Ancient Mariner's hypnotic power

by Gwen Herat

Ever since I read Ancient Mariner perhaps over and over again throughout the years, the ship had been a source of stress for me. The Mariner's hypnotic power absorbed from the dead crew and the ship's display its transformation into an image as it came face to face with the albatross and the spectre ship is something I still cannot comprehend. Later, it was a skeleton ship, warped and the sails as thin as air and only powered by supernatural forces,

‘Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship.
Yet she sailed softly too.
On me alone it blew

At this point, Coleridge fails to emphasise what went through the Mariner's mind nor of the wind upon which lay his as the ship shared its fate with the albatross but hint at Mariner's fate after a diet of blood.

The ship sinks into the sea to the loud sound of underwater thunder. It creates a whirlpool in which the Hermit's boat spins around. What follows is disaster when he drinks his own blood and puts himself among the dead. It was his last realisation that in spite of death the moment approach over the horizon. But in Homer, the dead drink blood so that they can reach the living while the Mariner drinks blood in order to hail the dead.

Speech

Both amount to free their speech from the yearn of speech. Here, the reader can come into conclusion what thirst meant to the Mariner:

‘Water, water everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink.
Water, water everywhere
Not any drop to drink'...

He yearned for the strange power of speech he saw in the water around him. He felt the mysterious wind around him and with no motivation of spirit, he submitted his soul to the influence of fear. He felt he was the only one left in the world; the loneliness by day with no sleep at night, the Mariner was possessed by evil spirits he so often confronted at sea.

Here the Coleridgean analysis of a singe character appear haunted, possessed or can even be dispossessed.

Temporality

The poem which is in a state of temporality, is rhetorical with the same scenes and the same figure that has already appeared before our eyes even though we failed to understand what they represented. It could have been the familiarity at the appearance of the spectre ship.

When the spectre ship moved without the wind, it became the retribution of a crime that was without a motive, something other than the stillness of live; or so what the Mariner imagined.

The loud wind never reached the ship, Yet, now the ship moved on;
Beneath the lightning and the moon
The dead men gave a groan...
They groaned

Especially posts associate the wind in their language. Though this theme is ancient, it is universal. The wind, the sea and the vast ocean is in truth, a confession of allegory as the voice that lives not only in the minds of poets and writers but in the layman too.

Potent voice

Therefore, Coleridge was no exception but put up with its potent voice to raise the character of the Ancient Mariner where the poem with its strange allegories along with the Mariner traumerised by the effects of the dead crew whose bodies rise in spirits, is sort of an inspiration that carry him to the end where his thirst is quenched by blood. Naturally, he assess himself:

‘I bit my arm and suck'd the blood,
Any cry'd, A sail; a sail:’ (11.152-3)

It was the killing of the albatross that originally made the Mariner identify himself as a blood-sucker. It inspired him, perhaps on the verge of insanity but this side of his personality is not highlighted in totality.

I never did understand why Coleridge being such a wonderful writer had set about trespassing the vocabularies to establish plausibility of historical details with doubtful assurance when the voyage was undertaken. The poets of his time who were never inspired by unnatural elements, reacted to his stylistic ventriloquism.

Many thought that he was not versed in antique language that he desperately tried to introduce. This made Coleridge change many phrases when he revised the poem in 1800. Many readers were tired of antiquity and the rest had no taste for it.

Convictions

But the strength behind Coleridge's convictions were such that the style of the Ancient Mariner would remain intact and no reader would think that the poem to be ancient nor outdated on the face of it appearing odd to 16 century reader though the 1798 version contained archaic words and bad spellings.

The intensity with which he wrote Ancient Mariner has much semblance to today's Dan Brown and yesteryear's William Blake who thoroughly depended on violence, bloody movements, spirits along with macabre instances to highlight the them of their plots that can be denounced by the church and people of faith.

However, they are all fiction but can drive terror into the human mind which perhaps Coleridge intended. Many a time it crossed my mind whether Coleridge really found a live mariner around whom he evolved this famous epic. The debate on this can be both ways to the reader.