“Purgatory Now”

That Wordsworth and Coleridge collaborated—even minimally—on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner serves to explain in part the presence of the theme of transgression and expiation that is recurrent throughout Wordsworth’s work but blatantly apparent in only this one poem of Coleridge’s.  But where Wordsworth’s episodic enlightenment to the glories of nature can be construed as the workings of the guilty conscience of an imaginative teenager, Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is imbued with a sense of the truly fantastical and horrific and, ultimately, edifying.  But this is not to say that the Mariner does not function within a world of his own making.  For, as Coleridge puts it in his Biographia Literaria: “The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am” (Norton Anthology, 477).  In other words, it is the primary imagination that continuously constructs our reality, because, according to Robert Penn Warren, to know something is to create that thing (New and Selected Essays, 342).  In this way, we re-create, in response to our ever-changing environment, ourselves, or our concept of ourselves, every waking moment of our lives.  Coleridge goes on to explain the secondary imagination: “It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it struggles to idealize and to unify” (477).  To reiterate, it is our secondary imagination that allows us to respond poetically (and sympathetically, as the Mariner ultimately does) to our perceived ‘ordinary world.’  The Mariner’s sea journey is, then, the quintessential Romantic Quest, a meeting, according to Anca Vlasopolos, of mind with experience (Wordsworth Circle, No. 10, 365), in which the subconscious desire to understand the natural world supersedes the very conscious desire to get home (my extension of Ms. Vlasopolos’s argument).

         It is not unreasonable to regard the Mariner as a poet-prophet, very much akin, in an evangelistic sense, to Wordsworth of The Prelude.  Wordsworth’s witness to the soothing power of God, for example, comes after an extensive ‘chronodicy’ in which he relates the “spots of time” concept (The Prelude, Book Twelfth, 208-335) and the fearful episodes of boat stealing and bird nest plundering.  What is interesting is that both Wordsworth’s spots of time involve death (as the Mariner’s spiritual awakening involves the death of his shipmates).  It is eerily ironic that first-hand encounters with death or death scenes would evoke creativity and sensation in a mind, instead of deadening the senses and immobilizing the powers of observation. 

         It is line 105 that I believe is critical to understanding the Mariner’s conception of reality: “We were the first that ever burst / Into that silent sea [italics mine]” (105-106).  This can be read two ways: 1) that the sea to the Mariner seems insipidly expansive or 2) that the Mariner wills the ship onto a sea of his own creation (the ship being the first thing to ever sail upon it).  Unless these lines are a figure of speech (which is a matter of opinion), it can be said that the Mariner’s secondary imagination has re-created or modified this reality to be part of a grand self-reprobative process, in which everything from then on has the special task of punishing him.  After hanging the albatross around the head of the Mariner (as punishment), the shipmates drop dead (as punishment for abetment of the murder), but interestingly, by the light of the moon (not the light of the bloody sun).  Robert Penn Warren explains this in the following way: “[I]f we accept the interpretation that the Polar Spirit belongs to the imagination cluster and yet exacts vengeance, then the fact that horror comes in the moonlight is simply an extension of the [following] principle: violated and despised, the imagination yet persists and exacts vengeance” (Warren 373).  It is the shipmates’ act of hanging the albatross around the head of the Mariner that constitutes such a violation: They throw the whole guilt on the Mariner, and he eventually wills them dead.  It is only when he is made to retell his story for the rest of his life (at the injunction of a Polar Spirit, an entity from that same region he once detested), does he, like Wordsworth, become a prophet of the greatness of all things natural.

Secondary Source Works Cited

Vlasopolos, Anca. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as Romantic Quest”. 

            Wordsworth Circle 10 (1979): 365-69.

Warren, Robert Penn. New and Selected Essays. New York: Random House, 1989.