So What Actually is up with _The Rime of the Ancient Mariner_?

I have to admit, I wasn't super moved by Romantic poetry when we first started reading it. I can appreciate that at the time it was kind of revolutionary to write in common language, to revere nature and "simple people" as subject matters, to give so much importance to the experience of the individual, but I honestly didn't really get any real sense of passion from the earlier poems we read. From what I have learned about the Romantic movement from past history and music classes I've taken, this sense of passion, whether positive or negative, created from the experience of man in nature, is one of the most important aspects of the movement, but I was starting to doubt that that applied really to Romantic poetry, until, however, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner completely proved me wrong. In this poem nature is constantly inspiring profound emotions, in both the Ancient Mariner, and the experience of the reader - it struck me as a truly Romantic piece, at least by my perception of Romanticism, and so for this week's post I wanted to look at how this poem embodied Romantic ideas.

Going off of what I've studied about Romantic music, the Romantic movement in the arts originated as kind of a reaction to the preceding Classical movement. The Classical movement was largely defined by strict adherence to standard forms - a piece of music or other form of art was considered aesthetically pleasing and beautiful if it achieved a sense of balance and resolution, it was very much guided by logic and order. Early Romantics however started to veer away from this definition of beauty toward an idea of beauty as reflecting the individual's true experience, which was often too complicated to be balanced and where neat resolution wasn't always realistic, and as a result, started to veer away from tho strict forms. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was published in 1798 as part of the Lyrical Ballads collection of poetry by Wordsworth and Coleridge, and is thus considered to be the earliest true Romantic work - so it was at the point where older forms hadn't been completely abandoned, but instead were used in more non-traditional ways, which definitely applies to the form of this poem. This poem is considered to be in the form of a ballad. According to traditional form, the ballad is composed of quatrains, four-line stanzas, that rhyme the second and fourth lines (abcb rhyme scheme), with alternating lines of iambic tetrameter (four iambs) and iambic trimeter (three iambs) ("Ballad"). The poem starts out adhering pretty strictly to this form - the entire Part I is composed of these quatrains, and an example of the scansion would be:
  x     /      x     /    x  /   x     /
The sun came up upon the left,            (a)
  x    /   x     /     x     /
Out of the sea came he!                        (b)
  x     /      x         /     x    /   x     /
And he shone bright and on the right   (c)
    x      /      x /   x    /
Went down into the sea                        (b)  (Coleridge 1.28-32)

However, as the poem progresses, the poem starts to stick to this form less and less, with stanzas of five or six lines, and rhyme schemes that didn't always rhyme alternating lines, and then in Part VI the poem even takes on a form of dialogue between the First and Second Voices. It is interesting though because toward the end of the poem, as the Mariner gradually makes it back to land and receives his penance, the form starts to go back to following the standard form, which suggests maybe some sort of resolution after all.

Here's an illustration that I thought really embodied this
personification of nature: "The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, Plate 6: The Ice Was All Around"
By Gustav Doré

Even though the poem follows a traditional form for the most part, the way the subject matter is portrayed within this form is strikingly new and Romantic. A large part of this is the way nature is personified in many ways throughout the poem. The stanza in the example above portrays the sun as masculine, giving a sense of brightness and power and order. However, later on in Part I, forces of nature start to be portrayed as more monstrous: "The ice was all around:/ It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,/ Like noises in a swound!" (Coleridge Part I, 379)). After the Mariner kills the Albatross and the ensuing curse sets in, nature is described as rather hellish and uncompromising: "All in a hot and copper sky, the bloody Sun..." and "Water, water, everywhere/ Nor any drop to drink" (Coleridge Part II, 381). It's also interesting because the forces of nature in the movement of the sun and the moon are what provide a sense of order to the poem by giving a sense of the time passing. In Part VI, the surroundings are described in relation to the moon - the bright eye of the ocean is cast toward the moon, the eyes of the dead men are described as glittering in the moon, the moonlight and shadow of the moon is reflected on the harbor - the moon seems to be a source of vision.

Another notably Romantic aspect of the subject matter is the overwhelming sense of fantasy. In this poem, fantasy arises in the form of surreal, almost nightmarish visions. We see first the vision of the skeleton ship with the Life-in-Death spectre-woman and her mate Death: "The nightmare Life-in-Death was she,/Who ticks man's blood with cold" (Coleridge 383). In Part V, the ship starts moving because of the force of a spirit: "From the land of mist and snow,/ The Spirit slid: and it was he/ That made the ship to go" (389). The voices that appear in the end of Part V through Part VI, according to the annotation, are "The Polar Spirit's fellow-daemons" provide the verdict on the Mariner's penance. And then the mysterious figure of the Hermit in the Woods guides the Pilot and Mariner to land and frees the Mariner from the burden of his guilt by commencing his penance sentence.

The deviance from standard form, the strong emotional imagery created with nature, and the use of elements of the fantastical as the driving forces behind the plot and development of the poem are all big examples of Romanticism at work in this poem. The poem is also Romantic overall in its general lack of resolution - while the Mariner sins and is punished for his sins, it is never made clear his motives for killing the Albatross, and so it is hard to glean a clear moral-of-the-story from the poem (except maybe to not kill good omens - but why, why??). I think this might be intentionally vague, to suggest that human nature isn't always rational, that maybe the experience of the individual during their personal journey is maybe more important than the outcome of this journey, that instead of striving to achieve perfect harmony and establishment of the "good" and the "right", this uncertainty and wildness of emotion, though often terrifying, are more representative of true beauty.

Works Cited

"Ballad". Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 14 Nov 2013. 22 Nov 2013. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballad#Ballad_form>.

Coleridge, Samuel. "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". Six Centuries of Great Poetry. Erskine, Albert and Robert Penn Warren. New York: Dell Publishing, 1992. 377-397. Print.