5 minute read
Ugliness in Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Laura Fletcher (WHS)
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is one of Coleridge’s best-known works and was first published in 1798. During Autumn of the previous year, Coleridge had been living in north Somerset and had spent some time in the company of William Wordsworth. A walking tour across the Quantock Hills gave them the inspiration to write their Lyrical Ballads that have been said to mark the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is written in the English ballad tradition – mostly quatrains with an ABCB rhyme scheme alternating four-stress and three-stress lines. However, it is a real contrast to the other poems in the collection due to its occasional uses of ugly and monstrous imagery, which helps to illustrate Coleridge’s ideas concerning guilt, suffering, and penance. In the initial description of the Mariner as having ‘thy long grey beard and thy glittering eye’ an intriguing, mystical appearance is conveyed, suggesting a legendary or wise character, with beards having the associations of Greco-Roman philosophers. However, later in the poem, on closer inspection, the wedding guest is repulsed by the Mariner, describing him as ‘long and lank and brown’, and his emaciated and discoloured state conjures images of deterioration and decrepitude. But the wedding guest’s choice to listen to the Mariner’s story pays off as he rises the next day ‘a wiser man’. Perhaps Coleridge had another seafarer in mind when he wrote the poem, as the description recalls Homer’s description of Odysseus his raft from the island of Ogygia is shipwrecked and he arrives in Scherie. He too has a somewhat deceptively ugly appearance as the women who see him flee: ‘But, streaked with brine, he terrified them so, that they fled in fear, at random, over the sand spits.’ More grotesque, however, is the figure of Death that the Mariner describes: ‘His bones were black with many a crack, All black and bare, I ween; Jet-black and bare, save where with rust Of mouldy damps and charnel crust They’re patch’d with purple and green.’ Coleridge uses the vivid imagery of the bare bones of the living skeleton, with the alliterative ‘charnel crust’ conveying the death and destruction associated with the figure. The use of a vivid bruise-like colour palette of purple and green furthers the sense of human illness and deterioration. Critic Seamus Perry notes how Coleridge’s ‘roughly pantheistic vision of the world completely suffused with God’s abundant goodness’ ‘there is a problem with this otherwise intoxicating view: much of the world seems very short of lovely. On the contrary, it is full of cruelty and arbitrary violence and acts of evil.’ The figure of Death seems to encapsulate these realities of cruelty and violence as he plays dice to win the lives of the crew, and this is reflected in his terrifying appearance. Some of the ugliest imagery of the poem emerges as the Mariner loses hope when spirits pursue the ship and later as his crew dies around him. The sinister and repulsive sights reflect his descent into despair. ‘Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs Upon the slimy Sea.’ Coleridge’s repetition of ‘slimy’ conveys an unpleasant image and the detail of ‘with legs’ suggests that they have a disturbing blend of land and marine features, made even more unsettling by his inability to identify what kind of creatures they are. The Mariner’s complete despondency at his situation is shown as he suggests that the world is devoid of all beauty after his crew die: ‘The many men so beautiful And they all dead did lie! And a million million slimy things Liv’d on – and so did I.’ The hyperbolic description of ‘a million million slimy things’ conveys an overwhelming build-up of creatures in contrast to the beauty of his men. Dr Andrew Green suggests that ‘The sea and creatures from the deep may be seen as an externalisation of the Mariner’s guilt’ and in this way the increase of ‘slimy things’ during the poem might represent the Mariner’s increasing guilt and despair. The figure of Death is contrasted with the arguably more terrifying Life-In-Death who comes to represent human suffering. ‘Her lips are red, her looks are free, Her locks are yellow as gold: Her skin is as white as leprosy, And she is far liker death than he; Her flesh makes the still air cold.’ Whilst ostensibly beautiful with the traditional ideals of feminine beauty of the time of red lips, golden locks and pale skins, she appears distorted and sinister. There is a grotesque quality to her skin that is ‘as white as leprosy’ and her body that is described ‘flesh’, suggesting a bareness, and both emphasise her diseased state. The bright colours, rather than conveying health and vigour, seem gaudy and uncomfortably bright, suggesting a twisted and unnatural beauty. The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in ‘A Defence of Poetry’ that ‘poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.’ Coleridge demonstrates the transformative nature of poetry in his description of the water snakes. Although some of the ‘ugly’ images in the poem reflect the genuine danger of the Mariner’s situation, Coleridge argues through the water snakes that lead to the Mariner’s salvation, that appearances can be deceptive. Whilst the Mariner notes that ‘no tongue their beauty might declare’, he sees the
value in them nonetheless: ‘I watched their rich attire: Blue, glossy green, and velvet black, They coil’d and swam; and every track Was a flash of golden fire.’ Coleridge uses a lexical cluster of adjectives associated with richness and luxury (‘rich’, ‘glossy’, ‘velvet’), utilising the language of rich clothing to suggest their worth both visually and spiritually to the Mariner. Whilst this is not the traditional imagery of the Romantic sublime, the snakes inspire a change in the Mariner and Perry argues that ‘Recognising a joy implicit within natural appearances appears to mark a saving transition from ‘spectral persecution’ to a progressive penance.’ The snakes have value both in their rich colours and their role in the Mariner’s spiritual development. Coleridge makes beautiful what is distorted in the conclusion of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as although the Mariner has experienced the ugliness and distorted nature of guilt and human suffering, embodied by the sea creatures and the figures of Death and Life-In-Death, he is partly healed of his guilt by recognising the beauty and richness of the sea snakes. By exploring the changing state of the Mariner from despair to piety, Coleridge presents ugliness as being in the eye of the beholder and representative of the state of the individual.
Bibliography
Coleridge, S., Wordsworth W. (1798). Lyrical Ballads Penguin Classics
Perry, S. (2014). A introduction to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner <https://www.bl.uk/romantics-andvictorians/articles/an-introduction-to-the-rime-of-theancient-mariner>
Green, A. (2016). A Study in Guilt – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
<https://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/e-magazine/ articles/20473>
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69388/adefence-of-poetry
