Mariner

Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Malcolm Guite, 430 pages

     It is an ancient Mariner

     And he stoppeth one of three

     'By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,

     Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?'

The initial idea behind The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was a Gothic trifle, a simple spooky ghost story that could be easily sold for quick cash, but Coleridge's genius rapidly shaped it into something more.  Since it first appeared as the opening poem of the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, the Rime, like the Mariner himself, has surprised and captivated readers with its poetic and prophetic power.  As Malcolm Guite explains in his study of the poem and its poet, the themes of sin and death, conversion and rebirth, played out as compellingly in the life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge as they did in his creation.

This is more than coincidence.  Rejecting approaches which separate Coleridge's early poetry from his later philosophical explorations, Guite describes his life's work as a concerted effort "to build a bridge between the dead but objective world of meaningless fact, on the one hand, and the world of rich subjective fancy with no claims to truth, on the other."  Coleridge found this bridge in Imagination, understood as that part of man which is closest to his Creator, and the faculty by which he begins to understand God's symbolic language of nature.  Human creativity is therefore an extension of the Divine, and it follows "that deep Thinking is attainable only by a man of deep Feeling, and that all Truth is a species of Revelation."

     He went like one that hath been stunned,

     And is of sense forlorn:

     A sadder and a wiser man,

     He rose the morrow morn.