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Coleridge and the Luminous Gloom: An Analysis of the “Symbolical Language” in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Elliott B. Gose Jr.
Elliott B. Gose Jr.*
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia, Vancouver 8
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Extract

Speaking of the “plan of the ‘Lyrical Ballads’” in Chapter 14 of his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge pointed out that while Wordsworth was to deal with “the wonders of the world before us,” he himself was to try to connect the human truth of “our inward nature” with the “shadows of imagination.” The fruitfulness of this connection is evidenced by “The Ancient Mariner”; its aesthetic basis was analyzed by Coleridge at a later date: “The romantic poetry,” he decided, appeals “to the imagination rather than to the senses and to the reason as contemplating our inward nature, the working of the passions in their most retired recesses.” By “exciting our internal emotions,” the poet “acquires the right and privilege of using time and space as they exist in the imagination, obedient only to the laws which the imagination acts by.” Philosophically, Coleridge's transcendentalism is obviously responsible for this assertion of the superiority of the mind over nature; he had remarked its psychological basis as early as 1805:

In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering through the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking for, a symbolical language, for something within me that already and for ever exists, than observing anything new. Even when that latter is the case, yet still I have always an obscure feeling as if that new phenomenon were the dim awakening of a forgotten or hidden truth of my inner nature. (Anima Poetae, p. 136).

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 75 , Issue 3 , June 1960 , pp. 238 - 244
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1960

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References

1 Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor (London, 1930) i, 129–130. Cited by Richard Harter Fogle in an illuminating article, “The Genre of The Ancient Mariner,” Tulane Studies in English, vii, 1957.

2 I agree with Carl F. Keppler (Symbolism in The Ancient Mariner, unpubl. Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Michigan, 1956) that the poem tells of a journey into the unconscious. But I feel that the ship enters what Coleridge later called “the terra incognita of our nature” (Statesman's Manual, p. 470) not when it passes “the Line” (of the equator) but when it enters the Pacific: “We were the first that ever burst / Into that silent sea.” Coleridge's emphasis on “our inward nature,” and on “the workings of the passions in their most retired recesses” (in the quotations included above), seems to me evidence of the importance of the notion of the unconscious to him and of the likelihood of his embodying it in a poem. That he has done so in “The Ancient Mariner” is not, however, a necessary axiom to my interpretation of it. On his connecting God and the unconscious see Anima Poetae, p. 31.

3 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Reynal & Hitchcock, New York, 1946), pp. 71, 88, 93, 87.

4 Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, ed. Whitney J. Oates (New York, 1948), ii, 257 (Book xiv, Chap. 13).

5 That this symbolic use of the sun was habitual in Coleridge's mind may be judged from the number of times he uses it as an image of God. The earliest appearance is in a passage from “Religious Musings” (1794–96): “The veiling clouds retire, / And lo! the Throne of the redeeming God / Forth flashing unimaginable day / Wraps in one blaze earth, heaven, and deepest hell.” (U. 398–401) See also 11. 98–104 of this poem, the footnote to 1. 89, and the end of the poem (quoted on p. 240). In “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” (June 1797), Coleridge speaks of “such hues / As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes / Spirits perceive his presence.” (11. 41–43) The most striking use of the sun as God is in “The Destiny of Nations” (11. 13–23), a passage quoted on p. 242. J. B. Beer investigates Coleridge's sources and his use of this image in some detail in his valuable book, Coleridge the Visionary (London, 1959). See fns. 6,10, and 14.

6 The scene just analyzed bridges the gap between Platonism and Christianity, as St. Augustine attempted to do in Chaps. 2 and 3 of Book x, The City of God. Even when Augustine speaks of original sin, his imagery is taken from Plato and Plotinus, and is similar to that Coleridge used in the blessing scene: “If the will had remained steadfast in the love of that higher and changeless good by which it was illumined in intelligence and kindled into love, it would not have turned away to find satisfaction in itself, and so become frigid and benighted.” (Book xiv, Chap. 13) Exactly the same image and the same distinction (light-intelligence, heat-love) was later used by Swedenborg. See Coleridge as Visionary, p. 117. Although Coleridge does not treat God's illumining of the soul to intelligence, we have seen what he makes of the cold night away from God, until He kindles the Mariner's soul to love.

7 Joy also appears in a passage very reminiscent of the “Religious Musings” one, a passage describing the music of the angelic spirits farther on in Part v.

Sweet sounds rose slowly through their mouths,
And from their bodies passed.

Around, around, flew each sweet sound,
Then darted to the Sun;
Slowly the sounds came back again,
Now mixed, now one by one.
Sometimes a-dropping from the sky
I heard the sky-lark sing;
Sometimes all little birds that are,
How they seemed to fill the sea and air
With their sweet jargoning!

And now 'twas like all instruments,
Now like a lonely flute;
And now it is an angel's song,
That makes the heavens be mute.

It ceased; yet still the sails made on
A pleasant noise till noon,
A noise like of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune.

The angelic troop have come from God to help the Mariner after his conversion, and here they celebrate God the Sun with music which is connected not only with the sun and heaven but also with singing birds in the air and a hidden brook's music (as in “Religious Musings” we found “heavenward wing” and “the glad stream… warbles as it flows.”) See also 11. 56–58 of “Dejection: An Ode.”

The moonlight bay was white all o'er,
Til rising from the same,
Full many shapes that shadows were,
Like as of torches came.

A little distance from the prow
Those dark-red shadows were;
But soon I saw that my own flesh
Was red as in a glare.

I turn'd my head in fear and dread,
And by the holy rood,
The bodies had advanc'd, and now
Before the mast they stood.

They lifted up their stiff right arms,
They held them strait and tight;
And each right-arm burnt like a torch,
A torch that's borne upright.
Their stony eye-balls glitter'd on
In the red and smoky light.

9 Coleridge, Notes, Theological, Political and Miscellaneous (London, 1853,) pp. 402–403. In common with several other quotations in this paper, this one is cited by Craig Miller in his unpubl. Ph.D. diss., Key Terms in Coleridge's Prose Writings (Univ. of Washington, 1957). I also owe a debt to Warren Tallman, with whom I developed the basic interpretation of the imagery in the poem.

10 Lines 15 and ISa are an early version of line 15 as it appears in Hartley Coleridge's edition of the Poems (London, 1912), p. 132. See fn. on that page. Later, in a letter to Crabb Robinson (March 1811), he spelled out the concept in the image: “The sun calls up the vapour—attenuates, lifts it— it becomes a cloud—and now it is the Veil of the Divinity—the Divinity transpiercing it at once hides and declares his presence. We see, we are conscious of Light alone, but it is Light embodied in the earthly nature, which that light itself awoke and sublimated. What is the body, but the fixture of the mind.” Berkeley traced the origin of image and concept in his Siris. See Coleridge as Visionary, p. 119.

11 In fairness to Plato, I should quote a distinction he makes in the same Chap, vn of The Republic which begins with the myth of the cave. He speaks of “the images in the water which are divine, and are the shadows of true existence (not shadows of images cast by a light of fire, which compared with the sun is only an image).” (Translation Jowett's, italics mine.)

12 As Clarke puts it, “Guilt and Fear have interposed themselves between God and the sinful Mariner and his mates, who find themselves now wholly in the power of Death and Life-in-Death” (p. 39). Because of his hypothesis, Warren sees the spectre bark as connected with the sun in an “emotional equating” by means of “iteration” (p. 94).

13 The red and yellow associated with her are thus a fright ful parody of the life-giving colors associated with the sun whose place she has temporarily usurped.

14 Inserted immediately after the stanzas quoted in fn. 7. See Lane Cooper, “The Power of the Eye in Coleridge,” Late Harvest (Ithaca, N. Y., 1952). See also Coleridge the Visionary, pp. 51–52, passim.