Thoughts on Coleridge

     All throughout my undergrad career as an English major I had constantly heard bout The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; that specific title--and to me it was only a title of some literary work, verse or prose I knew not which--had been thrown around it seemed more than any other. (Or maybe the title just stuck in my head because it was so unique; either way I found [and still do find] that the poem is referenced quite frequently.) Therefore it was with great anticipation that I finally cracked open my anthology and began reading. Now, it must be said that I had no prior encounters with Coleridge and was not sure what to expect. (I was somewhat under the impression that his work would be more or less the same as Wordsworth's.) And, not wanting to corrupt my literary palette with the lesser works, I made the decision to look first at Rime of the Ancient Mariner (before reading the other assigned poems). After reading it in its entirety twice, with the glosses and all, and after looking at the rest of the pieces, I began to notice a number of things.
     I was first struck by the contrasts between the work of Coleridge and that of Wordsworth. In my opinion Wordsworth is much darker than Coleridge, more death-oriented and doom-worshipping. Maybe Wordsworth just posesses a Buddhist-like way of viewing death with detachment, but the fact remains that death and decline are typical Wordsworthian themes. Now, Coleridge meditates on death as well, but in a way that at some point offers redemption. (For example the Ancient Mariner is blessed by the hermit; in another instance the narrator confined to the lime tree bower comes to see beauty in his arboreal "prison.") I find Coleridge to be more of a poet of (grim) positivity, and Wordsworth a poet of despair, in a sense. In wondering why Coleridge leans more towards the "light," so to speak, I came to formulate another opinion of the poet and his works.
     Coleridge seems to be much more in tune with (judeo-christian) religion than is Wordsworth, who could be described as almost pagan in his "green" spirituality, if you will. The over-all themes of redemption that kept appearing in Colderidge's work, along with some very thinly-veiled allusions to the death and resurection of Christ, gave me pause at times, and had me checking his biographical stats online to see if he was educated to be some sort of clergyman prior to his career as poet. The most obvious instance of this is the symbol of the albatross, who selflessly assists the sailors out of their arctic death-trap and into calmer waters. The ancient Mariner kills said albatross out of nothing but human perversity, much like man killed Christ who loved him. I found no paralell to this in the assigned Wordsworth poems.    
    

McLuhan, McKusick, and McGann

In 1964 The Medium is the Massage burst onto the literary scene, catapulting its primary author, Marshall McLuhan, to rock star status (along with a $100,000 per year professorship at Fordham University and a cameo role in Woody A). The last word in the title was supposed to be  m-e-s-s-a-g-e, but the printer mistakenly inserted an a for an e. The error turned out to be a blessing because, among other things, the misspelled word punned mass and age. McLuhan rejoiced in being able to claim that his picture book was intended for the masses through the ages. (His publisher must have thought so too, because they omitted the year of publication.) The theme of the book is that the medium is the m-e-s-s-a-g-e. In other words, over time form is more transformative than content. Thus the invention of the Western phonetic alphabet privileged the linear continuum as the organizing principle of our perceptions, which had a greater long term impact than the content that it communicated. Although this idea is old hat to those of you who were reared on post-structuralism (not me), it was novel (and confusing) to us children of the Age of Aquarius. Today many of the literati trace the antecedent of post-structuralism to McLuhan’s book. But, as I learned this week, there are some who trace its roots 150 years further back, to Coleridge. In the James McKusick (assigned) article, he shows—or tries to show—how the “The Ancient Mariner’s” linguistic form enhances its content. The Jerome McGann (unassigned) article follows the McLuhan paradigm precisely in that he shows how the poem’s structure delivers a radically different message from its ecological theme.

McKusick, who prefers the 1798 version of the poem over its successors, believes that the original “enhances the poem’s ecological themes through its conservation of lexical diversity” ((7). The diversity is represented  by its melding of three linguistic forms: lexicon of traditional ballads, diction of Chaucer and Spenser, and seafaring terminology. Aside from the expressive poetic effects of this archaic language, McKusick sees value in the “discrete historical periods and social strata” (emphasis mine) from which this language is drawn. Supposedly these “polyglossic and diachronic features” give the Mariner an aura of geographic and historical transcendence. But I do not see how this quality “enhances” the poem’s ecological themes. Perhaps if McKusick had provided an example or two of which language belongs to which age, I would have had a clearer idea, but he does not do this. That’s the difficulty of dealing with discrete historical periods; they are hard to locate.

Professor Garrett suggested that I read  the McGann article, “The Meaning of the Ancient Mariner,” in conjunction with my class presentation on the poem. At first I was taken aback by its 37-page length; then, on reading in the first paragraph that McGann intends to explains the “meaning behind the meanings of the “Rime,” I hit the floor. But as it turned out McGann eases the reader into his argument, beginning with an informative critical history of the poem’s text. One of the things he shows is how the successive changes Coleridge made to the poem coincided with the evolvement of religious and philosophical thinking. By 1817, when he added the gloss, Coleridge was committed to a historical view of the Scriptures known as the Higher Critical approach, which viewed these ancient writings as a “living and processive” organism. So determining biblical truth meant not just consuming the written text but also god’s word expressed through commentary, gloss, and the interpretation of theologians at different points in history. Although this approach served to restore authority to the church, it also comported with Romantic aesthetics. Thus Coleridge applied this hermeneutical system not only to the bible but to ecology, history, and literature.

The significance of the 1817 version of the poem resides in its four layers of (fictive) development: the original, raw tale of a mariner; the subsequent ballad narrative; the editorial gloss supposedly added during publication; Coleridge’s hermeneutical theory imprinted on the finished product. Although Coleridge’s readers would have recognized the period difference in the language of the ballad and that of the gloss as spanning from before the Age of Discovery to the 17th or 18th centuries. What’s more, the discerning reader would notice that the factual differences between the gloss and the narrative, which testifies to the documents evolution of time. Of course, contemporary readers may not be privy to the significance of this multifaceted structure, but this only underscores the importance of having informed professors in the classroom. It seems to me that $100,000, in inflation adjusted dollars, is a fair salary.

Rime Revisited

I was excited to read Coleridge this week as I love "Rime of the Ancient Mariner". I remembering reading it in Honors English in high school wondering what sort of trip Coleridge must have been on and where I could get some of the same. I think my favorite stanzas are the ninth in part the second ("Water, water, every where…") and the eleventh in part the third ("Her lips were red, her looks were free…") just for sheer blood-curdling pleasure. I love how creepy and strange the whole becalmed ship section is, it all just seems like some gothic Poe-esque opium fever dream. A question that I have always had is why does the Mariner choose that one particular wedding guest to accost? Was there something in his look or attitude that moved the Mariner? Did he feel that the Wedding Guest in particular had something to learn from his story? I have searched the stanzas for an answer but haven't ever been able to come up with anything satisfactory. That doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't an answer somewhere in the poem, goodness knows there are still some stanzas that I am trying to understand even now. 

Reading "The Eolian Harp" I'm trying to figure out what the point of the poem is. At first it seems as though Coleridge is enjoying himself romancing and and pondering while on his honeymoon but then it seems that at a reproving glance from his bride that he feels penitent for his idle musings and resolves to approach thoughts about the divine with more respect. Why would he feel guilty about idle thoughts? The comparison between an Eolian Harp and his mind seems to remove the potential for guilt since an Eolian Harp is a passive instrument and reliant on the currents of the wind for stimulation or impetus to action. If "all of animated nature/Be but organic harps" that are only stimulated into thought as "o'er them sweeps/[…]one intellectual breeze" then whose fault is it if those harps devolve into "many idle flitting phantasies"? Or is it as a gesture of gratitude for his "peace", "cot", and his "heart-honour'd Maid" that Coleridge is responsible for attempting to regulate the thoughts that flit through the imperfect mind that God gave him?

Environmentalism and Aesthetics: A Brief Comparison of “Beyond Ecology” and “Coleridge and the Economy of Nature”

                Evernden, in “Beyond Ecology,” leaves the reader with a deceptively simple notion that “environmentalism without aesthetics is merely regional planning” (103). This statement, at first glance, might invoke the usual connotations of the humanities where subjectivity and “opinionated” reasoning reign supreme. I perhaps made this evaluation because of the usual responses from scientists and engineers, which usually impart little to no hope for the humanities to “understand” or discuss science or the environment. Though, Evernden supports this statement in uniting the concepts of both experiencing and interpreting the environment simultaneously while also not simply putting a value on nature. The knee-jerk reaction of the ecologist, as Evernden points out, is to “build in utility to the argument for preserving natural places” (93). This argument for utility is built upon the mutual assumption held by both social sciences as well as the physical sciences in respecting the “all-consuming importance called man” (95). As Evernden points out, the search for some sort of value present in nature for humans might be the wrong methodology for justifying the preservation of whooping cranes or other endangered creatures. Science cannot interpret the world alone but must work in tandem with the humanities to develop a mutual respect between humans and nature.

                McKusick, in “Coleridge and the Economy of Nature,” supports the idea of the sciences and the humanities working for or with one another in that “language [can be characterized] as a living thing or an integral organic system, either through the coinage of new words or the recovery of archaic ones” (8). Yes, it seems like a simple method for uniting the concepts of the sciences and the humanities, but this idea extends beyond a simple metaphor or the simplistic observation that language is our device in communicating any sort of information that is scientific or aesthetic. More importantly, it seems science and the humanities are interconnected simply because the observations that take place in poetry, such as Coleridge, display a “relation to the natural environment and his aesthetic principle of organicism likewise entails reference to the linguistic habitat of a poem as an essential determinant of its meaning” (8). Given such a relation between the environment and language, it seems there is a symbiosis or cooperation amongst the two systems. This relationship is necessary for humans to both interpret and interact within nature, but it is important to observe there is no “value” or hierarchy placed upon the “use” of nature for the benefit of society. The relationship between the aesthetic and the scientific gradually became an issue, as discussed by McKusick, “due to human intervention in the natural world [that was viewed by scientists] as tending toward the improvement of the landscape and the development of natural resources” (2). There are obviously ubiquitous benefits for the manipulation and integration of nature in modern society, but it seems there is an even greater need to spur thought for our relationship and symbiosis with our natural environment rather than assuming our unquestioned dominance over it.  

Thoughts on "Kubla Khan"

In Biographia Literaraia Coleridge, speaking of the two cardinal points of poetry, nature and the imagination, says, “The sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moon-light or sun-set diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combing both” (LABL 689). Even in his preface to “Kubla Khan,” Coleridge admits to have composed the poem “with equal fidelity the dream of pain and disease” (LABL 670). In several ways, “Kubla Khan” can be read in the same regard as a combination of opposites or cognate words that attempt to describe the indescribable. A vision in a dream, the poem’s supposed origins, even hints at the confusing of elements, which abound through contrasting imagery: measureless caverns and measurable fertile ground (ten miles); a “sunless sea” and “sunny spots of greenery” and “a waning moon;” and “A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!” (my emphasis, lines 4-6, 11, 15, 36).  

The poem also concerns itself with direction, angles, distance, and location. The ALPH river, (a cognate word derived from “Aleph?”- the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet signifying infinity) runs downward, away from Khan’s “pleasure-dome” through caves of ice that the poet is unable to measure, to “a lifeless ocean.” If a broad line can be drawn regarding the poem’s direction, it begins with pleasure (the stately dome), moves down to fecund ground, and sinks to a sterile ocean. Does pleasure have a natural purpose? Is pleasure separated and contained inside the dome because it doesn't agree with the fertile grounds?

 The sense of angles and distance no doubt resonate with images such as “deep romantic chasm” and “Huge fragments” (lines 12, 21). Coleridge also concerns himself with shapes. It’s tempting to associate the half-circularity of the pleasure-dome and the waning moon to the three circles weaved around the person at the end of the poem. These rounded/whole images are contrasted with the irregularity of the ice in the caves, as well as the hail-like grain that bursts up from the fountain. There is order and disorder, wholeness and incompletion.  

Norman Fruman in Coleridge, The Damaged Archangel, offers a sexual interpretation of the poem from the perspective that it is a poem embodying several ideas—“the power of art, an Oriental emperor, a wailing woman, an overflowing fountain—” and no single interpretation should be taken as the interpretation (Fruman 395). Nevertheless, the sexual interpretation, as Fruman notes, is grounded in that “opium deadens tactile sensitivity in many users and can lead to impotence. More often, regular use of opium simply diminishes the sexual drive” (Fruman 425). With that in mind, Fruman considers the sexually emblematic imagery: the demon-lover; the earth quickly panting, “the supposition that some kind of sexual encounter is being described;” followed by the bursting fountain, which Fruman asks “is there a more precise definition of sexual ejaculation?” (Fruman 397-98). There are several other examples Fruman offers for a sexual reading: the tabooed sexual terrain as juxtaposed by the words “holy” and “sacred river,” for example, and in the end suggests that “this poem does seem to derive from inner sources and aesthetic procedures so unusual for Coleridge as to justify the belief that the major block of images in the poem did derive from personal fantasies” (Fruman 402).

The poem is indeed perplexing and simultaneously a feast for the imagination and the mind. And I make reference to the sexual interpretation mainly to keep in line with the theme of the class. What can be more natural than sex? That being said, it can be argued that there is a distinction between a natural sexual reading (as exemplified by nature; nature is the one panting and bursting forth fountains), and a non-natural sexual reading, as seen by the woman calling to a demon-lover. The latter can be more properly described as eroticism, which is not natural; it is inventive, creative, and only humans (figuratively speaking) can copulate with demon-lovers, succubi, and incubi. Eroticism is part of the imagination. The sex act is natural, and takes place in nature. Eroticism, because it is human invention, then, can qualify as taboo because not all human inventions are in agreement with other human ideas such as holiness or sacred. Perhaps, this is why the poet has a difficult time with associations of pleasure and holiness, or more explicitly, "holy dread" (line 52). By contrast, it becomes problematic to think of nature (the earth) as bursting with such sexual imagery, yet also contain a "lifeless ocean" (line 28).

 On another note, despite its fragmentary style, as Fruman also notes, there is in fact a sense of order in "Kubla Khan", and evidence that Coleridge consciously produced the poem and altered words for poetic effect. But the ambiguities that abound are probably intentional of the poet’s part. Maybe we’re not supposed to know the meaning of this poem. Maybe the indescribable and the immeasurable attest to the limits of language. Finally, does the pleasure-dome in fact get built? Khan “decree[s]” it to be built, and yes, if the dome casts a shadow on the waves then it can be assumed to exist. But if we contextualize the poem in the vision where it supposedly takes place, and if we think of the line “I would build that dome in air,” as the poet (now only dreaming) but no longer seeing that vision, then can we say the vision was some sort of prophetic warning? Is this why the poem should end with such cautious language as “Beware! Beware!?” For who can eat honey-dew and drink “the milk of Paradise?”

“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.

Beyond Ecology

I thought that Neil Evernden’s article “Beyond Ecology” raises many interesting points regarding humankind and its relationship to the non-human environment. He discusses this relationship within the context of “interrelatedness” but he takes this issue far beyond the notion of a casual connection. Instead, he interrogates whether or not humans and non-human elements are completely independent entities. In one instance, he explains that different bacteria can transfer an extra chromosome to other bacteria or to another species in general. This example undercuts preconceived notions that each creature is completely distinct from the other and highlights how the natural world is dependent on each other. I think Evernden is alluding to the idea that the boundaries within nature (including mankind) are much more fluid than we thought. It seems that he is encouraging us to take a more holistic approach when we consider what is natural and what is not. He argues that the only way we can understand human nature is to also study man within the context of the natural environment, not outside of it (95). We are accustomed to perceiving man onto himself and easily forget that man is deeply connected to his surroundings. Everden’s article attempts to bridge the gap between our preconceived notions of man with the reality of our relationship with the natural world. Although he makes a valid point, I think it becomes quite difficult to do so because over time, we have hidden nature from our sight. 

With the onset of urbanization, we do not see a inherit connection to nature; it seems as though mankind and nature are independent of one another. Evernden argues that “we not only see ourselves not part of the environment, we are not even part of the body. We, the real us, is concentrated in some disputed recess of the body” (98). Even on the few occasions when we attempt to connect with the natural world, we do so within the context of modernization. This eliminates any possibility of noticing our interconnection with the natural world. In order to perceive the interrelatedness that Evernden refers to, we must first begin to reframe our perception of man and nature, otherwise it will be difficult to reimagine the boundaries between them as anything but stable.  

Evernden brings up another interesting point when he urges us to include humanities within the conversation of ecology. He points out that we are misguided to believe that only the natural sciences are capable of understanding nature. He explains that the “significance of a place is a personal thing, and the battle for the right to know ‘where I am from’ is not one to won by environmental impact assessments and benefit-cost analysis” (102). I think he is right in the sense that since we are interconnected with the natural world, we need to utilize the social and the natural sciences in order to have a better understanding of our relationship with nature.  I think the field of humanities opens many opportunities for exploration that goes beyond the functionality of nature, but I’m unclear on how it would do so. Although Evernden stresses the importance of including humanities within the study of the natural environment, he does not provide a clear explanation on how this new approach would translate in practice. 

“The Distinctiveness of Humanity:” A Response to Neil Evernden’s Argument of Human Inter-Relatedness to Nature

In “Beyond Ecology: Self, Place, and the Pathetic Fallacy,” Neil Evernden questions the wisdom of science on insisting upon the subject/object binary necessary for the observation and measurement of the objective, external world, arguing that concomitant with the aforementioned binary is a devaluing of the role of the arts and humanities in deciding what is most important in environmentalism. At the very heart of the issue, as far as Evernden sees it, is humanity’s insistence on seeing themselves meaningfully distinct from the environment at large. Following such a belief, is that nature ends up being valued above all for its utility to human life, that is, for its “resources,” a term that Evernden apparently finds loathsome, (“slurp of chunks of the world’). Attempting to destabilize this sense of human distinctiveness, Evernden takes great pains in stressing Ecology’s most positive contribution to date in the environmentalism debate: how inter-related is everything in the environment, meaning, that, as humans,“we can’t do as we wish without pay a price [for it]” (92). Throughout the article and with great attention to detail, Evernden attempts to show how difficult, if not impossible it sometimes appears to be, to consider a human being anything but a biological amalgamation of sorts. The implication, of course, is that the human sense of an individual self among the flesh is merely an illusion, and given humanity’s history of polluting the environment, a dangerous illusion at that. 

While I enjoy and appreciate Evernden’s biological analysis of, for instance, the stomach’s collection of living organisms, or the lichen’s being composed in reality of two distinct organisms, lost in the scientific minutiae of everything about the natural world he describes are just the sort of human concerns that he claims are most important. Part of the problem with his argument is how needlessly complicated he makes a human being out to be. Scientist and engineer Ray Kurzweil makes the profound point in the following of how important it is in science to approach a problem with the appropriate level of complexity, as clarity about a potential solution often will depend on a certain conceptual distance, as it were, from the details of what is being observed: 

It is important that we build models of the brain at the right level. This is, of course, true for all our scientific models. Although chemistry is theoretically based on physics and 

could be derived entirely from physics, this would be unwieldy and infeasible practice. 

So chemistry uses its own rules and models. We should likewise, in theory, be able to 

deduce the laws of thermodynamics from physics, but this is a far-from-strait forward

process. Once we have a sufficient number of particles to call something a gas rather than a bunch of particles, solving equations for each particle interaction becomes impractical, 

whereas the laws of thermodynamics work extremely well. The interactions of a single molecule within the gas are hopelessly complex and unpredictable, but the gas itself, 

comprising trillions of molecules, has many predictable properties. (Kurzweil ch. 4)

After reaching a certain microscopic level of examination, human beings are, too, hopelessly complex and unpredictable, full of various lifeforms, each having their own peculiar traits and manners of existence. Yet, when determining human values, little of any of this knowledge helps one get any closer to determining what matters most to us as human beings. How, for instance, would one's studying or being made aware of the various examples of bacteria in the human stomach ever lead a person to the knowledge of the Sistine Chapel? Or Neil Armstrong’s landing on the moon? Or the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse? In other words, peer too closely at a human being and what is missed is how all that is gathered together in that blink of an eye ultimately composes a complete and distinct person, someone with dreams, hopes, fears, desires, and loves. No amount of studying biology or the larger environment can ever teach a person what it means to be human. And my argument in no way should be interpreted as an attack on science. I love science. We need science. In a word, the kind of bare facts that Evernden’s argument depends on are just that: meaningless in themselves, and empty of human subjectivity, and therefore, incapable of explaining or bringing us any closer to a definitive understanding of what makes homo sapiens more than just biological entities but more importantly, distinct persons of, for lack of a better word, spiritual value.