LETTERATURA INGLESE

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

BIOGRAPHY:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Devon in 1772. He completed his secondary education in London
and, in 1791, he entered Cambridge University which he left without taking a degree.
In Cambridge, Coleridge became interested in the world of Ancient Greece and in neoplatonic
philosophy (similar to Schopenauer).
Coleridge with Robert Southey, he planned to establish a utopian, egalitarian society in Pennsylvania but
the project, called Pantisocracy, never came into existence.
After publishing the Lyrical Ballads (1798) with Wordsworth, they spent a year in Germany where Coleridge
began his study of German philosophers such as Kant.
After he settled in the Lake District his health deteriorated and, in order to endure the pain he was in, he
started taking laudanum, an opiate, to which he became addicted. In 1816, ill, depressed and alienated
from family and friends. The following year he published Biographia Literaria (1817), a stimulating
collection of aesthetic, philosophical, religious and political reflections. Coleridge died in 1834.

THEMES AND STYLE:

In his Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge explained the dual task which he and Wordsworth set
themselves in the Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth was to deal with subjects from ordinary life, while Coleridge
was to focus on extraordinary and supernatural events in a credible way.
To achieve this, he set himself to producing in the reader a frame of mind which he defined as
“suspension of disbelief” or “poetic faith”.
Many of his poems, not only those included in the Lyrical Ballads, are pervaded by a sense of the
mysterious and the extraordinary and involve fantastic, magical characters. The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner was defined by Coleridge himself as “a poet's reverie”, that is to say, a composition written in a
state of 'confusion' of the rational mind. These features have led many critics to interpret Coleridge's
poems as an exploration of the human subconscious.

IMAGINATION:
According to Coleridge, Imagination is a fundamental and vital principle of growth and creativity which
allows the poet to perceive the unity and wholeness of the universe. In his Biographia Literaria he
introduced his famous distinction between Fancy, Primary Imagination and Secondary Imagination.
○ Coleridge describes Fancy as a rational faculty, a 'mode of memory' which collects and stores
'material' from the external world and combines what it perceives into pleasing shapes and
images → Unlike Imagination, it does not involve any creative power, it’s like the memory for
Wordsworth;
○ Primary Imagination is a spontaneous, unconscious process experienced by all human beings
when sensory experiences trigger images, impressions and sensations. In other words, Primary
Imagination lies behind what Coleridge refers to as 'the mystery of perception' → is common to all
man;
○ Secondary Imagination refers to a conscious process through which the poet dissolves the
impressions and images generated by Primary Imagination and reassembles them in order to
create new images and symbols and, ultimately, new meaning. In other words, Secondary
Imagination coincides with poetic imagination → it’s only for poets, is a free association of ideas.

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! Imagination is the means for Leopardi to get closer to happiness, when we have a limit (like the hedge
in infinity), we start to imagine and this allows us to free ourselves from reality and get closer to
happiness.

STYLE
Coleridge's verse is notable for its musicality and its incantatory quality. He makes frequent use of sound
devices such as alliteration and onomatopoeia and his language is often deliberately archaic.
Coleridge's poems are also rich in symbols and most of the time symbolic meanings are to be found in
natural elements. → ES: in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the Sun embodies a wrathful, punishing God,
the Moon embodies the visionary force of imagination and the Sea embodies the creative power of man.

THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER

THE STORY
The Ancient Mariner stops a wedding guest and begins narrating his dreadful story: after a violent storm,
he and his fellow mariners reached the Polar regions. An albatross appeared through the fog and the
Mariner killed it. No explanations are given for this action, which appears to be completely irrational.
The consequences are terrible: the ship ceases to move, the entire crew is tortured by thirst, the sea is full
of slimy creatures. A phantom ship arrives: on board two scary creatures, Death and Life-in-Death, are
playing a game of dice. Death wins the life of the Mariner's shipmates, who all die. Life-in-Death wins the
Mariner's life. The Mariner faces more and more solitude and desolation until the moment when, alone
and forlorn on a motionless sea, he gradually becomes aware of the enormous consequences of his
brutal, unjustified act. After, he re-establishes contact with the natural world he had previously offended.
The process of his soul's redemption begins: the ship moves again, and celestial spirits appear by the
corpses of the dead sailors. Back home, the Mariner recounts his experience to people, in order to share
his story of crime, penitence and atonement. In the poem's final stanzas, the Mariner earns the wedding
guest's sympathy. There is no real ending to the Mariner's story.

STYLE
The poem consists of seven parts, to which Coleridge added marginal notes; these notes, together with
the frequent archaisms, resemble an ancient document reprinted with explanatory annotations for
contemporary readers. The poem has been called a romantic ballad; like a medieval ballad, it is written in
four-line stanzas and has the form of a dialogue. However, it differs from the ballad for the psychological
depth of the description of the characters, for the moral lesson and for the extensive use of symbols.
Coleridge, according to some scholars, pretended to have found a manuscript that dealt with this story,
which is why we find words taken from Old English or Middle English (inflection).
He wanted to give credibility to the work as Manzoni did for The Betrothed.

THEMES
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the poetic embodiment of Coleridge's conception of the relationship
between man and nature. The story of the Mariner revolves around the old man's sin, caused by his
inability to recognise the spiritual principle that links together all things created, which leads him to kill the
Albatross brutally and for no reason. From this perspective, the story of the Mariner can be interpreted as
an allegory of the poet's act of creation: like the Mariner, the poet overcomes his insensitivity towards
nature thanks to the creative power of imagination, which allows him to recognise the vital, unifying

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principle which lies in all forms of nature. The message in this ballad is actual: man now a days destoy
nature and don’t follow the teachings of the Ancient Mariner.

THE KILLING OF THE ALBATROSS

Coleridge's “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is a Romantic ballad because it is full of repetition, contains
a sort of refrain and tells a dramatic story in verse; it is written in archaic language and is a mixture of
dialogue and narration, in fact Coleridge used a language linked to ancient ballads, rich in alliteration,
repetitions and onomatopoeia.
Coleridge, according to some scholars, pretended to have found a manuscript that dealt with this story,
which is why we find words taken from Old English or Middle English (inflection).

The first line of the poem is the poet's comment, who introduces the central character, an old Mariner.
The poem opens with a description of an ancient mariner who meets a guest at a wedding and grabs
him to tell him an extraordinary story. The narrator begins to speak, at the beginning of the story the sailor
meets 3 Gallants but stops only one to talk to him; initially the Wedding-Guest wanted to go to the party
also hearing the noises but then he was enchanted by the sailor's eyes (glittering, magical).
Thanks to these magical eyes the Wedding-Guest becomes a child; in the 23rd line of this poem
Coleridge inserts the word "kirk", he is Scottish and critics believe for this reason that the story begins in
Scotland.

Subsequently the Mariner says that the sun rises on the left-hand side of the ship. This means that the
ship
was sailing towards the South. There is a picturesque touch in this line. The sun seemed to rise from and
set into the sea. The use 'he' refers to the Sun here, which was rising from the sea. The Mariner further says
that it was shining brightly on the right side of the ship. There is also internal rhyme in the line.

The sailor later says that the sun seemed to rise higher as the days went by, meaning the ship was
getting closer to the equator. The Sailor says that a strong sea storm has broken out; this was
personified as very violent and ferocious, it reached the ship which remained trapped. It should be noted
that the storm has been compared to a huge and fast bird of prey or a winged monster that pounces on
the ship, its prey. The ship was forcibly pushed by the storm towards the South Pole. Nature is described
as both dangerous and attractive (sublime)

Continuing his tale to the wedding guest, the sailor says that, after a considerable time had passed, an
albatross came through the fog. The albatross is a very large, predominantly white, oceanic bird with a
robust body; the sailor considers and compares the bird to the Christian soul and greets it in the name
of God. It is notable that the Albatross was the first living being that the sailors encountered in the region
of fog and snow. Believing that he was just like them, a creature of God, the sailors welcomed him aboard
their ship. His arrival lifted their spirits and brought them hope. The ancient Mariner had only wanted
killed the innocent Albatross at the end of the ballad.
! We don’t know why the Mariner kill the Albatross

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A SADDER AND WISER MAN

In this passage the story ends, the sailor greets the wedding guest, who is sad, because he was unable to
participate in the wedding banquet and because he heard a very sad story, but the next day he wakes
up feeling wiser, he feels he understood the moral purpose of this story. The wedding guest understands
that the consequences of evil fall on others, in fact both the old sailor and his crew suffer punishment.
There is no rational explanation for the evil, in fact the ancient sailor kills the albatross for no reason.

Each element of this ballad has a connotative meaning:

- the ship, together with the crew, is seen as humanity,
- the vessel alone is the symbol of the human body.
- travel can identify with life.

The further symbols of this ballad are both parabolic, religious and ethical, for example:
- the killing of the albatross can be seen as the original sin and as the breaking of the pact of love
and respect towards nature;
- the albatross can be seen as Jesus Christ, the innocent victim.
- the sun: benign, because it provides light and heat, therefore life;
- ice, which is green and howls and growls like a wild beast, is dangerous, frightening and powerful,
therefore it symbolized the sublime and power of nature.

The future life of the Ancient Mariner is an agony where he have to travel from land to land and tells his
story; the Mariner is destinated to teach by his example to love and bless all the things create by God.
The wedding-Guest at the beginning of the story was happy but at the end he is both sad and wisser.
Wisser because he know what to do (love everything) but also sad because love everything in the Earth
it’s not easy.
! But the Wedding-Guest have a choice, at the beginning he was a child and now he is an adult and he
have to do a choice everyday.

PARTI IN MEZZO:
The sailor's companions at first curse because he killed the albatross, but then justify it. The ship enters
the Pacific Ocean and sails to the Equator, but here the breeze drops and the ship is stopped due to
calm. The sky is on fire from the bloody midday sun. For days and days the ship is motionless, surrounded
by sea water without a drop to drink. Slimy monsters appear in the surrounding waters and mysterious
phenomena occur. The wind is completely absent, the sun is scorching, the water is rotting; everything
happens at the Equator (the Line). The crew, suffering from thirst(with dry throats), blame the sailor for
their misfortune and hang around his neck, instead of the cross, the albatross he had shot down.
During this terrible period of time in the ship's journey, the sailors are incredibly still. There is a moment of
hope when a shadow approaches in the sky from the west, but due to their dehydration no one can
speak. The sailor finally bites his arm and wets his lips with his blood. With this act he manages to alert the
ship's crew on the horizon. Unfortunately, joy turns to horror when they realize that the ship is a ghost ship.
The Sailor can see “Death” as a passenger on the ship as well as “Life in Death” ( → paradox).
The two play dice for the crew and Life in Death has won the Ancient Mariner’s soul. The other sailors turn
to curse the sailor then one by one the men fall dead onto the ship. Death is personified, represented in
the guise of a skeleton (but without the scythe typical of representations of Death).

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The woman who seems beautiful and sexually attractive, but there is something off in the description: the
skin as white as leprosy (it was a very widespread calamity in the Middle Ages, so it is another reference
to it, it is also a bad omen that something bad will happen terrible).
After this week-long curse, the Sailor comes to his great realization. In the moonlight, while the ship's
shadow remains a “terrible red,” the sailor observes beautiful water serpents glistening and swimming
alongside the ship. At the sight of them he exclaims: “O happy living beings!” The sailor appreciates,
praises and blesses the beauty of these creatures and consequently believes that his saint begins to take
pity on him. Finally he manages to pray and at this moment the albatross slips from his neck and ends up
in the sea.
All the mariner are temporary alive, they return to Scotland but once they arrive they die again; the sailor
confesses his sin and is forgiven.

MEDIEVAL AND ROMANTIC BALLADS

In the Medieval ballads, for example in Lord Randal, the character is flat; in the Rime of Ancient Mariner the
Wedding-Guest is a round character that change in the story.
In the Romantic ballads at the end there is a moral message, in the medieval ballads there isn’t.
Coleridge's “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is a Romantic ballad because it is full of repetition, contains
a sort of refrain and tells a dramatic story in verse; it is written in archaic language and is a mixture of
dialogue and narration, in fact Coleridge used a language linked to ancient ballads, rich in alliteration,
repetitions and onomatopoeia.