himself into the sea. Howbee't dame Tethys pitying him,
Receyvd him softly, and as he uppon the waves did swim,
Shee covered him with fethers. And though fayne he would have dyde,
Shee would not let him. Wroth was he that death was him denyde,
And that his soule compelld should bee ageinst his will to byde
Within his wretched body still, from which it would depart,
And that he was constreynd to live perforce ageinst his hart.

And so as a charmed, wide-gulled ‘Cormorant’ he lives, unwillingly, to this day. Is this the kind of bird (if not the selfsame, then some kind of mythic coavian) that the Mariner finally slays? Or put it another way: is the mysterious love the Nine-fathom oceanic spirit has for the Albatross a parallel of the mysterious love the oceanic Titaness Tethys has for her Aesacusian Cormorant? Coleridge liked to describe himself as a library cormorant. L'oiseau c'est moi, as Louis Quatorze never said.

In order to wrap this up and tie a little bow upon it I'd need some hard evidence that Coleridge read Golding's Ovid, or indeed any concrete evidence at all beyond a few contemporaneous Notebook entries that he was thinking about Oceanus and Tēthys as he drafted his poem. I don't have that, though. (One, perhaps overtenuous, thing to note is that Golding's rhymed fourteener couplets are, metrically, the same as Coleridge's ballad quatrains, save only for the formatting). But that's not what I've been doing here, really. This section has been an excursus from the main argument of this blogpost, to which I now return, and into which it feeds only one salient: that the ocean of Coleridge's Rime is not a mere expanse of material water, but an entity in its own right, a supermortal creature. It is primeval chaos and structured form, female and male, life and death, Tethys and Ocean. True, it is not personified in the poem, but it is surely alive without being (as Ocean and Tethys are doomed Titans, not immortal gods; or as the pagan gods are doomed longaevi, not Christian angelic or divine eternals) immortal.

If it seems odd to you that I'm describing the sea itself as a longaevus, in the sense that Lewis uses the term, then I'll reiterate that what I'm suggesting is that the sea of the Rime is not the large quantity of brine sloshing around the declivities of our material planet that science studies. It is something mysterious and magical, something in a sense alive, not mortal in the way that we are, but neither immortal—because there will come a time when the Wandering Jew is finally relieved of his curse, when the Mariner can finally unburden himself of his tale once and for all and when the whole world will be rolled up as a scroll, at the Final Judgement.

:4:

A few notes on the other longaevi in the poem, starting with the spirit who takes offence at the Mariner killing the albatross. As to why this water spirit lives at nine-fathom deep ... well's that's a question that doesn't admit of any definite answer. But I'm going to make one suggestion. It relates to Purchas, his Pilgrimage (1614), a book we know Coleridge was reading in the summer of 1797, and out of which (of course) he confected ‘Kubla Khan’. Now Purchase, his Pilgrimage is full of mariners' tales. Chapter 13, for instance, tells of the voyage of the Globe in 1610, commissioned by the newly mandated East India Company, under the command of Anthony Hippon. Hippon rounded Cape of Good Hope, made it to India, discovered that the Portuguese had anticipated him at the Coromandel Coast (his initial destination) and so sailed on to the Bay of Bengal where he not only initiated trade but established factories (‘to Captain Hippon, therefore,’ says Charles Rathbone Low in his History of the Indian Navy 1613-1863 [1877] ‘belongs the honour of having been the founder of those factories in the Bay of Bengal which developed into magnificent trading establishments, and ultimately gave our Presidency the cities of Calcutta and Madras’). Purchas's account doesn't cover this after-history of course, but Coleridge would surely have known about it.

Now: something interesting happens before the (strikingly allegorically-named, don't you think?) Globe gets to India:

We weighed from the Black-well in the good shippe called the Globe, being bound for the East-Indies, the third of January 1610. The one-and-twentieth of May [we] sailed not farre from Mosambique and Comoro ... The fourth of August we stood in three houres, and then sounded, being about three leagues off the shore, and had nine fathome, and the land then bore West-North-West to the Northwards. At three o'clock we cast about and stood. ... The sixt[h], in the morning, we perceived our selves to be in a great Current by the rippling, and We sent off our Pinnasse to come to an anchor, and we found the Current to let North by West, and we made our way from foure of the clocke in the after-noone, the fift[h] till noone, the sixt[h]: North North-well, and ran seventeene leagues, and then We were in the latitude of ten degrees, and one and thirtie minutes, and from noone till two of the clocke wee steered away North. [Purchase His Pilgrimage, 3:13]

We can assume Coleridge read this, and there's nothing stopping us speculating that it stuck in his mind: the world-boat becalmed in nine fathoms of water and afterwards being swept away northward in a great current. The Rime tells just this story. The point about the nine fathoms is that it isn't all that deep: eight leagues further out from the coast the Globes takes another sounding and find themselves in twenty-fathoms, and the open water is hundreds of fathoms (the Marianas Trench is over 6000 fathoms deep). So we can deduce: the Nine-fathom Spirit doesn't stray too far from land.

What of the water-snakes? The Latin for such creatures is natrix (plural natrices), and usually when Classical authors talk of them it is as a venomous and terrible scourge (natrix was also the name of a kind of whip used for public flogging). The ninth book of Lucan's Pharsalia (specifically 9:619ff) includes a long list of the terrible serpents, both land- and water-based, that derive from the monstrous Libyan Medusa and now infest the world. One of those is the ‘natrix violator aquae’ [Lucan 9, 720], 'the sea-snake, defiler of waters’. The way Coleridge takes these creatures, and reimagines them as beautiful and spiritually wholesome is one of the most striking moves in the Rime.

And here we find ourselves upon a critical pathway that is very well trodden indeed: because, following Coleridge's own often reiterated assertion that poetry is intrinsically serpentine, critics have hurried to churn out analyses of Coleridge's creative praxis in those terms, readings of the various snakes in his oeuvre as self-referential embodiments of poetry as such (so that's why the Mariner's blessing the water-snakes has such efficacy!). Whole books have been written on Coleridge and metaphorical snakes. ‘The common end of all narrative, nay of all Poems,’ Coleridge wrote, ‘is to convert a series into a Whole: to make those events, which in real or imagined History move on in a strait Line, assume to our Understandings a circular motion—the snake with its Tail in its Mouth’ [Letters, 4:545]. In the Biographia he says ‘the reader should be carried forward by the pleasurable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself. Like the motion of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power’ [Biographia 2:11]. It's so characteristically Coleridgean a conceit, this, that his friend Hazlitt made mild fun of him for it: ‘The principle of the imagination,’ is how he pastiches the Coleridgean position ‘resembles the emblem of the serpent ... with undulating folds for ever flowing into itself,—circular, and without beginning or end.’ [Hazlitt, ‘The Drama: XI’ (Dec. 1820), in P P Howe (ed) Hazlitt Complete Works, 18:371]. Does this strike you as a little ... pat, maybe? A touch over-easy? Is this how the natrices in the Rime figure, though? Might we see these snakes as less about poetry, and more as ancients in the sense that I'm talking about there: rebuses of mutability (shedding their skin) and of eternity (the Ouroborus with its tail in its mouth)?

Beyond the shadow of the ship,
I watched the water-snakes:
They moved in tracks of shining white,
And when they reared, the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes.

Within the shadow of the ship
I watched their rich attire:
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.

O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware. [272-85]

The focus here is surely not their quasi-poetic expressivity so much as their longaevitas: their hoary (‘white or gray with age’; ‘remote in time past’), elfish light—elves being prototypical longaevī on the sense that Lewis discusses. Their attire: blue, ‘glossy green’ (so silk or satin?) and velvet (silk again), like ambassadors from the court of the Fairy Queen.

Then there are the reanimated corpses of the mariners (I'm sorry to be being so plodding over all this: I'll come to my main point shortly, I promise). The 1817/1834 marginal glosses explain what happens to these unlucky sailors thuswise: ‘the bodies of the ship's crew are inspirited [in 1834 this was changed to inspired], and the ship moves on. But not by the souls of the men, nor by demons of earth or middle air, but by a blessed troop of angelic spirits, sent down by the invocation of the guardian saint’. If this looks like an attempt at retconning the 1798 poem to fit it into a more orthodox frame, and avoid the sense that the poem is engaging in blasphemous mockery of Christ's resurrection, it shouldn't. The angelic nature of this reanimation is evident from the original text:

The upper air burst into life!
And a hundred fire-flags sheen,
To and fro they were hurried about!
And to and fro, and in and out,
The wan stars danced between.

We, since we know our Bible, will recognise that God ‘maketh his angels spirits; his ministers a flaming fire’ [Psalm 104:4]; ‘the flame went up toward heaven from off the altar, that the angel of the Lord ascended in the flame of the altar’ [Judges 13:20].

(A snatch of John Barnett's 1867 Cantata based on the Rime, there). But though the angels are immortal, and the now departed souls of the sailors are immortal, the bodies working the ship are neither mortal (because they are still working after death) nor immortal—which is to say, they are longaevi. Which brings us to this fine couple:

(Image is by Carole Humphreys). Death and his mate Nightmare-Life-in-Death. I've always been struck by the woman's name. It's not Nightmare Death-in-Life: not, that is, the nightmare that we die, that our lives are inevitably ended by death—but on the contrary the nightmare that death might not end our lives, that we might continue after death in some ghastly neither-alive-nor-properly-dead state. That's a very striking thing. And it explains the Nightmare dame's appearance: skin white as leprosy, not just bone-white (like her mate) but white like a peculiarly horrible wasting disease in which the body rots—like a corpse—but we are still alive. She is beautiful, which is to say alluring, because none of us want to die. But she is a Nightmare because the prospect of posthumous survival is, when we think about it, nightmarish.

Death and his Nightmare partner play dice for the mariner's, or perhaps mariners' (I think it's genuinely ambiguous) soul(s), and she wins. So the ship and crew are doomed to the nightmare of living even though they are dead. That may seem plenty Gothic, and there's no shortage of neo-Gothic types, from zombies to vampires, to testify to our continuing fascination with this horrible notion. But it's a classical idea too, dating back at least to Odysseus's encounter with the dead-not-wholly-dead Achilles in the Odyssey:

μὴ δή μοι θάνατόν γε παραύδα, φαίδιμ᾽ Ὀδυσσεῦ.
βουλοίμην κ᾽ ἐπάρουρος ἐὼν θητευέμεν ἄλλῳ,
ἀνδρὶ παρ᾽ ἀκλήρῳ, ᾧ μὴ βίοτος πολὺς εἴη,
ἢ πᾶσιν νεκύεσσι καταφθιμένοισιν ἀνάσσειν. [Odyssey 11:488-91]

Don't sweet-talk me about death, Odysseus:
I'd rather be the slave of the poorest peasant
if it meant I could be alive on Earth again
than be king over all the perished souls of the dead.

Being dead, in the sense of being dead-dead, would be by definition nothing, and however vertiginous the tumble from life to that state might seem to us now, being dead in the sense of being not-quite-dead would be worse. I wonder if this isn't the key to the whole poem. ‘What's it like being dead?’ one character asks another in a recent novel. ‘It's like being alive,’ the ghost replies. ‘But less so.’

:5:

This has become a long post, and indeed too long, and I'm still going, so it's worth pausing for a moment to ask: does this have anything to do with anything, beyond the particular complex of prompts and images and fascinations and anxieties out of which one particular Romantic poet wrote one poem? Are the longaevi what their seclusion by C S Lewis to a chapter apart within the structure of The Discarded Image suggests they are: an interesting anomaly in a larger system that provides a coherent vision of the cosmos. Quaint hangovers from a bygone age, curiosities that divert us but aren't the main show. There's a side of Coleridge that would have agreed with this; the side that thought his ‘Conversation Poems’ and prose his most important work, the same part that was apologetic about, or vaguely embarrassed on behalf of, or else simply nonplussed by his ‘Kubla Khan’s and ‘Christabel’s and ‘Ancient Mariner’s. But we know better. We know that these poems are the core of what makes Coleridge a writer of genius, and that the longaevi are not embellishments, but the beating heart of our art.

We could come at this question another way by asking why it is that poets, or at least some poets, are moved to write poems about the gods and demigods of an exploded and believerless pantheon. Why does Keats keep returning to his Endymions and Hyperions? Wordsworth didn't, and indeed in the 1800 ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads he dismisses all that sort of thing as an exhausted set of mere literary conventions. Don't, he exhorts us, say reddening Phœbus lifts his golden fire; say the sun rises. It's more poetic, says William, because it's simpler, because it's closer to the language really used by men and also because it doesn't alienate readers who lack a classical education. Nobody worships Phoebus anymore, after all. True to his word, Wordsworth went on to spend his career writing poems about shepherds and leech-gatherers and ordinary people walking over the Alps, and very pointedly not to write poems about gods and monsters.

Coleridge, influenced by his friend though he undoubtedly was, is a trickier case. The Biographia opens by recalling how James Bowyer, his teacher at Christ's Hospital, drove classical allusion out of the young poet by force of mockery: ‘Lute, harp, and lyre, Muse, Muses, and inspirations, Pegasus, Parnassus, and Hippocrene were all an abomination to him. In fancy I can almost hear him now, exclaiming “Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse? Your nurse's daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh aye! the cloister-pump, I suppose!”’ And Coleridge the poet certainly avoided excessive classical allusion, like Wordsworth, and put his poetic energies into poems about lime-trees and midnight frost and inventing practical criticism and so on—except—except that sometimes he forgot himself, and his Muse put her terrifyingly lovely, leprosy-white, red-lipped face in at the window of his imagination and he wrote about lesbian vampires and ships crewed by the undead sailing holy-snake-infested waters and so on. (Southey went at it a different way, by writing epics based not on Greek and Roman myths but South American and Indian ones instead).

And influential though the Preface to Lyrical Ballads undeniably was, it certainly didn't unseat the old gods from poetry, as the entire career of Keats and Shelley, Arnold and Browning and Swinburne and Yeats (and so on, and on) showed. So the question becomes: in what does this weird persistence inhere? This persistence, precisely of the weird? Classical allusion is vulnerable to the charge of mere elitism, building your art around allusions to the sorts of things with which your readers will only be familiar if they have had an expensive public-school education. But the history of the democratization of literature, which we have all been living through since the massive expansion of public literacy at the end of the nineteenth-century, has not seen the adoption of a solidly relatable proletarian Wordsworthian aesthetic coming to dominance. On the contrary, Fantasy, in the broadest sense, is more popular now than it has ever been. From some angles it really starts to look as though Fantasy is the only cultural game in town, at the moment.

So instead of the elite/commoner distinction, how about a quotidian/uncanny one? When he insists that poetry should be written about ordinary things in ordinary language only a little dignified in diction and metre, Wordsworth was amongst other things excluding the fantastical from the proper domain of poetry. But over the subsequent two centuries the Fantastical has grappled with the Wordsworthian mundane-sublime, like a Balrog first burning and then strangling its Gandalf, until the latter scrambles up the endless stair to burst (to switch literary allusions) into mimesis's desolate attic, whilst the latter lived on, subterraneously haunting the cultural subconscious. I grow fanciful. It's been a long blogpost, and I am as aweary as Mariana.

Put it this way: the larger cultural agon of the last two centuries has seen le naturalisme of prose and poetry enshrined as a quasi-official embodiment of ‘literature as such’ whilst the much larger beast of popular culture has spread its tentacles in the attempt to grasp a new narrative vocabulary of longaevi. As the Greek gods become increasingly a minority interest, the northern-European and Norse mythology rose up, through Wagner, fictionalised in Tolkien into such figures as contemporary Fantasy and Marvel Comics Universe's Thor. The fey medieval longaevi personae of elves and fairies, gnomes and brownies, leprechauns and trolls, gremlins and cobalos and dvergr were shuffled-through by Fantasy Writers, like bargain hunters as a boot fair, and some of them have been elevated out of tweeness into a renovated status of uncanny and unsettling dignity. Elves are the key example. Tolkien's invented legendarium is really an elvish set of stories (although the mortals and hobbit bit-part-players loom larger in the more popular iterations of it) and elves are longaevi in exactly the sense that Lewis uses the term: immortal beings who are somehow also mortal beings—for they can be killed in battle, or even die of a broken heart—who live much longer than mortal men and women and yet whose immortality is a mode of diminishment, and retreat into the west (whatever that means). Tolkien was the world's biggest Fantasy for a time; then it was probably superseded by Star wars before the Peter Jackson movies put it back up top, and then both franchises were overtaken by Harry Potter—texts addresses much more directly the neo-Gothic ghastliness and horror of Voldemort's longaevi unkillability. So where are we now? Well, I suppose we're in the middle of the Reign of the MCU, when every third movie at the cinema seems to be about a superhero. And what is a superhero? A figure who looks like a man, and yet has super-human and super-mortal powers. Of course, I know, not all superheroes are technically super: as Batman and Iron Man show, they don't all have ‘powers’—‘you can,’ in the immortal words of kid Syndrome from The Incredibles, ‘be super without them.’ But they mostly have powers, and the point of those powers is that they make these beings more than mortal. Stronger, more skilled, more morally wise, functionally immortal except for those time when (‘the best-selling graphic novel of all time!’)—they aren't.

Thor may a god; but can Chris Hemsworth really live forever? Surely not: I mean, he's muscly, but surely not that muscly. What happens, exactly, when a Jedi is killed? I mean, do they die like mere mortals, or do they rather vanish into air only to reappear in ghostly, attenuated form? The Doctor keeps dying and keeps coming back to life with a new face: does that sound like an entirely comfortable fate to you? Vampires don't die, except when they do; but then they're never really alive in the first place (except when they have access to the sorts of intensity of sexual intensity we mortals can only dream about). But really, at the moment, I am struck by the prodigious popularity of our present day dominant longaevi pantheon, comic-book superheroes. Tom Shippey follows Richard Firth Green in believing that scholars tend to ‘privilege le merveilleux savant over le merveilleux populaire’ when in fact ‘the [repressive] clerical authorities were not as in control of things’ as they liked to make out. Popular culture, of the genuinely ground-up sort, like comic books, teen vampire romances, pulp science fiction, have a more immediate access to the cultural reservoirs that feed the continuing irrigation of our collective imaginations with the longaevi. Here's Shippey on Shakey:

Shakespeare, whose most original plays are his fairy ones, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, neither of which has a clear plot source, knew more about fairies than has been noticed. When Titania says, at the beginning of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that ‘this same progeny of evils’ in the human world comes from the ‘dissension’ between her and Oberon, she repeats a belief recorded much earlier by the Irish Franciscan Thomas O’Quinn: that trouble in the fairy world brought trouble for humans as well – or for us ‘muggles’, as J.K. Rowling has it. In 1610 Simon Forman, watching Macbeth, was quite sure that the ‘witches’ (as we would label them) were ‘feiries or Nimphes’ and perhaps others thought so too. In Henry V Mistress Quickly of the Boar’s Head Tavern, lamenting the death of Falstaff, cries that the old sinner can’t be in Hell: ‘He’s in Arthur’s bosom, if ever man went to Arthur’s bosom!’ She meant ‘Abraham’s bosom’. Or did she? Avalon may have seemed a better bet to the groundlings than wherever the old patriarchs were supposed to have ended up.

This blogpost returns, like a snake biting its tail, to its starting point: the image at the top, one ‘bbbeto’ on deviantart.com has adapted Sir Joseph Noel Paton's 1849 canvas ‘The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania’ as ‘The Quarrel of Superman and Wonder Woman’. It works as well as it does because these are our longaevi now.

In other words, I'm suggesting that ‘we’ (that dangerous generalisation) have much of the same conflicted uncertainty with respect to death, and the possibility of our surviving it, as did Coleridge. Some of us, I daresay, believe that death is the utter end, a blank, the cessation of all ego in the individual forever. But many people don't, or can't, think so uncomfortable and, from the point of view of our immersively conscious now, counter-intuitive a future. The thought that death is the actual end is hard to inhabit. Indeed, as Oscar Wilde might have said, the only thing harder to think than that our deaths will be the absolute ends is—to think that it won't be. Our choices are between DEATH, or Nightmare LIFE-IN-DEATH, a fate at once worse (because Nightmarish) and better (because beautiful and alluring, in a chilly, white-skinned way). I think our culture keeps returning to these longaevi because they emblematise this weird doubled-ancientness, and so dramatise and act-out our collective anxieties. I could be wrong.

At any rate, and to finish (at least) on the poem, I think it's this, or something to do with this, that reverts metatextually back upon the textuality of this text. It's not that the sea-snakes ‘symbolise’ poetry as such, or that the mariner's curse is some kind of author's mania, or anything like that. It is that this is a poem that deliciously and evocatively baffles our understanding, that it always outflanks attempts, such as this very blogpost, to comprehend its strangeness. We don't even know the Mariner's name! Life wants to know, but Death wants the opposite—I've always liked Adam Phillips's one-line epitome of the Freudian Death Drive as ‘that part of ourselves that determinedly wishes not to know’ (it's in Darwin's Worms, I think). That this poem has endured so vigorously speaks to its resistance to being explained away, or even explained, by critics like me. The Rime is a death that just won't die.