Читать книгу The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Other Poems - Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Страница 6
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, philosopher and critic. A great friend of William Wordsworth, he was a founder of the Romantic movement in English literature, and is regarded as one of the most important poets of the period. He died at the age of 61, having battled lifelong ill health and an opium addiction.
Early Years
Coleridge was born in 1772 in Devon, the youngest of thirteen children of the Reverend John Coleridge, a vicar and headmaster. The reverend died when Samuel was just eight, and he was dispatched to London to attend Christ’s Hospital. There, under the tutelage of a stern but inspirational schoolmaster, he was introduced to the Greek and Roman poets as well as Shakespeare and Milton.
Musing on his school days in 1817’s Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, Coleridge recalls how the Reverend James Bowyer drilled into him that ‘poetry, even that of the loftiest and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex’. Bowyer’s approach to poetic composition was no-nonsense in the extreme, but it instilled in Coleridge a sensitivity to syntax and imagery, and sent him off to Cambridge University full of ‘good gifts’. He proved a more enthusiastic poet than student, however, accumulating large debts and a collection of juvenile poems but never completing his degree.
Idealists and Romantics
Coleridge’s education did at least serve to throw him into the company of young men who would later form his literary circle. At Christ’s Hospital he befriended Charles Lamb, and as a student he met Robert Southey, a fellow poet and idealist with whom he hatched a plan to found a commune in the wilds of America, where learning and liberty would reign supreme. In 1795 the two young men married sisters Edith and Sarah Fricker – Southey happily, Coleridge very unhappily – and plans for the commune eventually faded.
But these disappointments were soon eclipsed: that same year, Coleridge made the acquaintance of William Wordsworth, and they embarked on a poetic and philosophical collaboration that would define not only both of their careers but also the artistic legacy of their era.
In the late 1790s the two poets lived near each other in Somerset and would meet to discuss the purpose and potential of poetry. ‘Our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry,’ Coleridge wrote, ‘the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination.’ They determined to publish a joint collection of poems in which Coleridge would focus on ‘persons and characters supernatural’ while Wordsworth would celebrate ‘things of every day’. This project materialised in 1798 as Lyrical Ballads, an anthology that included some of the poems for which both men are now best known: Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ and Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’.
Lyrical Ballads is credited with bringing Romanticism to Britain. This movement was already flourishing in Germany, and it would ultimately dominate European artistic output until the mid-nineteenth century. Romanticism favoured emotion and imagination over reason and intellect, and tended to celebrate nature, heroism and spiritual experiences. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey and Lamb were soon joined by a younger generation of Romantics, including Keats, Byron and Shelley.
An Albatross Around His Neck
‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, a ballad in seven parts, is Coleridge’s longest poem. The mariner of the title detains a man who is on his way to a wedding, and insists on recounting an increasingly terrifying tale of disaster upon the high seas. Gradually the wedding guest is drawn into the frenzied narration of this ‘grey-beard loon’, for it transpires that the disaster is entirely self-inflicted. Having been driven south by inclement weather, the mariner’s vessel is caught in Antarctic ice. The sudden appearance of an albatross – a symbol of good fortune – helps them escape, but then the mariner does something inexplicably ungrateful: ‘With my cross-bow / I shot the Albatross.’
Before long this crime is roundly avenged. The ship finds itself trapped once again, this time on calm, windless waters near the equator, and supplies quite literally dry up: ‘Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink.’ The sailors rightly blame the mariner for his inauspicious murder of the albatross, and hang the bird about his neck as a sign of his disgrace. The arrival of another ship only compounds the horror, manned as it is by Death and Life-in-Death. They kill the crew but the mariner is forced to spend seven days and nights in a waking, raving nightmare. He eventually understands that it is his eternal curse and punishment to travel from ‘land to land’ recounting his ‘ghastly tale’.
The poem baffled many contemporary readers, and even Wordsworth later wrote that, for all its ‘delicate touches of passion’ and ‘felicity of language’, it nevertheless had ‘great defects’. For an 1817 reprint, in response to criticism that the poem was hard to follow, Coleridge added dozens of marginal notes explaining the plot: ‘The ancient Mariner inhospitably killeth the pious bird of good omen.’
Waking Dreams
Many of Coleridge’s poems display a visionary quality that borders on the hallucinogenic, and this is no coincidence. He had since his childhood suffered from health troubles whose symptoms were eased by opium, but by adulthood Coleridge had developed a powerful addiction to the drug that would plague the remainder of his life. He famously composed the vividly exotic ‘Kubla Khan’ in a fevered state after waking from an opium dream. This poem, like the supernatural ‘Christabel’, was never completed.
As he fell further into what he called his ‘accursed habit’ and its attendant depression, Coleridge’s life and work suffered considerably. In 1808, he finally separated from his long-suffering wife, leaving her and their three surviving children in the care of Robert Southey. By 1810 Wordsworth had become so frustrated by Coleridge’s addiction that the two poets fell out, remaining estranged for over a decade.
Coleridge spent the last eighteen years of his life at the London home of a physician friend, James Gilman, occasionally lecturing on Shakespeare and other poets and repeatedly attempting to give up his opium habit. He died in 1834.
