William Empson

The Ancient Mariner

I

M OST people receive the impact of the poem when young,

and to that extent it is not at the mercy of critics; but critics
have done a good deal to spoil it for them when older,
usually while claiming to point out its merits (as I am doing myself,
I must remember). There is often a question whether you should
read into a poem the beliefs and interests of the author when he
wrote or instead allow it the traditional meanings imposed by his
society; and I think wrong answers have been given here both ways
round. The Mariner appeals to a proud national tradition and
evokes a major historical event, the maritime expansion of the
Western Europeans; but a number of recent critics have expressed
relief that the fanciful reverie is so free from politics. On the other
hand, most of them take for granted that it is an allegory in favour
of redemption by torment, the central tradition of Christianity; not
liking perhaps to say in front of the children that Coleridge was a
Unitarian at the time, that is, had cut himself off from most white-
collar employment because he disapproved of this plan for redemp-
tion. To make the poem Christian one must argue that the Mariner
committed a real crime, and this has afforded many critics a steep
but direct path to the wild heights of Pecksniffery which are their
spiritual home. Even Humphrey House, who wrote well (Coleridge,
1953) about what Coleridge meant in saying that the poem had too
much of the moral, and should have been like an anecdote which he
recalled from the Arabian Nights-even he went on to call shooting
the Albatross “a ghastly violation of a great sanctity, at least as bad
as a murder”. A student at Sheffield wrote in an essay for me that she
would have hanged the Mariner from the yard-arm with her own
hands; I had to warn her that the External Examiner would consider
this to be in the wrong tone of voice, but she was expressing the
orthodox modern view. I think it does the poem a lot of harm.

I1
Coleridge at this time called himself a Christian, meaning that he
revered the moral teaching of Jesus; he was also fond of saying that
ordinary Christians were materialists, because they believed that
matter could exist without a soul (as a tea-kettle for example); but
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this is polemical or witty language. Most of the people he met would
not have said he was a Christian till he was beaten down into
agreeing that the crucifixion was the means of redemption. In 1798,
the year after writing the poem, he was offered a post as a Unitarian
Minister, but said that the congregation must be free to reject him
after he had explained why he could not administer the Lord’s
Supper (the rite most intimately connected with human sacrifice).
He came of a clerical family and the unction was natural to him, also
he thought it a duty not to encourage atheism, so that his objections
to Christianity were left obscure; but they were binding upon him-
self. Whether absurdly or not, he was determined not to be seduced
into supporting beliefs which he disapproved; he would not have
done it even in a ballad. As to politics, his group of friends in
Devonshire had told him to shut up; there was a real police terror,
though it so happened that nobody we have heard of was among
those hanged, and a spy had reported to the Home Office “a set of
violent Democrats” in Devonshire. Maybe Coleridge felt contentedly
that he was still helping the cause, because he might be read by
the censor, when he said in his letters, “I have snapped my baby
trumpet of sedition”. In a letter of August 1797, not long before
starting the poem, he is trying to induce one of the set to seclude from
the police the agitator Thelwall :
If the day of darkness and tempest should come, it is most probable that
the influence of T. would be very great on the lower classes. It may
therefore prove of no mean utility to the cause of Truth and Humanity,
that he had spent some years in a society where his natural impetuosity
had been disciplined into patience, and the slow energies of a calculating
spirit.
No wonder he despised the Government for suspecting him, as he
made these statesmanlike plans; but the duty of discretion was not
a t all likely to exclude politics from his mind.
He wanted a theme of guilt and remorse and had been writing on
Cain before Wordsworth gave him the brief anecdote about an
albatross in Shelvock‘s Voyages; this suited him as he had been
reading earlier travellers’ reports, chiefly for a series of Odes on the
four elements. Also he positively wanted to write on superstition. A
basic impulse of the Romantics was to escape from the eighteenth
century, their enlightened parents in fact, so as to experience if only
through history and travel-books the variety of the world. Super-
stitions were found everywhere on these journeys, and a Romantic
would often adopt one; but Coleridge (as is obvious in the first
draft of the Mariner) was quite ready to laugh at olde-worlde
sensationalism. He needed superstition in poems for a philosophical
purpose; to examine the psychological function which gave it this
universal appeal. Wordsworth was himself writing poetry about his
immediate experience, but agreed that Coleridge should contribute
poems with:
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 the persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as
to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of
truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that witling
suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith.
The famous phrase was thus coined to deal with a special effort of
historical imagination; he was to show
the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such
situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been
to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at
any time believed himself under supernatural agency.
But we are not to suppose that Coleridge liked superstitions, or
wanted to encourage them; in a letter of July 1802, which can be
unusually frank as it is to a brother Unitarian, he says of possession
by spirits:
not only did it imply frightful corruption in the great article of all
religion, the moral attributes of God; but it must needs have had a bad
effect and an anti-social influence on the intercourse between man and
man . . .Yet so far are these Exorcists from being condemned by Christ
that their innocence is cited by him to prove his own. St. Paul directly
asserts the existence of wicked spirits swarming in the air.
Such beliefs in fact are rather like madness; the reality behind a
superstition of fourteenth-century sailors may well be the same ‘fact
of mind’ as the private neurosis of Coleridge himself. The works of
the Romantics, I think, are merely tiresome unless one recognises
that they are based upon assumptions of this sort; the authors were
courageous and generous-minded, and right in thinking they had a
new world to describe.
The great merit of The Road to Xanadu was in showing that
Coleridge had read widely in the ships’ captains’ reports, and that
whole verses of the poem were word-for-word quotations from their
prose; no wonder it is so much better than what he had written
before-the naked strength of the language is behind the Mariner,
as if English had been evolved solely to write this one poem.
Regarded as a summing-up of the maritime expansion, to make it
turn on a superstition was no more than just; the sailors had dared
their great journeys while notoriously fearing still greater perils than
the real ones. We are told that this crew is the first to enter the
Pacific and we see them invent a superstition about an albatross;
probably they were the first to see an albatross, but as often in
legends the name of the creature is taken for granted. The weather
had become less unhelpful when it appeared, so the crew at first blame
the Mariner for shooting it, but as soon as the sun comes out they
say he was right-they are only sure that the incident was numinous
enough to have a magical effect. (In a splendid illustration by Gustav
DorC the sailors huddle, white with rime among burgeoning shape-
less icicles, all gaping at a bird which estimates them quizzically like
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 the Dodo in Alice). The Mariner seems to imply a mild criticism of
the crew for this rapid change of mind, and the author cannot have
expected it to recommend the superstition to his readers. The
Mariner, however, is struck down by guilt as by the Furies, and I
have no wish to weaken the obvious violence of the effect; I only say
that we are intended to balance it with an equally obvious reflection:
“how free from guilt he is, according to our own beliefs”. It took a
sad lack of sturdiness in the modern world, I think, to obscure this
point altogether.
The Mariner says nothing about why he shot the bird, partly
because he now regards the action as beyond palliation, and the
author wants a feeling of mystery. But we can get some indications
from the first text. The storm had prevented revictualling :
For days and weeks it played us freaks:
and by the time the Albatross came what victual was left had
become nauseating:
The Mariners gave it biscuit-worms.
Nobody who had been reading travellers’ reports in bulk could
doubt the motive of the Mariner after that; he shot it for food. All
good explorers try out new sources of food; it is part of their
scientific aspect, which gives them the dignity of Faust; and the
darker Albatross mentioned in the anecdote of Shelvock, which is
just small enough to be hung round a man’s neck, does, I am told,
make a tolerable soup which would help to keep off scurvy. Probably
this soup was made and drunk, so that only the externals of the
Albatross were hung round the Mariner’s neck later on; it would be
easier to do. The Polar Spirit has then some excuse for killing the
whole crew, and the text when carefully examined does not say that
they invented the superstition against killing it as soon as it was
killed. (I do not believe that there were two hundred of them;
Coleridge or the Mariner invents this number to heighten the drama
of their all dying at once.) Coleridge did not disapprove of eating
flesh, though he ate little of it unless invited to dinner; he revered all
life, included vegetables. (Advanced thought had simplified and
hardened by the next generation, when Shelley was a vegetarian.) He
would thus have no temptation to suppress the thought of food.
Take the philanthropist Nansen; all teams such as his team had a
schedule for eating the husky dogs who pulled the sledges, so that
each time a sledge became empty, as the men and dogs ate the food
on the sledges, there were no husky dogs to pull this useless sledge.
I bet all those dogs loved Nansen like crazy. Anyhow, even granting
that the Mariner deserved to be killed for killing the Albatross, all
the rest of the crew did not deserve to be killed even more.
I am not denying that Coleridge said the Mariner had committed a
crime; he said it in the second edition, while removing a lot of
archaisms. He had come to realise that the poem deserved more
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solemn treatment than he had thought at first (maybe they laughed
heartily on that walking-tour, sharing in a parody of the fashion for
archaic ballads) ;but there was a more pressing reason. Wordsworth
was very sore at the reviews of Lyrical Ballads, which had jeered at
his prosiness ; he showed an unreasonable inclination to blame
Coleridge, who as usual was far too ready to kiss the rod. He
offered to suppress his poem, so Wordsworth claimed afterwards
that his fatherly encouragement had induced Coleridge to make it
presentable. Such was how he came to cut out the excellent techni-
cality “broad as a weft upon the left”, which could have been
explained at once in a footnote, and cut out some good though
sensational bits of description; this caused some horrible discords
in the sound as at 11. 372-3, “a quiet tune./Till noon we quietly
sailed on”, wrecking the exquisite harmony which the sound has all
through the first version. The facetious archaisms urgently needed
removing, but we pay a heavy price for it. Well then, the biscuit-
worms and the internal rhymefreaks-weeks (evidence of a long period
without revictualling) were cut out for being ridiculous, not because
the author had decided to hush up the food shortage. He also
altered the brief “Argument” introducing the poem. Instead of
“How a Ship . . . was driven by storms” (reaching the Antarctic
and the Pacific) “and of the strange things that befell; and in what
manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own country” (1798),
it says “how the Ancient Mariner cruelly and in contempt of the laws
of hospitality killed a Seabird and how he was followed by many and
strange judgements; and in what manner . . .” (1800). This was
omitted altogether in 1802 and the frequent subsequent editions,
chiefly no doubt because having an Argument at all came to seem
tiresomely olde-worlde, but also perhaps because Coleridge did not
care to explain his fable. However, the marginal glosses, added at
any time before 1817, give the same explanation; “And lo! the
Albatross proveth a bird of good omen” . . . “The Ancient
Mariner inhospitably kilieth the pious bird of good omen”. To call it
a “pious bird” must be intended as a mild parsonical joke, an aside
to relieve the boredom of the parents who overhear the children
being taught not to pull poor pussy’s tail. The Antarctic is notoriously
inhospitable, and its Spirit causes all the trouble; in most houses a
guest would be allowed to eat the available meat rather than starve
to death. Coleridge was trying to make his poem more acceptable by
plugging the moral archly. Still, he was not altering the story, and
would not think he was altering the interpretation. The poem itself
says, or the Mariner before recovering from a fit hears a voice in the
air say:
The spirit that bideth by himself
In the land of mist and snow,
He loved the bird that loved the man
Who shot him with his bow.
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From the first, this was intended as a powerful kick at prosy-minded
readers such as myself; and yet the rotund music depends on a
distinction between the man and the animal so basic that one takes
who, the other that. The Spirit is not inherently either good or bad,
merely wilful, and a reader is free to decide that it treated the men
wrongly.
The young Coleridge who wrote the poem, I don’t deny, had
strong impulses to agree with the Spirit; probably if he had heard
about the extermination of the Dodo he too would have recom-
mended the yard-arm. The orthodox Coleridge who made comments
long after was inclined to laugh off this flouting of the rights of man
over animals. But they both thought the childishness of the moral was
an actual recommendation, since children unlike ourselves have not
been corrupted by the world-they are ‘blest seers’. In any case, the
Mariner at the stage of his life when we meet him is being helped by
magic to express a revelation-he can tell it in any language,
recognising at a sight a man who needs to be told it, and the Wedding
Guest was sadder for knowing it, as well as wiser. What else can it
have been but that killing the albatross was a crime?

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The poems that Coleridge had been writing just before make
rather clearer how his mind had been moving. The terrors of Nature,
he explains in Religious Musings (1794), were planned by God to
awake the spirit of primitive man:
What mists dim-floating of idolatry
Split and misshaped the omnipresent Sire;
And first by Terror, Mercy’s startling prelude,
Uncharmed the spirit spell-bound with earthly lusts.
Till of its nobler nature it ’gan feel
Dim recollections, and thence soared to hope . . .
The typical ‘idol’ was Moloch; ‘idolatry’ means thinking God more
malignant than he is, so the argument lets Coleridge believe that
God is acting on a good plan though he sends earthquakes. (If you
believe in an omnipotent God you have to admit that he sometimes
chooses to act cruelly, however much you deny that he was specially
satisfied by the crucifixion). But only primitive man needed teaching
by terror; Coleridge holds out against believing that we need it
ourselves. Even so, it is clear from The Desliny qf Nations (1796)
that men were still primitive in the time of Joan of Arc. The Mariner
was also medieval, and 1 think we are expected to retain a certain
superiority to him. He has received an almost blinding revelation,
but we need not be sure that he knows how to interpret it. The
author might indeed modestly disclaim having had the revelation
himself; but I think he felt intimately and confusingly involved. The
wicked whisper that kept the Mariner from praying must I think be
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“God is unjust to me”; it comes soon after the line, later expunged,
saying that Christ would take no pity on him; but much of the poem
is concerned to deny this idea energetically. Then again, the question
whether you can love the slimy creatures would be bound up in his
mind with the question whether you can love their Creator; and are
they perhaps in some metaphysical sense a nightmare of your own?
Such are the ideas that would be at the back of his mind when
composing, though I do not mean that he deliberately worked them
in.
1V
What then did one find, reading in bulk the reports of the
European maritime expansion, which made it suitable for the
Mariner to be struck down by guilt? Surely the answer is plain once
the question is asked; they reek of guilt. Indeed Columbus himself,
returning to Europe in the first triumph of discovery, when he sent a
cutter racing ahead with the good news to Ferdinand and Isabella,
lamented that the Caribbeans were so innocent, unsuspicious, and
doomed. It may fairly be answered that this is unusual in a ship’s
captain; as a rule, what is startling in his narrative is the absence of
any sense of guilt. A bit translated from the Portuguese struck me as
good prose owing to its earnest piety;
Then might you see mothers forsaking their children and husbands their
wives, each striving to escape as best he could. Some drowned themselves
in the water; others sought to escape by hiding under their huts; others
stowed their children among the seaweed, where our men found them
afterwards, hoping they would escape notice. And at last our Lord God,
who giveth a reward to every good deed, willed that for the toil they had
undergone in his service they should that day obtain victory over their
enemies, as well as payment for all their labour and expense; for they
took captive of those Negroes, what with men, women, and children,
165, besides those that perished and were killed.
(The Colonial Era, H. Aptheker, 1960).
“What use was their religion if it did not tell them that this was
wrong?’-such was the way it would appear to Coleridge, who
boasted to correspondents around this time that he did not examine
religious doctrines as a mere arguer, but always in the light of their
practical effects. Also he had been considering what useful steps an
anti-slavery man could take; boycotting sugar appeared to be
ineffective. Charles James Fox took advantage of a brief interval of
power to abolish the slave trade in 1805, not long after the poem
was written, and common opinion seems to have thought this
overdue. The only actual superstition about albatrosses, it has
turned out, was that they were ships’ captains who had been drowned
passing the Cape of Good Hope; perhaps then the story means “The
explorers did not realise that the natives were human”. One still
meets this legend in print, and Coleridge might come across it;
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but I have not found any case of it in the reports. The Terra del
Fuegans were thought to be devils, not animals; and anyway
to be classed as human gave a creature no protection. Thus it
would not be right to say that the Albatross was a ‘symbol’ of the
ill-treated natives, but the terrible cry “I didn’t know it was wrong
when I did it” belongs somehow naturally to the whole set-up of
the exploring ship.
I became conscious of this around 1951 in Communist Peking.
Sardar Pannikar, the Indian Ambassador, needed books; if you had
been sent a book, not to hand it on would be cruelty, so I proferred
The Enchafed Flood by W. H. Auden. Next time we met (I should
explain that my wife and I were fortunate in being among the few
residents the non-Communist diplomats might still invite) he
growled out that it was all spoof. I said Auden had proved his case,
because the English, French and Spanish Romantics all treated the
sea in the way he described, but the Germans, having still no empire,
didn’t; the force of the argument lay in the negative control test. He
reeled off quotations from the epics of three Indian languages to
show that the sea is always the great sweet mother, to the poets. But
that was Auden’s point, I said, only the poets of the maritime
empires did it. “Then they weren’t really poets”, he said, leaving me
convinced that Auden had made an important discovery about The
Ancient Mariner. Probably he reflected, though I did not, that India
in the time of the poets he had quoted enjoyed a maritime empire
extending to Bali and Indochina. Still, I can’t really think it vulgar of
the Europeans to be Faustian. The effect on literature of their
maritime empires was to make the explorer a symbol of scientific
discovery, upon which the ships themselves had depended, thence of
intellectual adventure in general, and at last for the highest event in
ethics, the moral discovery, which gets a man called a traitor by his
own society. The Victorians continued to give a good deal of rope
to a serious traveller; the Art of Travel by Sir Francis Galton (1855)
says in its opening sentence that every traveller must be prepared to
take the law into his own hands. Auden says:
The Ancient Mariner and his ship represent the small but persisting
class of mental adventurers . . . From the social point of view, these
spirited adventurers are criminals; they disturb the social order and they
imply a criticism of the accepted round of life; they are self-appointed
outcasts . . .The Mariner escapes from his isolation by the enlargement
of his sympathies in the manner least expected and he is allowed to return
to common life . . . But he is still the marked man, the outcast, the
Wandering Jew, the victim of his own thought. Further, although he
has been judged by society, he has the reward of the courage that
propels the mental adventurer; that of arresting and disturbing and
teaching those who have had no such experiences.
Rather too cosy perhaps, but very central. This is what the poem is
traditionally about; as it would still be if Coleridge did not discover
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the meaning till after he had written and then ratted on it as fast as
he could.
V
But the poem was from the start more anchored to the poet than
that, and none of the changes he made are really alien to it. He was
himself a martyr to Neurotic Guilt, feeling guilty without believing
he had good reason for it; The Ancient Mariner is the first and best
study of that mental condition. Such is the reason why he couldn’t
finish any of his books; “My sickness has left me” he wrote to
Longmans (1 801) :
in a state of mind, which is scarcely possible for me to explain to you-
one feature of it is an extreme disgust which I feel at every perusal of
my own productions, and which makes it exceedingly painful to me not
only to revise them, but I may truly add, even to look on the paper on
which they were written.
Many authors have felt like this, but to explain it to one’s publisher
is a heroic exercise of the Romantics’ principle of self-expression.
Coleridge usually just says he feels fear, and then shows by the
example that he is afraid of being told that he has done wrong, or
more usually that he has neglected a duty. He used laudanum to
quiet this condition, and no doubt made it worse, but the condition
was there beforehand. The Pains of Sleep (1803) gives a splendid
description of his nightmares :
But yesternight I prayed aloud
In anguish and in agony,
Upstarting from the feverish crowd
Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me;
A lurid light, a trampling throng,
Sense of intolerable wrong,
And whom I scorned, those only strong!
. . . Deeds to be hid which were not hid,
Which all confused I could not know
Whether I suffered, or I did;
For all seemed guilt, remorse, or woe,
My own or others still the same,
Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame.
.. . Such punishments,. I said, were due
To natures deepliest stained with sin,
For aye entempesting anew
The unfathomable hell within,
The horror of their deeds to view,
To know and loathe, yet wish and do!
Such griefs with such men well agree,
But wherefore, wherefore fall on me?
To be beloved is all I need,
And whom I love, I love indeed.
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In January 1805, he wrote in a notebook (Inquiring Spirit, Kathleen
Coburn, p. 54):
It is a most instructive part of my life, the fact, that I have always been
preyed on by some Dread, and perhaps all my faulty actions have been
the consequenceof some Dread or other on my mind, from fear of Pain,
or Shame, not from prospect of Pleasure. So in my childhood and
Boyhood the horror of being detected with a Sore head . . . then a
shortlived Fit of Fears from sex, then horror of Duns, and a state of
struggling with madness from an incapability of hoping that I should be
able to marry Mary Evans.. .Then.. .my marriage, constant dread in my
mind respecting Mrs. Coleridge’s temper, &c . . . since then every error
I have committed has been the immediate effect of the Dread of those
most shocking bad dreams-anything to prevent them.

This mental state, in which the sufferer from guilt does not admit
he has sinned, was what Coleridge was likely to want to express in
the poem, because it was so familiar and such a burden to him; and
such is what his fable does express-in the mind of an unsophisti-
cated reader, now as then, the Mariner does not deserve his sufferings.
Modern critics must therefore be evading the real point of the poem
when they so eagerly invent proofs that he did deserve them. You
may answer that the author himself was too ready with pathetic
excuses, though really he deserved the punishment he got, so
probably he is trying to delude us about the Mariner. But his views
on Nature make him prone to blame the Mariner more than the
expected reader would, and this saves the author from suspicion; the
ambiguity of judgement heightens the effect. It was a splendid
invention to kill all the Mariner’s comrades and leave him alive with
their dead eyes still cursing him, because he is then forced to blame
himself more than we feel he deserves. They have died because he
shot the Albatross, though he could not have guessed that the Spirit
would use them as weapons to torment him. Also they have died
because he called a ship to help them, biting his arm to be able to
d o it; this was a phantom ship containing Death, but he could not
have known. After the gods had done him this injustice, he would
not show good feeling or good taste if he did not overblame himself
to an almost lunatic degree. Such, I think, is the evident point of this
main part of the story.
Mr. D. W. Harding, in an article for Scrutiny during 1941, now
available in his Language info Words, described the psychological
background of The Ancient Mariner. I wasn’t seeing the magazine
then, and did not find a reference to the article till after drafting this
piece; but he and W. H. Auden hold the priorities for the ‘inside’
and the ‘outside’ of the poem.
Coleridge found that walks in hilly scenery could do a good deal
to palliate neurotic guilt; and this was the main basis in experience
for the doctrine of the healing power of Nature through Imagination.
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Wordsworth in The Prelude describes his nightmares about revolu-
tionary Paris in a fine passage very near to The Pains of Sleep; they
had the experience independently, I expect, and then told one another
about it. Coleridge’s idea of a walk was a good deal: thirty miles
over rough country he seems to have thought normal, as a young
man, whatever he was saying about his bowels. There is an aside in
one of his letters, perhaps the only time when he made an excuse
which was more impressive than he realised. He could not have done
what he has promised, he is saying as usual, because he has had a
complication of illness, owing to crossing a pass in Westmoreland
during a storm; and perhaps, it occurs to him, he may be told that he
should have turned back; but this would be impossible to him, as it is
not his habit: “I never once in my whole life turned back in fear of
the weather” (Letters p. 484, 1802). We have long been told he was
self-indulgent and weak-willed, and I now hear him called fubsy, but
the trouble was that he was a compulsive character, who stuck to a
line once adopted with appalling persistency. The reason why he
had read everything was that he was a compulsive reader, who dared
not stop; rather than open a letter from his wife, he would read
straight on all through Purchas’s Pilgrims. Schoolmasters are
familiar with the type, which either does well or fails badly.
He thus expected Nature to be a bit rough; his everyday approach
to her was rather like that of the explorer. The fundamental revela-
tion granted to the Mariner, somewhat obscured by his compulsive
technique of total recall, was granted to Coleridge himself about five
years later and described in a letter to Sara Hutchinson:
I began to suspect that I ought not to go on; but then unfortunately
though I could with ease drop down a smooth Rock of 7 foot high, I
could not climb it, so go on I must; and on I went. The next 3 drops were
not half a foot, at least not a foot, more than my own height, but every
drop increased the Palsy of my limbs. I shook all over, Heaven knows
without the least influence of Fear. And now I had only two more to
drop down-to return was impossible-but of these two the first was
tremendous, it was twice my own height, and the Ledge at the bottom
was exceedingly narrow (so) that if I dropt down upon it I must of
necessity have fallen backwards and of course killed myself. My limbs
were all in a tremble. I lay upon my Back to rest myself, and was begin-
ning according to my custom to laugh at myself for a Madman, when the
sight of the crags above me on each side, and the impetuous Clouds just
over them, posting so luridly and so rapidly to northward, overawed me.
I lay in a state of almost prophetic Trance and Delight and blessed God
aloud for the powers of Reason and the Will, which remaining no
Danger can overpower us! 0 God, I exclaimed aloud, how calm, how
blessed I am now. I know not how to proceed, how to return, but I am
calm and fearless and confident. If this reality were a Dream, if I were
asleep, what agonies had I suffered! What screams! When the Reason
and the Will are away, what remains to us but Darkness and Dimness
and a bewildering Shame, and a Pain that is utterly Lord over us, or
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 fantastic Pleasure that draws the Soul along swimming through the air
in many shapes, even as a flight of Starlings in a Wind. -1 arose, and
looking down saw at the bottom a heap of Stones which had fallen
abroad and rendered the narrow Ledge on which they had been piled
doubly dangerous. At the bottom of the third Rock that I dropt from,
I met a dead Sheep quite rotten. This heap of stones, I guessed, and have
since found that I guessed aright, had been piled up by the Shepherd to
enable him to climb up and free the poor Creature, whom he had
observed to be crag-fast, but seeing nothing but rock over rock, he had
desisted and gone for help and meanwhile the poor Creature had fallen
down and killed itself. As I was looking at these I glanced my eye to the
left, and observed that the Rock was rent from top to bottom. I measured
the breadth of the Rent, and found that there was no danger of my
being wedged in, so I put my knapsack round to my side, and slipped
down as between walls, without any danger or difficulty.
There is a briefer record in his Notebook (August 1802):
.. .pass along Scafell precipices; and came to one place where I thought
I could descend, and get upon the low ridge that was between Scafell
and Bowfell, and look down upon the wild savage, savage head of
Eskdale. Good Heavens! What a climb! dropping from precipices and
at last should have been crag-fast but for the chasm.
-also a less attractive reference in a letter of 9th August: “Hartley
is almost ill with transport at my Scafell expedition”. Poor little
Hartley was not then quite six years old, and far too much a wind-
harp for Father to blow upon; one can see how hard Father had
puffed. But he might well be pleased; he had just written Dejection
and a series of letters about the pain of losing his poetic genius, and
now the thing had actually happened. There is no sign of the vanity
of an author-it does not occur to him that he has enacted the
Mariner; what has happened is far more important-the theory
about Nature has been proved true.
In his dealings with other people, Coleridge was too inclined to
kiss the rod and then shuffle out of reach of it: he deeply distrusted
open conflict or resistance. His passiveness before Nature here (“I
bear pain with a woman’s fortitude” he writes often) is rather the
same, but it feels unaffectedly grand (the style is like Defoe), and a
modern climber would readily believe that it saved his life. When in a
tight place one should collect oneself and not get rattled; otherwise
he would have died like the sheep. Many climbers would also
recommend appreciation of the scenery, as a help in keeping one’s
nerve at such a time; and this almost amounts to saying “Delight in
Nature when terrible gives one strength to control it”. Coleridge of
course went further, believing that such delight marked an intuitive
sympathy with the natural objects by an act of Imagination (very
remote from making up a poem), and therefore restored the indi-
vidual to a proper relation to the universe.
The Active Universe by H. W. Piper (1962) shows that the view of
Nature held by the earlier Romantics, however strange, was in line
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with “the current scientific orthodoxy”. Contemporary reviews of
poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge regularly explained what was
new in their philosophy; pantheism was familiar enough, even in
Pope, but the new poets combined it with animism, the belief in
various kinds of Spirits which had been formative for Renaissance
science, Thus they believed
that the world-soul would be found in each material object and that,
through the imagination, a real communication was possible between
man and the forms of nature.
Coleridge and Shelley both believed this, but Coleridge (thinks Mr.
Piper) was dependent as a poet on a personal relation with Nature
in some way that Shelley was not. It is clear at any rate that the
Mariner did not need to be a criminal before he could acquire
a revelation of this kind.

VI
We should now be equipped to reconsider the “moral” of the
poem, “He prayeth best, that loveth best/All things both great and
small”. I would do wrong to belittle the moral “Don’t pull poor
pussy’s tail”, which needs to be taught to children; but Coleridge
came to feel, like many of his readers, that it forms an inadequate
conclusion to so much lightning and despair. What the Mariner had
achieved was love of almost intolerable creatures, products of
Nature when particularly inhospitable. I said in my Some Versionsof
Pastoral that Coleridge “insisted in the margin by giving the same
name to both” that the creatures by which he was at first most
disgusted were the same as those which he eventually blessed
unawares for their beauty, so that they became his salvation. I still
think this a fair point, but the engineering of the poet is more radical
and complex. To call both of them “creatures of the calm” does not
prove them identical, but helps to suggest it; when Coleridge wrote
these marginal notes he continued to encourage a suggestion already
made in the text. When the ship reaches the equator in the Pacific
“the Albatross begins to be avenged”; the sailors are dumb with
drought, and
The very deeps did rot; 0 Christ;
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea. (1. 125.)
The water looked like petrol spilt on a motor road (next verse). More
than a hundred lines packed with incident follow before these details
are recalled, so we do not easily notice that the legs are omitted. The
crew deduce from a dream that a Spirit is avenging the Albatross, so
they hang the remains of it round the Mariner’s neck. Delirium is
probable by the time the skeleton ship appears to him-nothing
definitely supernatural has occurred before. The unreasonable
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quality of supernatural justice is plugged home by the game of dice.
Death wins the others, but Life-in-Death the Mariner; his condition
when we meet him is a life in death, and Coleridge made play with
the term again to describe his own life in his ‘Epitaph’. That sailors
are often victims of women when they strike land is a standard
reflection, and the grand description of the prostitute White Goddess
is entirely fitting for the ‘outside’, though for the ‘inside’ all it can
mean is that the innocent Coleridge had been badgered by Southey
into marrying a scold. An incurable syphilitic, unable to seek
honourable love because he would give the beloved the disease which
yet allows him to linger on, would strike Coleridge as an eminent
case of life in death, not unusual among retired sailors; and the
disease had actually been brought by Columbus from America. The
skin of the goddess is white as leprosy, which poets have often made
a sort of literary alternative to syphilis. Mr. Christopher Ricks has
pointed out to me that Coleridge in one of his letters (quoted by
House, p. 152), mentions fearing in a dream that the breath of a
spectral prostitute would give him the disease, and one can see that a
terror then so eminent would have to be present in his nest of
secret terrors, though his morality and his passivity would alike
make him fairly safe from it. So the White Goddess is needed both
for the inside and the outside of the poem, but I think he uses her
mainly as a conjuring device, to distract our minds while all those
legs drop off. The spectral ship goes, the sailors all die, and now for
the first time the marginal gloss says creatures. “He despiseth the
creatures of the calm” (the term of course reminds you that God
created them) is put against:
The many men so beautiful
And they all dead did lie;
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on, and so did I.
I looked upon the rotting sea
And drew my eyes away;
I looked upon the rotting deck
And there the dead men lay. (1. 240).
Their eyes continue to curse him. (It is not only wonderfully good,
but wonderfully like a real ballad.) The healing Moon comes up,
making possible his act of atonement by showing the creatures in a
better light, and they are now “water-snakes’’ (1. 275); the words
insist upon, and the rhythm makes vivid, a beauty of movement very
unlike the movement of things that crawl with legs. The spilt-petrol
colours recur but now seem hallucinatingly beautiful. These colours
and the words rot and sZimy all recall the things with legs, and the
confident rotund gloss “By the light of the Moon he beholdeth God’s
creatures of the great calm” feels to me like a pious refusal to
recognise a well-known unpleasantness : maybe they still had legs
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when he “drew his eyes away”, and maybe their legs just dropped off
quickly when the Moon got up; this would have been a magical bit
of luck for the Mariner, because obviously he couldn’t have loved
them if they were still crawly. But the matter is handled with great
tact, as it needed to be, because in theory he had to be able to love
any degree of crawliness whatever.
One might expect Coleridge, with his Ommjective and Summ-
jective, to make the Mariner recognise the snakes as part of his own
nature; but he keeps very clear of that. The snakes are absolutely
other to him, like beings of another planet, and it is an alien part of
his own mind which bIesses them; he is astonished that the saving act
has been performed. I do not think there is any traditional Christian
parallel to this; the process is entirely unlike, though it may easily
recall, the repentant saint punishing himself by kissing the leper’s
sores. The process indeed is exactly the other way up. The Mariner
is astonished to find his inside admiring what his outside had thought
disgusting, but at once feels happy and thankful about it, so that his
outside joins forces with his inside; naturally his life can now be
saved, and as the readers have been made to share his nausea for the
creatures they can grasp the heroic character of his spontaneous
reversal. This also deals with an objection, first raised by Words-
worth, that the Mariner does not do enough to make him the hero
of a poem. The motives of Wordsworth in this complaint are
obscure, but I am afraid that whatever they were they must have been
bad. He was just as much involved as Coleridge was, or H. G. Wells
later on, in a middle-class anti-heroic propaganda, justified up to a
point-a feeling that aristocrats had patented the honour of a
soldier so that ratting on it was a class duty for literary men. Though
the Mariner does every possible action for the survival of himself and
his fellows, he could never appear as a fighting man; in the same way,
because the rest of the crew are always united in decision, this is the
only eminent sea story which never uses the thrilling words captain
and mate. As a Pantisocrat, Coleridge felt that a ship ought to
be imagined as a democracy (and Kinglake in Eofhen reports that a
small enough Greek ship really was); but a kind of artisan courage,
from one of the crew, he felt allowed to praise; and the Mariner is a
striking case of it. We assume he is demanding water for all his
comrades when he hails the skeleton ship, because, if he had been
dying alone, he could not have raised the strength to bite his arm and
suck the blood so as to soften his mouth enough to shout. I think
Coleridge ought to have told Wordsworth to try doing this himself
before calling the Mariner insufficiently heroic.
VII
Psychologists tell me that they do not recognise the term ‘neurotic
guilt’, which I have long heard used as of a familiar reality. For
example, Dylan Thomas, with the dead earnestness which so often
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came as a surprise, told me it was curious he was such a martyr to
attacks of neurotic guilt, as he led such an innocent life, but he found
the only way to handle them was to hide in the country for a week
or two, stopping drinking altogether, speaking to nobody, and so on.
His meaning in using this term was clear; he felt struck down by
guilt though by his own principles he had done no wrong; and it was
easy to reflect that he had done wrong by the principles of the
hostess of Fern Hill, his peasant aunt. A psychologist (as I under-
stand) finds this trivial because it does not involve the mechanisms
of the deep Unconscious, and indeed it is more like ‘split personality’
-one moral code goes on dragging against another. But it is the
most prominent cause of mental upset among present-day educated
people, and I think psychologists belittle it because they dislike
admitting that there can be genuine rational disagreement about a
moral question. There was nothing mad about Coleridge except a
peculiarly severe conflict of this kind; he could not bear to rebuff the
fundamental sympathies of his society and yet found that accepting
the theology in which they were expressed, when he was beaten
down to it, was a kind of suicide.
The schoolboy Coleridge would enjoy being praised for his
cleverness, however pathetic the elder man made him appear; but
decided that there was no future for him in scholarship, since all the
white-collar jobs which it dangled before him required a profession
of belief in what Voltaire had shown to be infamous. In his charity
blue-coat gown, he explored London and found a shoemaker willing
not only to take him as apprentice but also to come and tell the
headmaster. The headmaster threw out the man and beat the child
(for being an iddel), and Coleridge in later life amused himself by
saying that this was the only just beating of all his beatings at school.
He was right, I expect, to remember it as important; it had made him
unable to emerge from his childish terrors. This boy sounds a great
deal more vigorous and enterprising than the grown-up Coleridge.
There were two or three further cases of “I didn’t know it was wrong
when I did it”, but the pattern had been established. He ran into
debt at college, so he later said, because when a man came and asked
how to decorate his rooms he said “As you please, sir,” supposing
the cunning tradesman to be a college official; so he ran away and
enlisted to save his family the money, but this only gave them the
extra expense of buying him out. His disastrous marriage followed
the pattern; Southey had told him it was the right thing to do. We
have two descriptions, by himself and by a student friend, of his
behaviour at Cambridge in a week before he failed an exam, and it is
an effort to believe that both are true. The brilliant gaiety was
achieved by ‘acting a part’ with iron resolution; but perhaps the
suicidal despair was a bit playboy as well. This romantic style of
behaviour has become tiresomely familiar, but we should remember
I think that Coleridge had a genuine reason for it; he did not believe
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the religion which was technically required of him, so there must
eventually have been a show-down when he refused to take the oath
for his degree.
He made a principle of not publicising his basic religious objection,
and I have only found one place where it becomes clear. On 27th
September, 1796, Charles Lamb, who had been a younger but
intimate schoolfellow of Coleridge, wrote that his sister Mary Lamb
in a fit of madness had killed their mother. “Thank God, I am very
calm and composed, and able to do the best that remains to do. Write
as religious a letter as possible , . .” Coleridge was unable to resist
writing letters which were too religious (he was twenty-three ; Lamb
was twenty-one). The first reply of Lamb (October 3rd) begins with
the words “Your letter was an inestimable treasure to me”, but the
next one grieves that Coleridge is not settling down to a serious
course of life, and the third (October 24th) questions the doctrines
that Coleridge has preached :
. . . Again, in your first fine consolatory epistle, you say, “you are a
temporary sharer in human misery, that you may be an eternal partaker
of the Divine Nature”. What more than this do those men say who are
for exalting the man Christ Jesus into the second person of an unknown
Trinity?-men, whom you or I scruple not to call idolaters.
Presumably an idol, a Moloch, is a God who demands human
sacrifices. Lamb is objecting to the idea that suffering makes us
better because God enjoys it; also, he finds it bad taste for Coleridge
to talk as if God has been kind to arrange a disaster so as to make
Lamb better. He is deeply concerned to comfort his sister, so he finds
it morally disgusting to be told to reflect that he himself is being
polished for Heaven; has her murder polished her for Heaven?
Indeed, 1 think the case is one which makes the unpleasantness of
Christian consolation especially prominent. But I must not claim
that it was obvious to Lamb; his letters here express deep submission
to the arbitrary will of God, as when he says, near the start of his
first reply to Coleridge:
My poor dear, dearest sister, the unhappy and unconscious instrument
of the Almighty’s judgements on our house, is restored to her senses-
to a dreadful sense and recollection . . .
He is in no mood to isolate himself from the religious sentiments of
his society. Only just of age, he has already had a period in an
asylum, and now the senile father, the mulish aunt, the greedy
brother, and the sister who, whatever her merits, was liable to turn
back into a tiger at any moment, all depend for their bread upon his
earnings as a clerk; he is taking care to preserve his sanity, and rather
surprised at his success. They are impressive letters, especially as they
are so far from the usual line of endeavour of a Romantic; and I
think they suggest that both the friends had been more logical and
definite in their revolt against Christian doctrine while still at school.
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Lamb’s other objections in this letter seem to be against Coleridge’s
pantheism, not his backsliding into orthodox Christian torture-
worship. But the sentence he quotes is not pantheist; for example,
the Athanansian Creed speaks of “the taking of the manhood into
God”. Coleridge presumably accepted the rebuke, as he remained a
Unitarian for about six more years.
We can see how hard it was to surrender to Moloch in a letter to
his parson brother George (July 1802); he thinks he has invented a
way to make terms with the Establishment without actually conniving
at its basic infamy. He has come to believe, he says, in an
original corruption of our nature, from which and from the consequences
of which we may be redeemed by Christ, not as the Socinians say by his
pure morals or excellent example merely, but in a mysterious manner
as an effect of his Crucifixion; and this I believe, not because I understand
it, but because I feel that it is not only suitable to but needful for my
nature and because I find it clearly revealed.
What he still cannot endure to say here is that the Father was
satisfied by the Crucifixion; he would have called that, surely, as
already quoted, “frightful corruption in the great article of all
religions, the moral attributes of God” (the quotation at least shows
that he was not too innocent to regard a theological question in that
light). The process he was going through here was a frequent one,
summarised with ghastly exactitude at the end of 1984, in the
pathetic delay of Winston Smith before gulping down last of all a
somewhat disguised form of the doctrine “God loves torture”. A
later stage of the same struggle is recorded in what Coleridge called
his “happiest effort in prose composition”, the Preface to Fire,
Famine etc. (Appendix I11 in the Oxford text of the Poems), first
printed in 1817 but claiming to report a conversation probably held
in 1803; it is a laboured piece of sophistry to the effect that seven-
teenth-century theologians did not really believe in Hell. When he
returned from Malta (1806) he had become keen on arguing for the
doctrine of the Trinity, and for ever after treated himself as an
interesting moral invalid.
I may well be told that, as the defences of Coleridge against the
religion were so inadequate, he could let it creep into The Ancient
Mariner. There are indeed plenty of expressions of straightforward
piety by the Mariner, as is historically correct. But Coleridge just
then was enjoying his brief period of triumph, especially the triumph
of frnding a friend he could revere; he expects the religion to be easy
enough to handle-technical difficulties will melt away when
confronted with real vision, and the certainty of offering a real
vision is the very tone of his voice and gleam of his eye. A recent book
The Enchanted Forest (W. W. Beyer, 1962) gives an interesting side-
light. It shows that many of the details of the Mariner came from
Wieland’s verse romance Oberon, which Coleridge was translating
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from the German at the time (so he claimed in a letter). It might seem
that this discovery refutes the Auden generalisation, but I do not
think so; the only’sea travel is in the Mediterranean. The hero, a
vassal of Charlemagne, kills a son of Charlemagne in self-defence
when ambushed treacherously on his way to Court; he can only be
pardoned if he carries off and marries the caliph’s daughter, So far
he is trying to recover his due status; but halfway through the poem
he commits a sin. The daemon Oberon has blessed his union with the
Saracen princess but added that it must not be consummated till
blessed by the Pope; while they are sailing to Rome this rule is
broken (the lady seeing no need for it) and they are thrown over-
board in a tempest for prolonged trials and sufferings. Mr. Beyer
several times calls the temptation “provocative”, evidently as a term
of praise; I think he means that the lust of the reader is excited by the
needless exasperation imposed on the characters. If so he justifies,
without meaning to, the behaviour of Coleridge, who never admitted
his debt to Oberon but said in later life that “Wieland’s subject was
bad, and his thought often impure” (Tabletalk, May 1811). This
reaction must have come early, because Wordsworth in 1798,
evidently relying on Coleridge’s judgement, snubbed Klopstock by
saying it was “unworthy of genius to make the interest of a long
poem turn entirely upon animal gratification”. A snuffy thing to say,
but Coleridge really did find the theme somehow in bad taste. The
Romantics often anticipate the Victorians, who felt that a gentleman
should know how to avoid the indecent struggles for virginity
recorded of the saints. Wieland had his free-thinking side but was
prepared to screw as much drama as possible out of Christian
chastity; and this is already vulgar because insincere. The Victorians
were right, I think, so far as they were tacitly recommending evasive
action, with only as much hypocrisy as the case required; and
Coleridge was right not to want to praise a God who made vast
punishments the sanction for unnatural and useless regulations.
One might answer, indeed, that he did worse; he turned the crime
into something which hardly any of his readers could accept as a
crime, deliberately writing a kind of parody of the traditional
struggle for atonement. Just before the Mariner he was writing
another study of remorse, The Wanderingsof Cain, and the surviving
fragments show the same twist in his attitude. Cain out of remorse
plans to sacrifice his son, but the ghost of Abel solemnly warns
him against it. The initial fault of Cain had been “neglecting to
make a proper use of his senses”. A spirit advises Cain to blind
himself as a means of expiation, but he decides that this would
make him morally worse, still further from proper use of his senses.
The Spirit turns into a flame and flees down athwart the jagged
peaks of the mountain range, so we know its advice was wrong-
an insinuating asceticism has been defeated. Evidently, what
Coleridge wanted to write about was uncaused guilt, even though
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the story he was using made the idea particularly hard to convey;
no wonder he gave up Cain when he found a more suitable story.
VIII
I need to fit Christabel and Kubla Khan into this account, which
may be done fairly briefly. Coleridge soon realised that the Mariner
was a grander poem than he had expected, and tried to repeat the
formula; that is, a large historical period or event was to be illu-
minated by the reader’s intuitive knowledge of the psychology of
superstition. To do a Gothic narrative poem was an obvious test;
all along, the great buildings of the Middle Ages had been hard for
the Augustans to ignore, so the Romantics in trying to escape from
the Augustans made immediate use of them. But the sensational
Gothic tradition derived largely from anti-Catholic propaganda, too
sectarian for Coleridge, and after rejecting that (I think) he just
could not see any point in his medieval witch. The end as it stands,
the conclusion to Part 11, does find a psychological truth in a super-
stition; it compares witchcraft to an affectionate pretence of cruelty;
but this is painfully thin and laboured. It is much to the credit of
Coleridge if he refused to finish Christabel merely because he found
it was a silly superstition, with no philosophical meaning (and Scott
just cashed in on the new invention regardless); or he may, as he
said, have been inspired by Crashaw’s Hymn to St. Theresa, and then
found the combination of sexuality and desire for martyrdom too
nauseating. Though so good in detail, the poem hardly reaches a
point where my account can be tested.
Kubla Khan, however, comes out well. Like House, I find it
a completely achieved poem; probably Coleridge was lying when he
told the story about the person from Porlock, nearly twenty years
later, after Byron had succeeded in overcoming his deep shyness
about printing it at all. When you realise what it means, you are
not surprised that he felt shy. It is a grand though brief statement of
the claims of the Romantic artist, and no wonder Coleridge when a
failure could not face that. Sir Herbert Read in The True Voice of
Feeling (1953) gave I think the best account of the Romantic position,
which he thinks was first formulated by Schelling but widely acted
upon beforehand. A society is always in development, and an artist
has a function in it like that of the designer of fashions; the ladies
know they want something, but only after seeing the new models
can they say “I know what I was wanting; it was that”. The paradox
of the artist is thus the opposite of the Christian one; he must say
ruthlessly what he himself likes or wants, and only by this selfishness
can he help his fellows. It is assumed that they all have the same
unconscious desires, since they belong to the same developing
society and are subject to its pressures ; otherwise the self-expression
of one could not help the others. The theory had always been true,
but the Romantics were the first artists to discover it and act upon it;
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if they appear ridiculously self-centred, we must remember they
considered it a duty. It is in this sense, of course, that the poet is the
unacknowledged legislator of the world. By the comparison to the
dress-designer I do not mean to make the belief ridiculous but to
convey how literally it was held, and how rapid the effects were
expected to be; also the French Revolution introduced a new pace
for the changes of fashion in female dress, and we are still living by
it. Every girl must grow up thinking “Poor Mum looked a frump at
my age”-there has to be a radical change every generation; before
1789 the process took several generations, and mercifully it has not
been getting quicker than the pace then established. Coleridge thus
lived in a world which literally did have a heightened sense of
changes of fashion. But the original creative genius for which society
craved usually emerged from poverty or remote solitude; in music
he actually did often come from some unexpected part of Europe,
drawing upon its folk-songs. He would then be said to “conquer
Paris” and so forth; comparing him to Jenghis Khan was practically
a clichi, though when expanded into a poem it somehow became
“obscure”.
After writing a very good poem about the European maritime
expansion, it was natural for Coleridge to think of the immediately
previous world conquest, of the land mass by Mongols. The story
was a familiar one to his mind, and ought to be to ours; it is
important for us to understand that the Mongol ponies were
cantering up to destroy our society root and branch, in the neigh-
bourhood of Vienna, when another pony galloped up from behind
with the news that Mangu Khan had died in Karakorum; so the
ponies all turned round and cantered back, to a family share-out of
the world conquest; and in the next generation, when they came
westwards again, it was known that the rich loot was all in the south,
so the Hounds of God destroyed the great civilisation of the Mos-
lems. This caused the Arab inferiority to ourselves which we take
for granted; but the reason we were spared was that we were
notoriously inferior to them. I thus feel irritated when students
placidly call Kublu ‘exotic’, meaning, “I won’t be bothered with
anything outside Europe”. Besides, the stories about the Khans are
terrible; if you know them, you realise that it is a startling thing to
say “That, at bottom, is what an artist is like”. The revolution which
he brings may do good in the end, but at the time, if it is any good,
it will be considered wicked as well as terrible. Coleridge was by no
means a hard man, and maybe the grimness of the meaning of the
poem, rather than its pathetic contrast with his actual failure, was
what made him twenty years later pretend that he had composed it
while asleep.
In all three poems an Inside needed to be related to an Outside, a
psychology to a history; and I think that only cases like these allow
a useful sense to Mr. Eliot’s term “objective correlative’’-one does
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not say over the telephone “DO come to dinner on Thursday; and
look, I’d be awfully pleased if you could bring your stomach with
you this time”, because it i s not expected to be detachable. The
phrase was first used about Hamlet, and there I do not see the
application. But it genuinely is I think a source of the magical power
of The Ancient Mariner that the inside can be felt to be far from the
outside (rather as the children, who have been its greatest admirers,
are not really explorers) and yet somehow they keep fitting one
another perfectly.

Sheer as a bomb-still you are all veins.

Heart-muscle’s moulded you.
Rage of heart-muscle. which is the dead, too, with their revenge.
Steel, glass-ghost
Of a predator’s mid-air body conjured
Into a sort of bottle.
Flimsy-light, like a squid’s funeral bone.
Or a surgical model
Of the uterus of The Great Mother Of The Gods.
Out of this world! One more revelation
From the purply, grumbling cloud
And vulcanism of blood.
The killer whale’s avalanching emergence
From the yawn
Of boredom this time.
Out of this world, and cruising at a hundred!
But alive, as even in blueprint you were alive,
Even as the little amoeba, flexing its lens,
Ranging in along a death-ray, is alive
With the eye that stares out through it.
What eye stares out through you?

You visor
Of a nature whose very abandoned bones
Will be an outpost of weapons.
TED HUGHES

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