Coleridge on Metrical Invention: an Untraced Quotation from the 1799 Notebook

Notebooks 1:387 is a short quotation in German marked ‘source not traced’ by Coburn.

Was im eigentlichsten und schärfsten Verstande erfunden wird, ist für die menschliche Gesellschaft nur selten wirklich nützlich.

In its day, this small thing generated a deal of bad-tempered heat in the narrow world of Coleridgean scholarship. Coburn's account of the entry notes that ‘without context it is not absolutely certain whether Verstand here means understanding, intelligence in the Kantian use of it, or simply sense (ie meaning)’. Accordingly she proposes two possible translations: ‘whatever is invented by the pure, and most acute, intelligence is but rarely of real use to human society’ and ‘whatever is invented in the most literal and exact sense [of the word invented] is but rarely of real use to human society’. Then she adds the following:

Since the above was written, a sharp controversy involving four correspondents and four translations of Coleridge's quotation has raged in the Listener, 2 April-7 May 1953. The argument turned partly on the two interpretations above: whether the word Verstand means a mental power, or the sense or meaning of a word; but it also turned on whether erfunden means invented, or discovered. As none of the controversialists identified the source of the quotation we are not much better off. The main point—Coleridge's reason for being interested in the passage, and whether he was impressed by it or noted it to refute it—remains obscure. If it be read according to (1) above, it reflects a position familiar to readers of Coleridge's later prose, and the quotation becomes a reference in support of his view of the limited use of conceptual understanding. But in the light of other entries in these early notebooks, and in view of eighteenth-century interest in the nature of erfinden and Erfindungen, reading (2) seems the more likely one, and the reading of erfunden as discovered suggested by correspondents to the Listener, unlikely. [Coburn (ed) Notebooks 1.ii: 386]

It is illuminating, then, to be able finally to locate the source of this quotation. It's by the German grammarian and philologist Johann Christoph Adelung and comes from Magazin für die deutsche Sprache, Volume 1 (1783), p. 147. It is, in fact, not a Kantian speculation on the nature of Understanding versus Intelligence, but speculation about the origin of poetic metre.

The sentence occurs in an essay titled ‘Noch ettwas über Deutsche sprache und Litteratur auf Veranlassung der Berlinischen Monathsschrift’; ‘Another reply to the Berlin Monthly on the topic of German language and literature’. The Berlinische Monatsschrift was a monthly magazine published by Johann Erich Biester and Friedrich Gedike, most famous nowadays because it published Immanuel Kant’s celebrated ‘What is Enlightenment?’ essay. The immediate context for the passage Coleridge copied into his notebook is some speculation about the provenance of German poetic metres: ‘Ob unsere Litteratur eine Einheit hat,’ Adelung wonders ‘wenn bald morgenländische, bald Laplädische Schwünge des Geistes, bald fremde Sylbenmaße ...’: whether our Literature possesses a unity, [and if so] when Eastern influences became apparent, when a Lapland spirit first animated it, when foreign metres first appeared. At this point Adelung adds a lengthy footnote that begins:

“Attiker,” sagt Herr Biester, “erfanden neue Sylbenmaße,—aber Rammler soll das nicht!” Ich antworte: 1. Erfunden wird in der menschlichen Gesellschaft eigentlich nichton sondern herrschen, kurz wenn unsere schönen Schriftsteller angegeben hatten, mit klarent Bewußtseyn heraus gehoben, und der Absicht bequemer und angemessener gemacht. Was im eigentlichsten und schärfsten Verstande erfunden wird, ist für die menschliche Gesellschaft nur selten wirklich nützlich. 2. Weder Pindar noch Attiker haben wohl in diesem schärfsten Verstande Sylbenmaße erfunden, sondern was schon in der Sprache, dem Tone, den Tonmaße conventionellen Begriffe des Wohlklanges dunkel lag, herausgehoben näher bestimmt, und mit Bestimmtheit angewandt.

“Attic,” says Mr. Biester, “invented new metres—but Rammler should not!” I answer: 1. In human society, such invention is not actually inventing but a process of codifying, in brief, taking that which our most beautiful writers have expressed and extracting metre from the clarity of their poetic awareness with the intention of making a more convenient and suitable account. What is actually and literally invented is seldom of real use to human society. 2. Surely neither Pindar nor any Attic speaker invented metres in this narrow sense, but rather took what was already hidden in the language, the tone, the measures of  lovely-sounding conventional terms, and emphasized these more precisely, and applied them with more sureness.

Here's the bottom of p.146:

... and here's the top of p.147.

‘Rammler’ is the poet Karl Wilhelm Ramler, and ‘Biester’ the Berlin Professor Johann Erich Biester. In other words, the reason this sentence caught Coleridge's eye is precisely because it insists that what is called invention is actually discovery (except in a few, artificial and unimportant cases). But the specific context of this quotation had to do not with Kantian thought or human consciousness more generally but the narrower question of poetic metre. Which is pretty interesting, actually.

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.

Untraced Quotation from Coleridge Notebooks, 1797

Notebooks 1:303 is a bit of Latin:

ingenium ei esse oppido magnum sed contumacius quam ut arte regi posset; dictionem ingenio parem, animosam, et imamoenam tragice que ferulem.

Kathleen Coburn translates this, although she doesn't quite get it right: ‘[that] town has a great genius, but more insolent than could be commanded by art—a style equal to genius, proud, gloomy, and tragically dangerous.’ In fact, for reasons that will become clear, oppidum can't mean town here, but must be a way of saying something like ‘edifice, construction’, or more likely ‘assemblage, collection’. I offer my translation of the Latin at the end of this blogpost.

Coburn can't identify where it's from. In fact it is Famiano Strada, a seventeenth-century Roman Jesuit, and he's talking not about any city but about the poet Lucan and his epic poem of Roman civil war the Pharsalia. The Latin is originally from Strada's Eloquentia bipartita (1655), [p.368 in fact] but that's not where Coleridge came across it. We can be sure of this because Strada actually wrote not ‘animosam, et imamoenam’ but ‘animosam, peracutam, eruditam et imamoenam’. The specific phrasing that Coleridge wrote down in his Notebook evidently derives from the Critical Review for 1797 (p.462) and a review of The Rural Lyre; a Volume of Poems (1796) by Ann Yearsley, a former Bristol milk-maid who had found fame as a poet. This is how the review opens:

This is interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that it means we can be sure Coleridge read this volume of the Critical Review. Another is that Coleridge perhaps knew, and certainly knew of, fellow-Bristolian Yearsley: her poems were quite famous. at least for a while; Coleridge's friend the Bristol publisher Joseph Cottle gave Yearsley money to save her from bankruptcy, and several decades after her death (in 1831) Robert Southey wrote her biography.

But my hunch is that Coleridge pulled this Latin out of the journal he was reading less because of what it says about Yearsley and more because it struck him as a description of his own poetry. As he notes in the opening chapter of the Biographia, critics had accused his first book Poems on Various Subjects (1796) of ‘obscurity’ and ‘a general turgidness of diction’. Strada could have been talking about STC's own work: ‘a collection of a more inflexible temper than can be managed by its artistry, where the style matches its author's genius: spirited, but tragically obscure and stiff.’

"Antiquus Marium": Ancientness in Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner"

I've covered most of Coleridge's major works on this blog (and I've written posts about all manner of his minor, abstruse and unknown works) but I've never yet addressed The Ancient Mariner. It's so central to my sense of what makes Coleridge a genuinely great poet, and there's so much to it, that I've been putting off approaching it. But it can't be put off forever.

Last week I posted a small post wondering whether STC's eye had been caught by his former fellow university acquaintance Christopher Bethel's use of the phrase ‘nauta senex’ in a poem. Today I'm following up with something more substantial, or if not substantial then at least—well: longer. The jumping-off point is the question I asked at the beginning of that earlier post: is the Ancient Mariner only ancient as he tells his story to the wedding guest? Or was he ancient back when he was an active sailor? In other words, was he a young sailor who has, since his strange voyage, been pounding the highways and byways, compulsively retelling his adventures, for such a long time that he has grown old? Or was he a greybeard back when he took to the sea?

:1:

We're not given his actual name, so let's start with his nonnomial moniker. He's ‘ancient’ at which point in the story—when he's speaking to the wedding guest, or when he was actually at sea? A related question: why ‘mariner’? There are more straightforward English terms that could have been used: sailor, shipman, tar, bluejacket, boatswain. ‘Sailor’, say, connects the agent with the ship on which he works, and more specifically the mode of propulsion; it’s a word that lifts up its semantic field to the sky and the winds. ‘Mariner’ signifies in the other direction: directs our attention downwards to the mare, the sea. And that's right, of course: since STC’s Rime is a poem more interested in the undertow, the hidden forces beneath—indeed, rather than by sails this sailor’s craft is propelled by a submarine force or power, by the mare itself.

Another way of putting this, of course, would be to peg sailor as an English vernacular and mariner as a Latinate, more antiquated term; but antiquated brings us to ancient, a Latinate and antiquated term easily replaced with the English vernacular old. Since Rime is a piece of nomenclature that, in its spelling as much as its usage, evidences Coleridge ostentatiously performing northern-Europe ballad ruggedness, we might think it pulls a rather different direction to Ancient and Mariner. This is not a poem in hexameters or hendecesyllabics after all; it is a poem that pointedly eschews neoclassical polish and subject-matter: all metrical gnarliness and ‘northern european’ Gothicism and fairy-tale supernatural narrative curlicues. (Classical sailors stayed close within the Mediterranean; it was modern, and by the eighteenth-century largely northern European mariners who ranged over the globe, into seas of ice and snow and so on).

Given that, why does the title The Rime of the Old Sailor feel so wrong? It can’t be just that we’re merely used to the other title. Ancient might make us think about the (Latinate) French word ancien, which in its 1790s context would evoke that which the Revolution had overturned, the hidden forces of popular revolt—that thing which in Conciones ad Populo STC had descried as a rising up from the depths: ‘Revolutions are sudden to the unthinking only. Political Disturbances happen not without their warning Harbingers. Strange Rumblings and confused Noises still precede these earthquakes and hurricains of the moral World.’ As he was writing this very poem, Revolution in France had risen from the depths and brought its deathly neck-dragging gull, its gull- or guillotine, to bear on the ancien regime.

Gull-otine? No? (Revolutionaries have to worry about these things, you know. Juan Pellicer wonders How revolutionary was the Lyrical Ballads? That he phrases the question that way suggests that there's been a critical consensus for a long time that the volume was pretty revolutionary.)

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

Why shrink, though? Wooden boards swell, rather than shrink, when saturated in water—indeed, wooden ships depend upon this feature to improve the watertightness of their roughly timbered and fixed together components. Shrink, we might say, stands to set-up the rhyme with drink, and to imply the quailing, flinching away from the plenitude of inhospitality that the ocean represents—a sort of pathetic fallacy by which the parched mariner, shrivelling up with thirst, projects his sufferings onto his ship. The ship is the vehicle in two senses: his actual means of transportation, and the means by which the metaphoricity of the poem translates itself into our experience. Were the Mariner’s thirst merely somatic, as it is in the in-text logic of the poem, the poem presumably wouldn’t have resonated as widely as it has. Presumably this superfluity of non-potable water, this agonizing thirst, these shrinking structural components—these three things in particular—signify more widely. So perhaps the question becomes: what do we thirst for? We poetic revolutionaries, we mariners, we readers?

:2:

Ice, of course, is not a shrinkage, but an expansion.

And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As green as emerald. [51-54]

That's spelled ‘emerauld’ in the 1798 version (for its archaic flavour, and also to position the word as a full-rhyme with cold) but the more conventional ‘emerald’ in the 1817 and 1834 versions. The obvious problem here (so obvious that critics don't seem to talk about it, as if it's merely a naïf or point-missing observation) is that sea-ice is not green. Coleridge had never seen sea-ice in person so, conceivably, he thought it was green. I mean, there's a Sir-Bedevere-from-Monty-Python's-Holy-Grail syllogism here, isn't there? The sea is green; icebergs are made out of the sea; ergo icebergs are green. But actually icebergs are white, all pre-1798 reports of icebergs describe them as white, and surely Coleridge knew that.

Why, then, green ice? Let's take, for starters, the first 80 lines (or in the 1817/34 edition, the first 82 lines) of the poem, bracketed by Coleridge as his ‘Part 1’. I'm thinking, again, of the differences between, on the one hand, a northern-european anglo-saxon or Percy's Reliques poetic, and on the other a southern-european, mediterranean, classical and neo-classical one. In the former (something I learned from my esteemed coleague and Anglo-Saxonist Jenny Neville) colour is a matter less of hue than it is of brightness: there are lots of bright things and dull things in Old English poetry, where there is much less specific redness blueness or yellowness. But in the sunnier and better illuminated traditions of Mediterranean culture there are lots of actual colours. If I'm arguing that Ancient Mariner straddles these traditions, in form as well as context, then I need to be prepared to look at it in those terms. The poem opens with dullness and brightness, the Mariner's ‘grey beard’ and his ‘glittering eye’ [3], ‘grey-beard loon! ... he holds him with his glittering eye’ [11-13], ‘the bright-eyed Mariner’ [20]. What colour are the Mariner's eyes? We can't say: blue, green, hazel, who knows. The colour doesn't signify—what matters is that they are bright. But then, across this grey-bright two tone canvas, three striking colours are laid. First:

The bride hath paced into the hall,
Red as a rose is she; [33-34]

Blushing red, we presume (not her dress—that must be white). Red, in other words, for flesh. What's next? After, that is, another reference to ‘the bright-eyed Mariner’ [40]? Why, those surreally bright-green icebergs, ‘as green as emerald’ [54]. And then the entry of the bird itself, the albatross. Alba, as I don't need to tell you, is Latin for white (the ‘-tross’ part is a holdover from the ending of the Spanish alcatraz, “pelican”, since the albatross was, wrongly, believed to be a relative of the other bird). For our purposes, and for a poetical imagination like Coleridge's marinaded in Latin, the albatross enters the drama as the White Bird—white for purity and innocence, white for death, the colour the icebergs ought to have been—and it is white that becomes the key colour from this moment: ‘fog-smoke white’ [77]; ‘the white moon-shine’ [78]; ‘the white foam flew’ [103], and a little later ‘the steersman's face by his lamp gleamed white’ [207] as the white ‘horned moon’ rises. White is the colour of the holy bird, and also is the colour associated with the water snakes who, when the mariner blesses them unawares, free him from his curse:

I watched the water-snakes:
They moved in tracks of shining white,
And when they reared, the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes. [273-6]

This doesn't, yet, get us closer to why the icebergs are emerald-coloured; but we can at least note that this particular vivid colour scheme, early invoked—bright red, bright green and shining white—comes, with the green mutating into yellow, back into the poem's colourfield at two crucial subsequent moments: first when the ship is supernaturally becalmed and encounter the deathship carrying Nightmare-Life-in-Death:

About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch's oils,
Burnt green, and blue and white [127-30]

Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Night-mare Life-in-Death was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold. [190-94]

The Greek word for green χλωρός (from whence chlorophyll) is also one of the Greek words for yellow (from whence chlorine, that yellow-green gas). The two hues are connected. Red enters the poem a second time when the zombie sailors, having brought the mariner home, are finally released from their grisly servitude.

And the bay was white with silent light,
Till rising from the same,
Full many shapes, that shadows were,
In crimson colours came.

A little distance from the prow
Those crimson shadows were:
I turned my eyes upon the deck—
Oh, Christ! what saw I there!

Each corse lay flat, lifeless and flat,
And, by the holy rood!
A man all light, a seraph-man,
On every corse there stood. [480-91]

That's the 1817/34 version. In the original 1798 there was an even greater emphasis upon the crimson: ‘those dark red shadows ... I saw that my own flesh/was red as in a glare’; ‘their stony eye-balls flitter'd on/In the red and smoky light’; ‘full many shapes, that shadows were,/In crimson colour came’ [1798: 486-8, 497-8, 509-10; all these were cut in the later editions though].

So: this is red as: the colour of blood. Red as an angry, martial, the fitting (as it were) Gothic lighting rig for a drama of death and uncanny posthumous action. Black, white, yellow and red: it's intuitively the right sort of colour scheme for the more Grand Guignol aspects of this poem, isn't it. This, though, still hasn't addressed the question of those emerald icebergs.

One possibility involves a leap to the sort of reading in which, of course (of course!) Coleridge often indulged: the Bible. Here's the vision of Revelation 4:

1. After this I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven: and the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, Come up hither, and I will shew thee things which must be hereafter.

2. And immediately I was in the spirit: and, behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne.

3. And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald.

What are those precious stones? Well, the ‘sardine stone’ is sardius or carnelian, described as a flesh-colored gem (hence carnelian, from the Latin carneus, ‘fleshly’). The other two are emerald, which is of course green, and jasper—a gem which can come in various colours, but which the Romans thought of as green (Lewis and Short: ‘ĭaspis: a green-colored precious stone, jasper, Plin. 37, 8, 37, § 115; Mart. 5, 11, 1; 9, 60, 20’—the Greek word St John uses here, ἴασπις, is the same gem). So the vision is of a jewel-like man the colour of flesh and green, and ringed by an emerald rainbow: the colour of vegetation and rebirth, of viriditas. The Greek Knight, the green man, the seagreen Mariner whose red (adamic) flesh passes through the fate that flesh is heir to, dies, and returns. The iceberg becomes, as it were, a gem on a hypertrophic scale, a jewel-like ἴασπις. It is, in its own rough-edged border-ballad way, a glory of the new apocalypse.

Does this help us work out whether the mariner, as working-sailor is ancient or not? Perhaps we might say: he is evergreen.

:3:

He is senex, but is he pater? We're not told of any children, and his habit of hanging out with hermits and sailors does not lead our thoughts in the direction of family life. Maybe that's one of the points of the poem, written (after all) soon after Coleridge himself became a father. Because, as the OED notes, ‘ancient’ also means ‘patriarch’, which is to say: father. ‘3. An old or aged man (or animal); a patriarch’. The citations include Cowper's 1791 translation of the Odyssey [2.4.517], which renders Proteus, father of the sea, thus: ‘Then, hero, loose the ancient of the deep’—which, since Coleridge almost certainly read this poem, is quite interesting. (The citations also include a couple more idiomatic usages of ancient for father: ‘a venerable ancient, by his side/A comely matron’ from Southey's Roderick, and Dickens's Sam Weller in The Pickwick Papers (1837): ‘“My father, Sir,” replied Mr. Weller. “How are you, my ancient?”’). So: how far might we push the reading of the Rime as being about, in effect, the Father Mariner?

In the marginal prose glosses Coleridge added to the poem, the white-bird albatross is described as ‘the pious bird of good omen’. Pietas is a particular Roman virtue associated not just with duty, righteousness and obedience to divine command, but with duty to one's family in particular. It's not just a piety but a filial piety. Might it be that killing the pious bird is impious in a specifically familial sense?

The Romans had several sacred birds, including eagles and doves, but the specific phrase pious bird, pia avis refers specifically to the Stork and crosses over from Roman use to Christian (Saint Ambrose thought the stork embodied pietas) because of its supposed devotion to its young: ‘ad pedes Ciconia apparet, quia preces fundit publicas & privatas; vel ob piétatem erga parentes: quam ob causam hanc avem piam vocant Romani’ [Eucharius Gottlieb Rink, De veteris numismatis potentia et qualitate lucubratio (1701), 171].

In all countries where the Stork breeds it is protected; boxes are provided on the tops of the houses; and he considers himself a fortunate man whose roof the Stork selects. There is a well authenticated account of the devotion of a Stork, which, at the burning of the town of Delft, after repeated and unsuccessful attempts to carry off her young, chose rather to remain and perish with them than leave them to their fate. Well might the Romans call it pia avis! [Henry Baker Tristram, The Natural History of the Bible (1867) 248]

The stork's association with childbirth survives into popular belief even today. Conceivably, the Mariner's killing of this pia avis is a cutting-off of his own potential as a father and progenitor.

:4:

There's another ‘ancient’ that's surely relevant here (odd that critics don't make more of it, really): the Biblical ‘Ancient of Days’ [Daniel, 7:9, 13, 22], which is to say, God—another dazzling-eyed, long bearded fellow whose word has the surprising power to stop people in their day-to-day and turn them into evangelists dedicated to passing that word along. The Mariner appears at a wedding feast, and marriage is a sacrament, after all. In the Septuagint the phrase is παλαιὸς ἡμερῶν, from πάλαι (pálai, ‘long ago’): God, in other words, comes as-it-were from days long, long before ours. In the Vulgate, it is antiquus dierum. By a similar logic, the Mariner could be called antiquus marium, the Ancient of Seas.

This may look a little fanciful, but bear with me. Because ‘Ancient’ as a descriptor of God touches on a particular problematic: since God, existing prior to and not constrained by time, cannot be old, a consequence of time. Time, like space, constrains material beings, but God is not a material being. So the word ancient hovers between two mutually incompatible meanings: ravaged by time, and absolutely free of time.

But this brings us back to one of the central fascinations of Coleridge's poem: the intermediary creatures, the ‘spirits’ as the later glosses (rather misleadingly) call them, that populate the mariner's world, intervening between mortals such as himself, his crewmates (the wedding guest and the hermit) in the one hand, and the divine on the other. Indeed there's one way in which the poem is quite strikingly question-begging: the albatross itself. Is it a regular bird? Or is it a daemon?

Other entities in the poem are unambiguously pegged as supernatural: the Nine-Fathom Deep force that first becalms the ship and later drives it on with unnatural rapidity is one: Coleridge's later prose glosses describes this as ‘a spirit’ that was ‘one of the inhabitants of the planet neither departed souls nor angels; concerning whom the learned Jew, Josephus, and the Platonic Constantinopolitan, Michael Psellus, may be consulted.’ Two interesting contexts (Psellus was his nickname, since it is Greek for ‘stammerer’). ‘These spirits are very numerous,’ Coleridge adds, ‘and there is no climate or element without one or more’ [Mariner, 131-4]. Then there is the encounter with the capitalised ‘DEATH’ the ‘mate’ (shipmate? sexual partner? I've never been sure) of ‘Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH’ (‘she/Who thicks man's blood with cold’). What manner of beings are these? Not mortals, clearly; but then again, not demigods—not in the Christian (Catholic, or Unitarian, depending on your view: ask the hermit) universe of this poem. The Christian God suffers no demigods to inhabit His universe. The ‘water-snakes’ of line 273 we can take to be forms of natural marine life, but the ‘spirits’ that reanimate the Mariner's dead crewmates are specified as angels, where the voices the Mariner hears belong to ‘the Polar Spirit's fellow demons, the invisible inhabitants of the element.’

This supernatural superstructure (super!) of the poem's worldbuilding is one thing that has been pretty extensively studied by Coleridgeans, and I don't propose to get into all that here. My interest is in the ancientness, and its strategic ambiguity between (divine) timelessness and (mortal) decrepitude-towards-death, of these entities. Here's a chunk of William Empson:

C.S. Lewis, in the first chapter of his survey of English 16th-century literature (1954), said that earlier writers had treated magic as fanciful and remote, but in this period they felt it might be going on in the next street; and one reason was a thing they surprisingly called ‘Platonism’: ‘the doctrine that the region between the earth and the moon is crowded with airy creatures who are capable of fertile union with our own species.’ Another reason for feeling at home with the spirits was the doctrine ‘that the invisible population of the universe includes a whole crowd of beings who might also be called theologically neutral’. That is, they die like the beasts, and never come before the Judgment Seat; they are ‘far from Heaven, and safe from Hell’. They are not morally neutral, being a mixture of good and bad like ourselves: but they are not angels or devils, permanently engaged in a Manichean battle, wearing the uniform either of God or Satan. Clearly, this makes them likely to be useful to us, perhaps even to tell the secrets of Nature, if we have something to offer in return.

Lewis used his dubious phrase about neutrality to introduce the idea, I think, because the full doctrine is seldom stated. It would be considered heretical, and would anyhow be shocking: but the feeling of it, or an approach to it, is widespread in the period. One of the chief reasons for wanting some kind of belief in Middle Spirits was the reverence felt for the newly recovered classics, together with the belief, often expressed, that it would be impudent to deny experiences which had once been generally attested. Apollo could not have been nothing, and it was very disagreeable to believe him a devil. It was clear that he had lasted a long time, say two thousand years, and pretty certain that he was now dead; to believe he had been a Middle Spirit fitted very well. It would be unfitting if he were summoned to the Day of Judgment, so the educated tended to assume that this would not happen.

There's a fair amount to unpack here, but I want to pull out two things. The first is Empson's intriguing (original to him, I think) suggestion that the rationale for belief in these intermediary spirits was a nostalgic disinclination to dispense with, or to out-and-out demonize, Classical mythology. Milton wasn't so sentimental, and dispatches all pagan gods to his Hell. But Coleridge, devout though he was, had a more emotional and imaginative attachment to the classical past. The second thing is that Medieval and Renaissance thinkers thought of these beings as material (although made of a more ‘subtle’ matter than us) and therefore mortal: ‘Paracelsus [says] that Middle Spirits are not spirits at all, having bodies made of more subtle kinds of matter than ours. However, all creatures with material bodies will eventually die, so if we find them around they must be capable of breeding, though not often as they are long lived: whereas the angels and fallen angels, being real spirits and totally immortal, must be totally incapable of breeding, or they would clutter the place up.’

Clutter the place up. You have to agree, he has a point.

Empson's interest in all this is, basically, Shakespearian: The Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest specifically; but that's germane to Coleridge's Mariner too—The Tempest in particular, we might think. What does it mean to talk of these enormously powerful supernatural entities being mortal? Empson is fascinated by Puck and by Ariel above all others, and of the latter he notes: ‘Ariel is so much a nature-spirit that he positively wants to dissolve into the more handsome parts of Nature, and renounce all contact with mankind.’ Since these intermediary spirits lack souls, they cannot enter heaven, or hell; and indeed, Empson thinks ‘Middle Spirits are indignant at being rejected from Heaven, and want to go there, and Paracelsus agrees that it is very queer of God to have allowed humans to enter Heaven, but not these greatly superior beings’. Nonetheless, and despite the fact that they can't go to heaven, the idea that these powerful entities would simply snuff out into nothingness is simply too much to believe. This Arielesque dissolving into nature, leaving the natural phenomenon infused with the essence of the spirit, is the compromise between absolute immortality and absolute extinction-at-death. It's not coincidental that this middle-spirit diffusion into Nature is so often invoked in Romantic poetry; for example Wordsworth's ‘She neither hears nor sees/Rolled round in earth's diurnal course/With rocks, and stones, and trees’, where Lucy (if that poem is about Lucy) has neither gone straight to heaven, nor blipped out of existence altogether.

This takes us at once to the end and therefore the beginning of The Ancient Mariner. Coleridge is quite clear as to the phantasmechanics of his poem's universe: if things happen contrary to the regular laws of nature, like dead men getting up and crewing the ship, or boats travelling preternaturally fast, it is because magical entities have gotten inside those corpses, or are gripping the keel of your ship and pushing it on. Which leads us to ask: how is it that the Mariner has his strange power of compelling listeners? What makes his eye glitter, and moves his feet over the land will-he or nil-he?

The comparison that critics often make is with the Wandering Jew, a figure patently in Coleridge's mind as he wrote this poem. But the Wandering Jew blasphemed against the black cross on which Christ died; where the Mariner blasphemed (is that too heavy-handed a way of putting it) against the alba ‘white’ cross. And the Wandering Jew is fated to walk forever, until the last judgment, unable either to die or, properly, to live. How long will the Mariner be compelled to go about buttonholing wedding guests and the like? Surely not until the last trump? And happens to the Mariner when his supernatural compulsion is lifted? Does he die and go to heaven? (Will the Wandering Jew do likewise?)

You know what? I don't think the poem knows, because I don't think Coleridge knows. I can't prove it, and I can't even really get into it without many thousands of words of analysis and discussion, for which there is not space, or readerly patience, here: but I think Coleridge was in some way suspicious of the notion of personal immortality even as he, publicly, insisted on a Christian afterlife (although even then he did so in a strangely ambiguous manner: see, for example, ‘Human Life. On the Denial of Immortality’). He can neither give up nor endorse the notion that humans survive death, I think because he anticipates Feuerbach's characterisation of such belief as actually, if counter-intuitively, a kind of blasphemy. In The Essence of Christianity Feuerbach says that in other aspects of life and belief, we make our existence dependent on God, but that when it comes to the question of immortality we make God dependent on us, because (he says) we in effect declare ‘if there is no immortality, there is no God,’ which is actually a way of saying: ‘if I am not immortal, then there is no God.’ Thus ‘heaven’, as Feuerbach puts it, ‘becomes the true God of man: as man conceiveth his heaven, so he conceiveth his God.’ I wonder if Coleridge, intimating something along these lines, finds his imagination trailing out into these supernatural liminalities of extended existence that are not quite material and not quite eternal-spirit either.

And perhaps it's that valence of ancient that is most relevant here. Ancient means drawn out through age and towards the asymptote of a never-yet-arrived-at death. Ancient means coming from before and existing outside time altogether as eternal spirit. Threading between the two is a path that avoids us having to commit to a belief wither in absolute immortality or in personal extinction. But this enduring has its nightmare side: death provides no rest to the zombified mariners; DEATH travels in the company of his grim antidote, Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH—as if death cannot simply be, on its (his) own terms, because he still has a nightmarish kind of life inside it (him). The ancientness of the Mariner is that sort of old-age, a life burning inside death, neither youth nor death.

Nauta senex

A question: is the Ancient Mariner only ancient as he tells his story to the wedding guest? Or was he ancient back when he was an active sailor? In other words, was he a young sailor who has, since his strange voyage, been pounding the highways and byways, compulsively retelling his adventures, for such a long time that he has grown old? Or was he a greybeard back when he took to the sea?

Here's a 1790 poem by Christopher Bethell, who was at Cambridge the same time and in the same college as Coleridge, and with whom he competed for college prizes in writing verse in Latin and Greek. Bethell went on to become a distinguised churchman, and ended his days Bishop of Bangor, but in his youth he wrote things like this, an exercise in which he is tasked to explain the surprising health of an old horse:

It was published in the second volume of Musae Etonensis (1795), a collection of neo-Latin versifying edited by William Herbert whilst we was still a pupil at Eton, hence the name. Several increasingly expanded editions were issued through the nineteenth-century (I notice there's a copy of the 1795 edition on sale on eBay right now for the lowlow price of £394). The bit that I want to concentrate on for a moment are these lines:

Labitur ut leni vento ratis, arripe portum,
Nauta senex; dubio nec male fide mari:
Мох fera tempestas turbatis saeviat undis;
At tibi jam clavo est et sine fune ratis.
Felix, qui post cuneta maris discrimina, tandem
Ex alto incolumis litore cernit aquas!
Tunc alus cursum monstrat, quae flamina captent;
Quà saxa, et syrtes, quà vada caeca latent. [13-20]

Which means:

When the ancient mariner, soft wind moving his ship,
finally slips into harbour, leaving behind the dubious sea,
the wild and savage tempest, the turbulent waves,
and finally now makes fast the ship's ropes;
he is happy to be safely beyond the sea's hazards,
high up the beach, removed from the water!
pondering might-have-been voyages, forced on by gales
to where rocks and sandbanks and unknown shoals hide.

Bethell's ‘ancient mariner’ is a representative figure for any man who has reached a calm old age and can look back with equanimity on the previous dangers of his life (the next section of the poem does something similar with a senex castra, an ancient soldier; and the poem's last line is ‘hic meritus senium nobile cinxit honor’; we must honour the nobility that old age has gathered to itself). But I wonder if Coleridge's eye settled on that nauta senex, that ancient mariner looking back on his life, and began wondering about the dangers of his might-have-been voyage. It's not much, but it might be something.