Fiends that plague thee thus

“The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she, Who thicks man’s blood with cold.” (Mervyn Peake, 1943)

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Illustrated by Mervyn Peake,
with an introduction by Marina Warner.
Cover design by Helen Lindon.
Vintage Classics, 2004.

“God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus!—”

Like the Ancient Mariner, whose glittering eye mesmerised the unwilling Wedding Guest, the story and the rhythm and the word choices of Coleridge’s Rime have the power to render the reader spellbound more than two centuries after its composition and publication.

Add to it not Gustave Doré’s engravings – superb as they are – but Mervyn Peake’s haunting images, and then this slim volume of what John Livingstone Lowes described as one of the two “most remarkable poems in English” provides an opportunity to venture into territories which only a poet’s mind can conceive.

And after a perusal – or better still, an incantation – of the poem perhaps we all will, like the Wedding Guest, believe ourselves undoubtedly sadder but also wiser humans.

William Edward Parry’s ‘Hecla’ in Baffin Bay (1821)

‘The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.’
— Part Two.

Employing a delectably unpretentious literary version of the traditional ballad form Coleridge gives us a narrative of the travails of a seaman who commits an ungrateful act and has to do penance during and after a circumnavigation of the world. Language and imagery are more partners than handmaidens to the story, and the seven-part structure includes a frame that has the mariner forced to recount his misfortunes not just to the wedding guest but to all and sundry.

What is his crime? It’s to have used a crossbow to shoot, for no apparent reason, the albatross that led the sailing ship out of the icy seas of Antarctica. For this the ship’s crew, after a fierce wind has blown them north into the Pacific Ocean, are stuck in the equatorial doldrums where they, one by one, succumb to thirst and die. It’s not until the mariner acknowledges his misdeed and blesses the sea creatures that the curse on him is lifted and, after apparently falling into a trance, he miraculously finds himself back in his home port. But has he expiated his sin? No, for he must now wander the earth and tell all who’ll listen what has transpired.

First appearing in print at the tail-end of the 18th century, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner helped expand the boundaries of literary Romanticism with its occult and supernatural elements: the polar spirits who provided the impetus to the ship’s movement, the figure of Nightmare Life-in-Death who diced with Death for the Mariner’s survival, the entities who took over the corpses of the crew to sail the vessel. But the glory of the poem resides its innate ability to appeal to the imagination, to encourage speculative theories about its meaning, and even to furnish fodder for scholars to research Coleridge’s literary sources and the culture that inspired his vision.

For who can help being moved by the successive horrors that visit the mariner for his thoughtless act – which includes indirectly encouraging his fellow seamen to approve his killing – and the inevitable affects he has on those he then comes into contact with, such as the wedding guest seeing him as a “grey-beard loon”? Who is immune from wondering about the inherent religious symbolism, not just the penance the protagonist has to undergo for his sin but the mentions of crossbow and the albatross hung around his neck like a crucifix, combined with legends such as that of the medieval Wandering Jew?

The Ancient Mariner, by Mervyn Peake

Marina Warner’s introduction and studies like the classic The Road to Xanadu by John Livingston Lowes (1927) discuss the literary sources that may have inspired the bibliophile Coleridge, ranging from accounts of voyages such as those of James Cook and – famed from the Bounty mutiny – William Bligh, to discussions of magical practices in the Caribbean. Warner doesn’t neglect, however, the likely impact of the author’s drug-taking which it’s known to have influenced the visionary opening of Kubla Khan.

An added reason for acquiring this edition of a work I already had in a couple of poetry anthologies was the inclusion of Mervyn Peake’s artistic responses to the text; eight in all, they range from the “four times fifty living men” who cursed the mariner with their eyes as they “dropped down one by one” to the Nightmare Life-in-Death, an illustration so disturbing it was dropped for the first publication.

But I think the best way to appreciate the sensory experience that Coleridge offers is by reciting the poem to oneself (it takes a little under a half hour) or perhaps even singing the stanzas to one or more traditional ballad tunes. Best choose a suitable melody – in a Dorian or Aeolian mode perhaps – or else the result might be akin to singing Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky to the tune of a jaunty nursery rhyme.

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It’s Independent Bookshop Week run by Books Are My Bag in the UK and Ireland, so this is a review of a title I purchased at our local indie bookshop, Book•ish in Crickhowell.

It’s only the second 2024 book not from my Mount TBR. The fifth title in my #20BooksOfSummer, it qualifies for the astrolabe, No 8 in Mayri’s Picture Prompt Book Bingo 2024. I’ve now matched ten of the sixteen icons with this year’s reads.

Bookforager’s Picture Prompt Book Bingo, 2024: https://wp.me/p7GrCV-1nN