“Purgatory Now: The Motif of Transgression and Expiation in the Poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge”

ALFRED C. VALRIE JR.

Thursday, 13 June 2013

Frances Ferguson, in her essay entitled “Bathos of Experience,” argues that we should consider the Romantics in terms of a “redeemed phenomenology” (39) which strikes a balance between human interactions with the world being cast as solipsistic, or quintessentially singular, and the world imposing its own preternatural, nonhuman being, or essence, on the subject.  Because, in recent Romantic criticism, each, the world and the subject, runs the risk of, in Ferguson’s words, “doing one another in” (39), we must reinterpret the Romantics as, first, beholden not to the mind or the world, but to the discovery of truth, and secondly, that once this truth—this transcendence—is reached, becoming cognizant of the poem and poet himself as message and evangelist, respectively.  In ancient and Medieval epics, the discovery of truth dealt more with righting an Everyman’s relationship with an angry pagan god or reckoning the full measure of salvation with the aloof Christian God.  When Ferguson calls the sublime a concern with power greater than our own, we can draw a line from Homer and Dante directly to Wordsworth and Coleridge by reason of the latter two’s fascination with the death of innocence and a ‘waking up,’ as it were, to the power of truth immanent in nature, whether that be human or environmental.  In Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth encounters his former, idealistic self in Dorothy and in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the main character arrives at newfound innocence through a process of exploration.  In the case of each poem, whether the exploration is internal, external, or both is a matter of profound interpretation.  What we must realize is that only by examining each poem can we begin to know, first, the totality of the word ‘nature,’ and secondly, the importance of sublime notions in commonplace discourses.

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).  Ferguson strikes a similar tone:

Thus, while for modern criticsm, the sublime is the arena in which an isolated self can achieve a heroism of subjectivity, the sublime was important then [the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries] less for rampant individualism and self-scrutiny than for the possibility of one’s becoming representative [as metonym of culture].  …  And while the truth functions or correctness of a particular representation [i.e. a poem’s message or messages] were not seen as immutable, the sublime hero of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was strikingly different from our modern versions [poetry or criticism] not only in that he quoted almost obsessively from epics but also in that he aspired to the condition of an epic hero, so that he, like Aeneas, might be taken as a metonymy of his culture.  (38)

To wit, Ferguson cites a Coleridge anecdote where a member of a group of people out on a walking tour exclaims, in response to Coleridge’s remarking that an overhead precipice blended with the sky and trees was truly ‘sublime,’ that not only was the sight sublime but also a thing of beauty.  Ferguson goes on to explain that for Coleridge, referentiality and definitiveness were far more important in forming ideas of the sublime than for modern critics of today because the Romantics—particularly Wordsworth and Coleridge—sought to portray a tremendous degree of universality and commonality in their poetry and written works such that any ambiguity of the motif of the sublime was at all times eschewed.  Where and what, then, are the notions of the sublime in Wordsworth and in Coleridge?  And in what ways do poetry—a term Wordsworth considered ‘disputed’—, the sublime, and the outside world operate in concert to effect, first, a sense of transcendence, and secondly, a righting and reckoning of man’s natural guilt in the order of creation?  Coleridge is key to the sublime because he attempted to define it.  By examining Wordsworth and Coleridge in reverse order—with Wordsworth first and then Coleridge—we can draw a line from the commonplace to the epic, from the everyday to the sublime, and from the singular to the universal.

In Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth explores life in relation to nature.  What is fascinating about the poem as a whole is that from the banks of the Wye, and in as short a space as 159 lines, Wordsworth recounts his adolescent days of pure emotional communion with nature (along with the requisite teenage angst and uncertainty and passion) and his adult days of sublimity, and a basic knowledge of a “presence” (94) that is interfused in sunsets, in the ocean, in the sky, in the air, and most importantly, in the mind of man.  But a consequence of this sublime vitality is the weakening of his emotional powers that allowed him to explore nature each day with a fresh sense of awe and discovery in concurrence with “aching joys” (84) and “dizzy raptures” (85).  A useful question is: Does Wordsworth utilize the newly realized, mysterious, permeative presence as a vehicle to see in Dorothy what he once was?  The obvious answer is yes.  His adolescence, which engendered “an appetite; a feeling and a love” (80) within him, certainly must be cherished and missed for its vibrancy and immediacy and novelty and, even, charity.  Yes, charity, for Wordsworth was an orphan and nature became his parent.  Wordsworth, then, carries two kinds of memories: in an acute sense, those memories of nature that made an indelible imprint on his mind (“the steep and lofty cliffs” [5] and “[t]he [h]ermit” [22]), and in a larger sense, the aggregate of all his adolescent pleasures that lie “unremembered” (31), deep in the fugal recesses of his mind.

            But does it not seem selfish that Wordsworth beckons Dorothy every time he wants to see what he once was?  Or is her company necessary to sustain him against the onslaughts and the “dreary intercourse” (131) of daily life?  One of the first things we learn of Dorothy is her inherent quality to remind Wordsworth of what he once was:

                         …and in thy voice I catch

                         The language of my former heart, and read

                         My former pleasures in the shooting lights

                         Of thy wild eyes.  (116-119)

Wordsworth, in short, is able to see into the life of her; the intimate relationship he shared with nature in his adolescence continually governs his perceptions and actions, even in adulthood.  It is through memories of his feelings at being one with nature that Wordsworth is able to recognize a similar vitality in Dorothy.  Such a recognition immediately reminds Wordsworth of what nature has done for him in the intervening five years (during which period his enthusiasm in the French Revolution and mechanisms or effectuation of liberty for all people waned greatly).  Dorothy, in a real way, represents that part of Wordsworth unchanged by the sights and sounds of the Revolution.  She is vibrant, mentally and physically.  Daily communion with nature has afforded her the opportunity for perpetual renewal, both in body and spirit.  Wordsworth, on the other hand, has witnessed firsthand scenes of senseless carnage and violent scuffles for power, along the way having an illegitimate child in an apparently loveless relationship (he later marries someone else).

            The uncommon combination of Dorothy and the cherished scenes of his youth triggers in Wordsworth a fructification of sublime proportions.  He realizes what has sustained him throughout his boredom at University and his tribulations abroad; he credits the indelible impressions made on his mind by the awe-inspiring scenes of his youth with saving him from many a sensual inundation in the city:

                         These beauteous forms,

                         Through a long absence, have not been to me

                         As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:

                         But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din

                         Of towns and cities, I have owed to them

                         In hours of weariness, sensations sweet

                         Felt in the blood and felt along the heart…  (22-28)

So we begin to see that the emotionality of his adolescence reverberates, “unremembered” (31), deep in his soul and subconsciously affects every action he undertakes.  Wordsworth was, then, in his espousal of the early causes for the Revolution and his unabashed admiration for nature, the original hippie.  For him, only through nature can we “see into the life of things [not necessarily people but later on true of all things in Wordsworth’s case]” (49).  Only by growing up in the country can each person arrive at a sense of place and a sense of purpose.

            It seems as if Wordsworth nearly lost his sense of purpose in his Continental experience.  When he makes his prayer to Nature—which can be likened to Eve’s fetishistic regard of the Tree in Paradise Lost—he comprises most of it with a scathing condemnation of what we would call normal life (Wall Street life or business life or even academia).  In Wordsworth’s view, the world outside his native countryside (especially the city) is composed of selfish, leering men, not unlike Cibber of Pope’s The Dunciad, who, operating within the “dreary intercourse of daily life” (131), seek to eliminate all traces of nature and life in the people they meet.  Sadly, these men have never experienced the side of nature savored by Wordsworth (or if they have, they have obviously forgotten it).  These men operate within a framework of their own creation, and consequently, are unable to relate to other men on the preternatural, empathetic level discovered by Wordsworth upon his return to the Wye.  They are unable to see the naturalness inherent in all things, and, like the young Wordsworth of The Prelude, are continuously consumed by a blinding impatience that renders null their “kindness” (130) and their “cheerful faith” (133) and makes them ignorant of the “quietness and beauty” (127) of the world around them.  In book seven, the “anarchy and din” (686) of the city fair nearly overwhelm and immobilize the creative powers of Wordsworth in a passage written both to evoke the cosmopolitan character of London and to reveal the city’s inherent (but dormant) naturalness.  It is interesting that Wordsworth uses for his subject a subverted festival that no longer serves its original purpose, to honor Protestant martyrs.  Now the fair is more like a circus of the secular than a celebration of the faith:

                      …the midway region, and above,

                      Is thronged with staring pictures and huge scrolls,

       Dumb proclamations of the Prodigies;

       With chattering monkeys dangling from their poles,

       And children whirling in their roundabouts.  (691-695)

Indeed, the chaotic mood of the fair is in many ways the antithesis of the tranquility of the country.  This tranquility, so far, has allowed Wordsworth to ‘get in touch,’ as it were, with his inner self, by realizing that he is a product of nature.  It would be understandably difficult to find oneself amongst “the moving pageant” (637) if one has been used to solitary, perpetual communion in an atmosphere of ubiquitous serenity.  Throughout Wordsworth’s poetry, there is a theme of personal discovery through the sights and sounds of nature (this nature being the countryside or mountains).  Wordsworth makes the case that it is more difficult to find one’s true identity in the multifarious hubbub that is city life.  This evocation of the activities at the fair reveals how truly far removed from Wordsworth’s idea of normalcy the spectacle must be.  With its “hurdy-gurdy” player and “fiddle weave[r]” (700), its “silver collared Negro with his timbrel” (703), and “Albinos, painted Indians, Dwarfs, / The Horse of knowledge, and the learned Pig,” (707-708), the discordant, forced variety of everything can be overpowering visually and, ultimately, mentally:   

                         Oh, blank confusion! true epitome

                         Of what the mighty City is herself

                         To thousands and thousands of her sons,

                         Living amid the same perpetual whirl

                         Of trivial objects, … (722-726)

Wordsworth goes on to describe the whole thing as a kind of oppression of the mind in that city life does not allow one to pick apart nature and see and understand it (her) in terms of the orderly systems that comprise it.  But Wordsworth then redeems the naturalness of the city for those who “hath among least things / An under-sense of greatest…” (734-735).  For these, the whole can be seen as another expression of the works of God.  A cursory recall of past experiences in “everlasting streams and woods” (745) allows one to cope with or come to a greater understanding of the complex, multi-layered milieu of the city.  But what about those who have never been out of the city?  Can they not initiate a personal communion with nature without having ever been in the country?  Wordsworth seems to leave these people out in his treatise on the powers of nature.  He seems to believe that they truly never know themselves.

It is not unreasonable to regard the Mariner as a poet-prophet, very much akin, in an evangelistic sense, to Wordsworth of The Prelude.  The Mariner’s mysterious parable, whose culminating ideal (which reads like a hackneyed proverb), “He prayeth best, who loveth best / All things both great and small; / For the dear God who loveth us, / He made and loveth all” (614-617), can be likened to Wordsworth’s proselytizing in The Prelude, “…this I speak / In gratitude to God, who feeds our hearts / For his own service; knoweth, loveth us / When we are unregarded by the world” (Book Thirteenth, 274-277), or Wordsworth’s testament to the educative power of nature in Tintern Abbey, “…’tis her privilege, / Through all the years of this our life, to lead / From joy to joy: for she can so inform / The mind that is within us, so impress / With quietness and beauty…” (123-127).  All three quotations are taken from passages near the end of their respective sources and leave the reader with an unquestionable satisfaction of the heart, soul and mind.  But it is important to exam how and why the poets arrive at such conclusions.  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 these “spots of time” (Book Twelfth, 208) that have made indelible impressions on Wordsworth’s mind, a motif (of reliance on the sensory experiences of youth in the “ordinary intercourse” [214] of life) recurrent throughout his poetry.  Wordsworth apparently has spent his first years principally concerned only with himself and unaware of the “fructifying” (1799 Prelude [First Part], 290) aspects of nature, those experiences that teach one how to think and feel.  But it is when he views a lowly pool and a heightened beacon providing a background for a lone woman fighting the elements that the reader becomes cognizant of the simplistic grandeur of nature, and hence, existence.  But why does a scene of death (the beacon was an execution site) initiate such an epiphany in Wordsworth?  Is it that he wants to know why the executed man murdered his wife?  A violent end to a domestic relationship is an undesirable occurrence indeed.  But where did the relationship go wrong?  Impatience (as Wordsworth experiences himself later on)?  A lack of understanding or empathy between the two, perhaps?  It is, certainly, Wordsworth’s primary imagination that perceives and records mentally the existence of the young woman, but, more importantly, it is his secondary imagination that struggles to give the whole scene, and thusly, the world, a unifying, coherent meaning.  Here, he is—among other things—attempting to make sense of the wife’s senseless death.  The reader is made to understand that only through empathy—Wordsworth’s idea of “behold[ing] in thee [Dorothy] what I once was” (Tintern Abbey, 120) and of being spiritually renovated when looking into the eyes of a loved one—can we truly see the humanity in one another.  In other words, we are all products (man and beast, all things great and small) of nature.  Only by understanding that fact, can we come to understand ourselves.  Only by viewing the woman backgrounded by the low pool and the high summit, can Wordsworth truly know her plight and, even, his own.  For, having lost his guide, he is as alone as the “Girl” (251) appears to be.  He is as lost and alone as the Mariner and his shipmates are when they drift aimlessly near the South Pole, a wasteland, much like, given the purgatorial significance of The Ancient Mariner, the dismal wood in which Dante finds himself at the beginning of The Divine Comedy:

                         When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,

                         I found myself within a shadowed forest,

                         for I had lost the path that does not stray.

                         Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was,

                         that savage forest, dense and difficult,

                         which even in recall renews my fear:

                         so bitter—death is hardly more severe!  (Mandelbaum trans., 1-7)

It is only when Wordsworth finds “the loved One at [his] side” (Book Twelfth, 262), that he can roam in confidence.  Analogously, only when the albatross, a figure, according to G. W. Knight, of “Christ-like force” (English Romantic Poets, 203), appears, does the crew find their way from the “wondrous cold” (52) to a more hospitable clime.  Virgil has a similar significance for Dante, leading him out of the gloomy wood, through the miserable depths of Hell and up to the glorious gates of Heaven.  My idea of the purgatorial significance of The Ancient Mariner comes from Knight’s essay, “Coleridge’s Divine Comedy,” in which he asserts that the Mariner’s story is one of “sin, loneliness, and purgatorial redemption” (203).  For this reason, it is useful to compare passages of Dante’s Purgatorio with lines from The Ancient Mariner.  The first, and most interesting of these comparisons lies in the description of the South Pole:

                         ‘And now the storm-blast came, and he

                         Was tyrannous and strong:

                         He struck with his o’ertaking wings,

                         And chased us south along.

                         ..…

                         ‘As who pursued with yell and blow

                         Still treads the shadow of his foe…

                         ..…

                         And it grew wondrous cold:

                         And ice, mast-high, came floating by,

                         The ice was all around:

                         It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,

                         Like noises in a swound!’  (41-44, 46-47, 52-53, 60-62)

And Dante’s account of the core of Hell:

                         …do not ask of me how I

                         grew faint and frozen then…

                         ..…

                         The emperor of the despondent kingdom

                         so towered—from midchest—above the ice,

                         ..…

                         …and he [Lucifer] was agitating them [his wings],

                         so that three winds made their way out from him—

                         and all Cocytus froze before those winds.  (22-23, 28-29, 50-52)

In the Mariner’s story of the South Pole, who is “he”?  We can safely say that “he” is a male anthropomorphism of the harsh, merciless and relentless snowstorm, but the portrayal of his “o’ertaking wings” certainly recalls Dante’s rendering of Satan.  In addition, the depiction of the wind as “yell[ing] and blow[ing]” uncannily parallels the fanning of the ice cold region by Satan’s wings (the height of the ice, “mast-high” in The Ancient Mariner and “midchest” in The Divine Comedy cannot be dismissed either).  The swooning noises, furthermore, of line 62 in the poem are not unlike the unheeded cries of sinners in Hell.  The albatross, moreover, is an excellent juxtaposition to the Lucifer of Dante’s Inferno, who is bird-like yet forever stationary, and who is forever subjugated to one temperature type, unlike the bird of Coleridge’s poem who can easily endure the change from an arctic climate to a tropical one.  In a metaphorical sense, the South Pole of the poem can be said to represent an immoral, or at least amoral, fate from which the Mariner has been saved by Christ.  Knight calls it, “the guid[ing] of humanity from primitive and fearful origins” (ERP, 203).  The fact that the Mariner is on a ship symbolizes the idea that, like Dante, he ‘lost his way,’ and drifted, as it were, away from God and away from righteousness.  The albatross and Lucifer can further be contrasted in that one eats the food of the men while the other eats men.  The difference here is that the albatross displays a willingness to befriend the men and “help (sic) man [humanity] beyond nature” (ERP, 204), while Lucifer simply wishes to satiate himself at humanity’s expense.

            Until now, the Mariner has not acted; he has been acted upon.  The killing of the albatross, the Mariner’s first identifiable action of the narrative and an apparent act of fancy that was, parenthetically, suggested by Wordsworth during composition of the poem, is not unlike the senseless murder that the young Wordsworth tries to reconcile with his burgeoning worldview.  It is, in colloquial terms, a foolish thing whose folly you recognize even before you do it.  The first immediate effect of the albatross’s death is a general lack of merriment on board the ship: “…But no sweet bird did follow, / Nor to any day for food or play / Came to the mariners’ hallo!” (88-90).  What is important to recognize here is that the Mariner is feeling the first phase of guilt: self-delusion in that he does not realize the cause of the bird’s absence.  When his shipmates vociferously object to his whimsical act of murder, they immediately relent and in so doing, become accomplices themselves (Knight 203).  It is at this point that the Mariner becomes conscious of his purposeless act and begins to feel real guilt that manifests itself in his imagination (which for Coleridge is inextricably linked to one’s perception).  The environment for him changes, forthwith, from a paradisiacal tropic to a fiery agony:

                         All in a hot and copper sky,

                         The bloody Sun, at noon, …

                         ..…

                         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;

                         ..…

                         Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs

                         Upon the slimy sea.  (111-112, 115-118, 119-120, 125-126)

I read this scene as entirely one of the Mariner’s imagination.  The blood of the sun is obviously a manifestation of the spilled blood of the albatross.  The hot and copper sky immediately conjure images of hellish proportions.  And the representation of time as endless brings a purgatorial import to the story.  The unfavorable regard of the sea creatures shows the Mariner to be devoid of all sympathy and understanding; his fear and disdain of the sea snakes is similar to that displayed by Dante toward a serpent in canto three of the Purgatorio:

                         At the unguarded egde of that small valley,

                         there was a serpent—similar, perhaps,

                         to that which offered Eve the bitter food.

                         Through grass and flowers the evil streak advanced;

                         from time to time it turned its head and licked

                         its back, like any beast that preens and sleeks.  (97-102)

The water creatures, the “slimy things,” in their aberrant, non-human villainy, have attained in the Mariner’s eyes a serpentine aspect.  He is trapped, or imprisoned, on his ship, much like the dead European rulers in Purgatorio, who must watch helplessly every night while the serpent comes in an attempt to harm them.

            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.  A comparable situation happens with the impatient young Wordsworth of book twelve of The Prelude who, while standing on the formidable “Crag” (292), looks past the “single sheep” (300) and the “blasted hawthorn” (301), both impressive phenomenons of nature in themselves, to descry the horses that will bring him home from school.  Wordsworth relates his reaction to his father’s death ten days later as a “chastisement” (311), a punishment for not harnessing the latent, unique (and rare) talents of pure spiritual communion with nature about which he is expected to prophesy to the unseeing masses.  Also, the great Crag, which looms, “far stretched” (294), like the mast-high ice of The Ancient Mariner and the midchest ice of the Inferno, is regarded as something that must be “gained” (297) and not admired.  Similarly, the Mariner paints a menacing picture of the ice, and refuses to acknowledge the Arctic’s scenic brilliance (and demonizes it, as I’ve shown above).

            “The Night-mare Life-in-Death” (193) seems like a horrifically beautiful antithesis to Dante’s Beatrice, who is also represented as a beautiful woman, and who assists Dante in his divine journey.  Here, Life-in-Death wins the Mariner’s life, and he remains alive, ostensibly, to complete his penance and expiate the curse.  The fear she instills in him parallels the death-like fear that the young Wordsworth feels when he views from a stolen boat a peak endlessly rising above him and when in “Nutting” he feels pain after robbing a virginal (and vaginal) nook of its fruit.  The Mariner views the wide-eyed dead men for seven days, a period of time that recalls the creation of the world, but in this instance, the Mariner re-creates himself.  Additionally, it is interesting that in a previous moonlight setting the Mariner willed the deaths of his shipmates, but it is in the moonlight at the end of the seven days that the Mariner realizes the magnificence of the sea creatures:

                         The moving Moon went up the sky,

                         ..…

                         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!  (263, 277-281)

The Mariner now sees the water animals for what they are: creatures of God.  But his penance does not end here.  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.

Works Cited

Alighieri, Dante.  The Divine Comedy.  Trans. Allen Mandelbaum.  

           New York: Alfred A. Knoph, 1995.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor.  The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.  pp. 422-438.  

            The Norton Anthology of English Literature.  Volume Two.  Ed. M. H. 

            Abrams.  New York: W. W. Norton Company, 2000.

Ferguson, Frances.  “Bathos of Experience.”  pp. 37-54.  Solitude and the Sublime:

Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation.  New York: Routledge, 

Chapman and Hall, Inc., 1992.

Knight, G. W.  “Coleridge’s Divine Comedy.”  pp. 202-213.  English Romantic 

             Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism.  Ed. M. H. Abrams.  New York: 

             Oxford University Press, 1975.

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.

Wordsworth, William.  Tintern Abbey and The Prelude.  pp. 235-238 and 

             303-383.  The Norton Anthology of English Literature.  Volume Two.  

             Ed. M. H. Abrams.  New York: W. W. Norton Company, 2000.

Wordsworth, William.  The Prelude (1850).  Ed. Jonathan Wordsworth.  New 

             York: W. W. Norton Company, 1979.