The literary era of the Romantics was a time of political turmoil and transformation. The poets played an important part in forming the landscape of the 18th century: with William Blake rejecting religious doctrine, Wordsworth radically encouraging social reform and eventually renouncing politics altogether and Coleridge fighting oppression and ‘enforced silence’ with political lectures and revolutionary pamphlets, tensions were high and public opinion rested heavily on the publications and propaganda of both the Ministry of Prime Minister William Pitt and the Democrats that favoured Coleridge’s point of view. Coleridge had already developed a strong sense of his spiritual self, evident in his nature poetry and frequent nods to Pantisocracy, but his voice of truth emerged more prominently with the progressive ideas and movements of the French Revolution; a movement that appeared to offer an escape from the oppressive constructs of Pitt’s Britain and the feudal systems of the French ancien régime.

         In contrast, his personal interests were potent in spirit and imbued with a depth of Soul often misunderstood by his peers. His interests in spiritual and scientific matters such as cartography, astronomy and mathematics led to the unique development of his brilliant mind and imagination that was firmly rooted in liberal thought, a characteristic that led to his eventual persecution by the Ministry. Despite the political pressure of Pitt’s ‘legislative strike on printed and spoken discourse’ in seventeen ninety-five, Coleridge produced one of his best poems, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, with endless metaphor and gothic horror that just might hint at the ‘“coldly malevolent”’ versions of counterrevolutionary alarm’ and the prosecution experienced by Romantic authors during ‘Pitt’s “Reign of Terror’ or in Coleridge’s terms, ‘Ministerial Treason’. This essay seeks to highlight how the world the Ancient Mariner enters into relates not only to Coleridge’s society, but also to his personal fears and memories that brought forth his bold, gothic and supernatural imagination as a mode of creative expression.

         Politics were not always at the forefront of Coleridge’s earlier poetry. We see in works such as Frost at Midnight that he often looks to evade the intensity of the situation by focusing on values rested in family and the natural world: ‘My babe so beautiful! It thrills my heart / With tender gladness, thus to look at thee’ (Frost at Midnight, ll.48-49). Despite this, the political tension continued to consume his life and Pitt’s ‘program of surveillance, intimidation, and prosecution’ in the form of ‘a centrally coordinated network of salaried spies’ seemed to burden the thoughts and wellbeing of Coleridge and his friends, the Wordsworths, significantly. Despite this, the spark of the French Revolution was of great interest to Coleridge, as we see with the Fall of the Bastille: ‘I see, I see! glad Liberty succeed / With every patriot virtue in her train! (Ode to the Destruction of Bastille, ll.21-24); it seems he also recognised an opportunity for liberation across Britain. Unfortunately, his youthful, schoolboy-self soon fell victim to accusations of treason and betrayal for his progressive thought and revolutionary support. For Coleridge, the concept of freedom was likely central to his intention: freedom of speech, resisting oppression (he condemned slavery much in the same way), but this only seemed to further intensify his persecution, eventually leading to a lengthy retreat into silence and addiction. During the six-week period leading to the Royal Assent of the Treasonable and Seditious Practices Bills (or Gagging Acts), a legislation designed to ‘contain local eruptions of unrest and to prevent larger accumulations of oppositional sentiment’, Coleridge produced his pamphlet The Plot Discovered in hope of preventing its passing: ‘This is the brief moment, in which Freedom pleads on her knees’. Unfortunately, the whirlwind of panicked protest did not succeed and what followed for Britain was a ‘chilling’ time of silence and repression. Soon after, the French Revolution became violent and dangerous and the threat of invasion became very real in Britain. It was then that Coleridge retreated and turned to works such as France: An Ode to express his concerns, pleas and repentance:  

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‘forgive me, Freedom! O forgive those dreams!

I hear thy voice, I hear thy loud lament,

From bleak Helvetia’s ice caverns sent –

I hear thy groans upon her blood-stained streams!’ (France: An Ode, ll.66-69)

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         Is it any wonder then, that The Rime of the Ancient Mariner contains strong gothic tones and language that speaks frequently of darkness and death? We might look at the Ancient Mariner’s world as a reflection of Pitt’s ‘gothic tale in juridical drag’ with an additional imaginative influence both from his childhood memories and the vast landscape of his unconscious mind. I will now examine how the state of the nation merged with childhood experiences such as discovering the bizarre and exotic imagery from The Arabian Nights may have influenced the otherworldly scenes and metaphorical aspects of the The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In terms of descriptive language, the way the ‘death fires danced at night’ (l.18) are reminiscent of a realm associated with alchemy and occultism, and with the later celestial influence we can assume Coleridge’s studies did stretch to the teachings of the Magi, but the story of the mariner is also presented as a dream. In terms of Freudian psychoanalysis, ‘dreams are heavily masked expressions of deep-seated desires and fears’, and this aligns with critics of the poem who described it as ‘a rhapsody of unintelligible wildness and incoherence’ and ‘a mental fiction shaped from the unique and richly stored treasure-house of Coleridge’s mind’. Coleridge later expresses in Pains of Sleep how his ‘shapes and thoughts’ torture him through the night. This suggests that this sense of darker, gothic imagery was residing in his unconscious mind at the time of writing and could also imply that Coleridge was dealing with symptoms of opioid withdrawal. Looking at the poem in this way, especially when considering that Coleridge’s other poetry was often biographical as opposed to a fictional tale, we can observe that he strayed from his usual literary mode into a world of storytelling that allowed him to conceal both identity and political perspective behind character, scene and multidimensional exploration. Though this was likely an alien world to the average onlooker, it seems to be very real to him.

         There are a number of metaphorical hints towards propaganda embedded within the poem, if interpreted as such. Take for example, the ‘STORM-BLAST’, personified as male and in heavy pursuit of the mariners. It doesn’t take much to relate the ‘STORM-BLAST', ‘tyrannous and strong’ (l.42) and ‘who pursued with yell and blow / Still treads the shadow of his foe’ (ll.46-47), to Pitt’s Ministry and the ‘persecutions of Darkness’ Coleridge complains of in his letter to George Dyer lamenting the prohibition of his political lectures due to accusations of Treason. Then we have the Albatross, known for symbolising freedom, the central idea of the Cult of Supreme Being led by Maximilien Robespierre that Coleridge supported at the time. Though Coleridge later expresses regret for the violent outcome of the revolutionary movements, he still stood for liberal ideas, though perhaps eventually more in pursuit of spirituality and devotion. Furthermore, the hanging of the Albatross around the Mariner’s neck could represent the burden of guilt Coleridge felt for his contribution to the movements that led to violent and destructive conflict and countless deaths:

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‘we have offended! O! my countrymen!

We have offended very grievously,

And been most tyrannous’ (Fears in Solitude, ll.41-43)

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His consequential retreat away from his literary career and spiral into addiction suggests that the burden of his involvement never quite left him, as is the way with the mariner, whose ‘agony constraineth him to travel from land to land’ and repeat his ‘ghastly tale’ (l.595). These aspects of the Mariner’s journey can provide a profound insight into Coleridge’s internal and external experiences by excavating its various parts. To begin with, the Mariner’s character gives us a clue into Coleridge’s emotional perspective. The mariner’s separation from society and apparent strangeness both highlight a melancholic loneliness, an obvious symptom of isolation: ‘hold off! Unhand me, greybeard loon!’ (l.7). The Wedding-Guest’s frequent expressions of fear further define quite how much of an outsider the character is: ‘I fear thee and thy glittering eye / And thy skinny hand, so brown (ll.231-32). The arrival of the Albatross is also telling of Coleridge’s perspective when described as the bird that ‘made the breeze to blow’ (l.98). Perhaps for him, the Albatross was symbolic of the force behind the revolutionary groups and prospects. After the shooting of the Albatross, the world turns to a darker more ethereal theme with gothic language and aspects of the occult: ‘water, like a witch’s oils/ burnt green, and blue and white’ (ll.19-20).

         It is worth noting that Coleridge was spending his time at Alfoxden with the Wordsworths, enjoying nights of ‘habitual star-gazing’ when the poem was written. He observed the nature of the cosmos much in the way the Magi did, as was the way of his father: ‘he told me the names of the stars, and how Jupiter was a thousand times larger than our world… From my early reading of Faery Tales and Genii etc. my mind had been habituated to the vast.’ It is likely that his interest in alchemy also led to his medical consumption of Laudanum, since it was first introduced by Paracelsus, a Swiss physician and alchemist. In this corner of Coleridge’s consciousness, we also discover his interest in Arabic culture, not only through alchemy and mathematics but through his untimely reading of The Arabian Nights at a too young age. In fact, The Story of Sindbad the Sailor bears a striking resemblance to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner with its ‘bird of a monstrous size’, and ‘great number of serpents’ that ‘began hissing around [him]’ displaying a strong crossover, whether conscious or unconscious, with the Albatross and the ‘water-snakes’: ‘Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs / Upon the slimy sea’ (ll. 127-128). This inclination toward the tales of The Arabian Nights and bird imagery was also inherited by Coleridge’s son, Huntley, described as ‘a very good, and sweet child, yet also strange and fantastical. He had invented an entire imaginary world called “Ejuxria”, to which he flew on the back of a “great bird” borrowed from the Arabian Nights.’

         Paired with the political tension of Pitt’s Britain and Coleridge’s resulting persecution, the mariner’s world becomes an expression not only of pure imagination and fantastical design, but an example of fact-based storytelling that offer his frustrations a mode of expression with a lesser risk of exposure. Later, themes of redemption arrive both into the Mariner’s world as ‘a blessed troop of angelic spirits, sent down by the invocation of the guardian saint’ and into Coleridge’s world as he finds maturity:

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‘They advance, they float in, the Olympians all!

With Divinities fills my

Terrestrial hall!

How shall I yield you

Due entertainment,

Celestial quire?’ (Visit of the Gods, ll.7-11)

 

         What follows is a moment of reckoning, proving that Coleridge’s surrender to God was his true salvation, as is the case of Sindbad who ‘at last… resigned [him]self to the will of God’ just as the Mariner was rescued and returned to his land by divine synchronicity. This event, like in The Story of Sindbad the Sailor where Sindbad ‘thought [him]self in a dream, and could scarcely believe [him]self out of danger’ is symbolic of awakening from a dreamworld:

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‘My body lay afloat

But swift as dreams, myself I found

Within the Pilot’s boat’ (Rime of the Ancient Mariner, ll. 564-566)

 

         So, the story of the Mariner and the world he ventures into is, on one hand, a story of spiritual transformation. However, it is also a tale that follows Pitt’s ‘Reign of Terror’ and the conflicts resulting from the French Revolution from the peculiar perspective of both the conscious and unconscious layers of Coleridge’s mind. Arguably, the political nods may not have been intentional, or meant with malice and treasonous intent, but the publication of the poem did provide the means for self-expression that the poets of the Romantic era may not otherwise have had available to them. The Mariner’s world is one of magic and supernatural adventure, but then so was the mind of Coleridge, one of the most remarkable poets and critics of the Romantic era described perfectly by his friend Charles Lamb as ‘an Archangel a little damaged… Never saw I his likeness, nor probably the world can see again”.

 

 

 

 

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References:

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Coleridge, S. T., ‘France: An Ode’ in Selected Poems (London: Orion Publishing Group, 1996) pp.59-70

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