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THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER AND OTHER POEMS
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Copyright
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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London SE1 9GF
This eBook published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016
Life & Times section © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
Silvia Crompton asserts her moral rights as author of the Life & Times section
Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from Collins English Dictionary
Cover by e-Digital Design
Cover illustration: I Shot the Albatross, Gustave Doré, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1876 edition, duncan1890/iStock
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Source ISBN: 9780008167561
Ebook Edition © September 2016 ISBN: 9780008167578
Version: 2016-09-28
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
History of William Collins
Life & Times
Part 1: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel and Kubla Khan
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Christabel
Kubla Khan
Part 2: Conversation Poems
The Eolian Harp
Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement
This Lime-tree Bower My Prison
Frost at Midnight
Fears in Solitude
The Nightingale
Dejection: An Ode
To William Wordsworth
Part 3: Other Poems 1787–1833
Easter Holidays
Sonnet to the Autumnal Moon
To the Muse
To the Evening Star
To Disappointment
The Rose
The Hour When We Shall Meet Again
The Raven
A Christmas Carol
Inscription for a Seat by the Road Side Half-way Up a Steep Hill Facing South
Ode to Tranquillity
An Ode to the Rain
The Pains of Sleep
Farewell to Love
The Visionary Hope
God’s Omnipresence: A Hymn
To Nature
Youth and Age
Work without Hope
Duty Surviving Self-Love
Epitaph
Classic Literature: Words and Phrases
About the Publisher
History of William Collins
In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.
Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner; however, it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.
Aged 30, William’s son, William II, took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly ‘Victorian’ in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and The Pilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopedias and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases, and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.
In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of ‘books for the millions’ was developed. Affordable editions of classical literature were published, and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time, and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.
HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics, and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.
Life & Times
About the Author
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, philosopher and critic. A great friend of William Wordsworth, he was a founder of the Romantic movement in English literature, and is regarded as one of the most important poets of the period. He died at the age of 61, having battled lifelong ill health and an opium addiction.
Early Years
Coleridge was born in 1772 in Devon, the youngest of thirteen children of the Reverend John Coleridge, a vicar and headmaster. The reverend died when Samuel was just eight, and he was dispatched to London to attend Christ’s Hospital. There, under the tutelage of a stern but inspirational schoolmaster, he was introduced to the Greek and Roman poets as well as Shakespeare and Milton.
Musing on his school days in 1817’s Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, Coleridge recalls how the Reverend James Bowyer drilled into him that ‘poetry, even that of the loftiest and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex’. Bowyer’s approach to poetic composition was no-nonsense in the extreme, but it instilled in Coleridge a sensitivity to syntax and imagery, and sent him off to Cambridge University full of ‘good gifts’. He proved a more enthusiastic poet than student, however, accumulating large debts and a collection of juvenile poems but never completing his degree.
Idealists and Romantics
Coleridge’s education did at least serve to throw him into the company of young men who would later form his literary circle. At Christ’s Hospital he befriended Charles Lamb, and as a student he met Robert Southey, a fellow poet and idealist with whom he hatched a plan to found a commune in the wilds of America, where learning and liberty would reign supreme. In 1795 the two young men married sisters Edith and Sarah Fricker – Southey happily, Coleridge very unhappily – and plans for the commune eventually faded.
But these disappointments were soon eclipsed: that same year, Coleridge made the acquaintance of William Wordsworth, and they embarked on a poetic and philosophical collaboration that would define not only both of their careers but also the artistic legacy of their era.
In the late 1790s the two poets lived near each other in Somerset and would meet to discuss the purpose and potential of poetry. ‘Our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry,’ Coleridge wrote, ‘the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination.’ They determined to publish a joint collection of poems in which Coleridge would focus on ‘persons and characters supernatural’ while Wordsworth would celebrate ‘things of every day’. This project materialised in 1798 as Lyrical Ballads, an anthology that included some of the poems for which both men are now best known: Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ and Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’.
Lyrical Ballads is credited with bringing Romanticism to Britain. This movement was already flourishing in Germany, and it would ultimately dominate European artistic output until the mid-nineteenth century. Romanticism favoured emotion and imagination over reason and intellect, and tended to celebrate nature, heroism and spiritual experiences. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey and Lamb were soon joined by a younger generation of Romantics, including Keats, Byron and Shelley.
An Albatross Around His Neck
‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, a ballad in seven parts, is Coleridge’s longest poem. The mariner of the title detains a man who is on his way to a wedding, and insists on recounting an increasingly terrifying tale of disaster upon the high seas. Gradually the wedding guest is drawn into the frenzied narration of this ‘grey-beard loon’, for it transpires that the disaster is entirely self-inflicted. Having been driven south by inclement weather, the mariner’s vessel is caught in Antarctic ice. The sudden appearance of an albatross – a symbol of good fortune – helps them escape, but then the mariner does something inexplicably ungrateful: ‘With my cross-bow / I shot the Albatross.’
Before long this crime is roundly avenged. The ship finds itself trapped once again, this time on calm, windless waters near the equator, and supplies quite literally dry up: ‘Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink.’ The sailors rightly blame the mariner for his inauspicious murder of the albatross, and hang the bird about his neck as a sign of his disgrace. The arrival of another ship only compounds the horror, manned as it is by Death and Life-in-Death. They kill the crew but the mariner is forced to spend seven days and nights in a waking, raving nightmare. He eventually understands that it is his eternal curse and punishment to travel from ‘land to land’ recounting his ‘ghastly tale’.
The poem baffled many contemporary readers, and even Wordsworth later wrote that, for all its ‘delicate touches of passion’ and ‘felicity of language’, it nevertheless had ‘great defects’. For an 1817 reprint, in response to criticism that the poem was hard to follow, Coleridge added dozens of marginal notes explaining the plot: ‘The ancient Mariner inhospitably killeth the pious bird of good omen.’
Waking Dreams
Many of Coleridge’s poems display a visionary quality that borders on the hallucinogenic, and this is no coincidence. He had since his childhood suffered from health troubles whose symptoms were eased by opium, but by adulthood Coleridge had developed a powerful addiction to the drug that would plague the remainder of his life. He famously composed the vividly exotic ‘Kubla Khan’ in a fevered state after waking from an opium dream. This poem, like the supernatural ‘Christabel’, was never completed.
As he fell further into what he called his ‘accursed habit’ and its attendant depression, Coleridge’s life and work suffered considerably. In 1808, he finally separated from his long-suffering wife, leaving her and their three surviving children in the care of Robert Southey. By 1810 Wordsworth had become so frustrated by Coleridge’s addiction that the two poets fell out, remaining estranged for over a decade.
Coleridge spent the last eighteen years of his life at the London home of a physician friend, James Gilman, occasionally lecturing on Shakespeare and other poets and repeatedly attempting to give up his opium habit. He died in 1834.
PART I:
THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER
PART I
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?
An ancient Mariner meeteth three Gallants bidden to a wedding-feast, and detaineth one.
The Bridegroom’s doors are opened wide,
And I am next of kin;
The guests are met, the feast is set:
May’st hear the merry din.’
He holds him with his skinny hand,
‘There was a ship,’ quoth he.
‘Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!’
Eftsoons his hand dropt he.
The Wedding-Guest is spell-bound by the eye of the old seafaring man, and constrained to hear his tale.
He holds him with his glittering eye—
The Wedding-Guest stood still,
And listens like a three years’ child:
The Mariner hath his will.
The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:
He cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.
‘The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared,
Merrily did we drop
Below the kirk, below the hill,
Below the lighthouse top.
The Sun came up upon the left,
Out of the sea came he!
And he shone bright, and on the right
Went down into the sea.
The Mariner tells how the ship sailed southward with a good wind and fair weather, till it reached the line.
Higher and higher every day,
Till over the mast at noon—’
The Wedding-Guest here beat his breast,
For he heard the loud bassoon.
The bride hath paced into the hall,
Red as a rose is she;
Nodding their heads before her goes
The merry minstrelsy.
The Wedding-Guest heareth the bridal music; but the Mariner continueth his tale.
The Wedding-Guest he beat his breast,
Yet he cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.
‘And now the Storm-blast came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong:
He struck with his o’ertaking wings,
And chased us south along.
The ship driven by a storm toward the south pole.
With sloping masts and dipping prow,
As who pursued with yell and blow
Still treads the shadow of his foe,
And forward bends his head,
The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,
And southward aye we fled.
And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As green as emerald.
And through the drifts the snowy clifts
Did send a dismal sheen:
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken—
The ice was all between.
The land of ice, and of fearful sounds where no living thing was to be seen.
The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and
howled,
Like noises in a swound!
At length did cross an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God’s name.
Till a great sea-bird, called the Albatross, came through the snow-fog, and was received with great joy and hospitality.
It ate the food it ne’er had eat,
And round and round it flew.
The ice did split with a thunder-fit;
The helmsman steered us through!
And a good south wind sprung up behind;
The Albatross did follow,
And every day, for food or play,
Came to the mariner’s hollo!
And lo! the Albatross proveth a bird of good omen, and followeth the ship as it returned northward through fog and floating ice.
In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,
It perched for vespers nine;
Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,
Glimmered the white Moon-shine.’
‘God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus!—
Why look’st thou so?’— With my cross-bow
I shot the Albatross.
The ancient Mariner inhospitably killeth the pious bird of good omen.
PART II
‘The Sun now rose upon the right:
Out of the sea came he,
Still hid in mist, and on the left
Went down into the sea.
And the good south wind still blew behind,
But no sweet bird did follow,
Nor any day for food or play
Came to the mariners’ hollo!
And I had done a hellish thing,
And it would work ‘em woe:
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay,
That made the breeze to blow!
His shipmates cry out against the ancient Mariner, for killing the bird of good luck.
Nor dim nor red, like God’s own head,
The glorious Sun uprist:
Then all averred, I had killed the bird
That brought the fog and mist.
’Twas right, said they, such birds to slay,
That bring the fog and mist.
But when the fog cleared off, they justify the same, and thus make themselves accomplices in the crime.
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.
The fair breeze continues; the ship enters the Pacific Ocean, and sails northward, even till it reaches the Line. The ship hath been suddenly becalmed.
Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down,
’Twas sad as sad could be;
And we did speak only to break
The silence of the sea!
All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
And the Albatross begins to be avenged.
The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.
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.
And some in dreams assuréd were
Of the Spirit that plagued us so;
Nine fathom deep he had followed us
From the land of mist and snow.
A Spirit had followed them; one of the invisible inhabitants of this planet, neither departed souls nor angels; concerning whom the learned Jew, Josephus, and the Platonic Constantinopolitan, Michael Psellus, may be consulted. They are very numerous, and there is no climate or element without one or more.
And every tongue, through utter drought,
Was withered at the root;
We could not speak, no more than if
We had been choked with soot.
Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.
The shipmates, in their sore distress, would fain throw the whole guilt on the ancient Mariner: in sign whereof they hang the dead sea-bird round his neck.
PART III
‘There passed a weary time. Each throat
Was parched, and glazed each eye.
A weary time! a weary time!
How glazed each weary eye,
When looking westward, I beheld
A something in the sky.
The ancient Mariner beholdeth a sign in the element afar off.
At first it seemed a little speck,
And then it seemed a mist;
It moved and moved, and took at last
A certain shape, I wist.
A speck, a mist, a shape, I wist!
And still it neared and neared:
As if it dodged a water-sprite,
It plunged and tacked and veered.
With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
We could nor laugh nor wail;
Through utter drought all dumb we stood!
I bit my arm, I sucked the blood,
And cried, A sail! a sail!
At its nearer approach, it seemeth him to be a ship; and at a dear ransom he freeth his speech from the bonds of thirst.
With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
Agape they heard me call:
Gramercy! they for joy did grin,
And all at once their breath drew in,
As they were drinking all.
A flash of joy;
See! see! (I cried) she tacks no more!
Hither to work us weal;
Without a breeze, without a tide,
She steadies with upright keel!
And horror follows. For can it be a ship that comes onward without wind or tide?
The western wave was all a-flame.
The day was well nigh done!
Almost upon the western wave
Bested the broad bright Sun;
When that strange shape drove suddenly
Betwixt us and the Sun.
And straight the Sun was flecked with bars,
(Heaven’s Mother send us grace!)
As if through a dungeon-grate he peered
With broad and burning face.
It seemeth him but the skeleton of a ship.
Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud)
How fast she nears and nears!
Are those her sails that glance in the Sun,
Like restless gossameres?
Are those her ribs through which the Sun
Did peer, as through a grate?
And is that Woman all her crew?
Is that a Death? and are there two?
Is Death that woman’s mate?
And its ribs are seen as bars on the face of the setting Sun. The Spectre-Woman and her Death-mate, and no other on board the skeleton ship. Like vessel, like crew!
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.
The naked hulk alongside came,
And the twain were casting dice;
‘The game is done! I’ve won! I’ve won!’
Quoth she, and whistles thrice.
Death and Life-in-Death have diced for the ship’s crew, and she (the latter) winneth the ancient Mariner. No twilight within the courts of the Sun.
The Sun’s rim dips: the stars rush out:
At one stride comes the dark;
With far-heard whisper, o’er the sea,
Off shot the spectre-bark.
We listened and looked sideways up!
Fear at my heart, as at a cup,
My life-blood seemed to sip!
The stars were dim, and thick the night,
The steersman’s face by his lamp gleamed white;
From the sails the dew did drip—
Till clomb above the eastern bar
The hornéd Moon, with one bright star
Within the nether tip.
At the rising of the Moon.
One after one, by the star-dogged Moon,
Too quick for groan or sigh,
Each turned his face with a ghastly pang,
And cursed me with his eye.
One after another,
Four times fifty living men,
(And I heard nor sigh nor groan)
With heavy thump, a lifeless lump,
They dropped down one by one.
His shipmates drop down dead.
The souls did from their bodies fly,—
They fled to bliss or woe!
And every soul, it passed me by,
Like the whizz of my cross-bow!
But Life-in-Death begins her work on the ancient Mariner.
PART IV
‘I fear thee, ancient Mariner!
I fear thy skinny hand!
And thou art long, and lank, and brown,
As is the ribbed sea-sand.
The Wedding-Guest feareth that a Spirit is talking to him;
I fear thee and thy glittering eye,
And thy skinny hand, so brown.’—
‘Fear not, fear not, thou Wedding-Guest!
This body dropt not down.
But the ancient Mariner assureth him of his bodily life, and proceedeth to relate his horrible penance.
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.
He despiseth the creatures of the calm,
I looked upon the rotting sea,
And drew my eyes away;
I looked upon the rotting deck,
And there the dead men lay.
And envieth that they should live, and so many lie dead.
I looked to heaven, and tried to pray;
But or ever a prayer had gusht,
A wicked whisper came, and made
My heart as dry as dust.
I closed my lids, and kept them close,
And the balls like pulses beat;
For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky
Lay like a load on my weary eye,
And the dead were at my feet.
The cold sweat melted from their limbs,
Nor rot nor reek did they:
The look with which they looked on me
Had never passed away.
But the curse liveth for him in the eye of the dead men.
An orphan’s curse would drag to hell
A spirit from on high;
But oh! more horrible than that
Is the curse in a dead man’s eye!
Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse,
And yet I could not die.
The moving Moon went up the sky,
And no where did abide:
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside—
In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and every where the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.
Her beams bemocked the sultry main,
Like April hoar-frost spread;
But where the ship’s huge shadow lay,
The charméd water burnt alway
A still and awful red.
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.
By the light of the Moon he beholdeth God’s creatures of the great calm.
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:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware.
Their beauty and their happiness.
He blesseth them in his heart.
The self-same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.
The spell begins to break.
PART V
‘Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing,
Beloved from pole to pole!
To Mary Queen the praise be given!
She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven,
That slid into my soul.
The silly buckets on the deck,
That had so long remained,
I dreamt that they were filled with dew;
And when I awoke, it rained.
By grace of the holy Mother, the ancient Mariner is refreshed with rain.
My lips were wet, my throat was cold,
My garments all were dank;
Sure I had drunken in my dreams,
And still my body drank.
I moved, and could not feel my limbs:
I was so light—almost
I thought that I had died in sleep,
And was a blesséd ghost.
And soon I heard a roaring wind:
It did not come anear;
But with its sound it shook the sails,
That were so thin and sere.
He heareth sounds and seeth strange sights and commotions in the sky and the element.
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.
And the coming wind did roar more loud,
And the sails did sigh like sedge;
And the rain poured down from one black
cloud;
The Moon was at its edge.
The thick black cloud was cleft, and still
The Moon was at its side:
Like waters shot from some high crag,
The lightning fell with never a jag,
A river steep and wide.
The loud wind never reached the ship,
Yet now the ship moved on!
Beneath the lightning and the Moon
The dead men gave a groan.
The bodies of the ship’s crew are inspired and the ship moves on;
They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose,
Nor spake, nor moved their eyes;
It had been strange, even in a dream,
To have seen those dead men rise.
The helmsman steered, the ship moved on;
Yet never a breeze up-blew;
The mariners all ’gan work the ropes,
Where they were wont to do;
They raised their limbs like lifeless tools—
We were a ghastly crew.
The body of my brother’s son
Stood by me, knee to knee:
The body and I pulled at one rope,
But he said nought to me.
‘I fear thee, ancient Mariner!’
Be calm, thou Wedding-Guest!
’Twas not those souls that fled in pain,
Which to their corses came again,
But a troop of spirits blest:
But not by the souls of the men, nor by dæmons of earth or middle air, but by a blessed troop of angelic spirits, sent down by the invocation of the guardian saint.
For when it dawned—they dropped their arms,
And clustered round the mast;
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