Character Transformation as Epic Element in S. T.

Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

Assist. Lecturer Ra’ad Kareem Abd-Aun
Napoo, Col. of Fine Arts, Univ. of Babylon, Vol. 2 (2008).

In his Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye refers to the “development

[which] occurs when a lyric on a conventional theme achieves a
concentration that expands it into a miniature epic.” (324) Frye sites
Spencer’s Epithalamion, Milton’s Lycidas, Eliot’s later poems, Edith
Sitwell’s later poems, and many Cantos of Pound’s as examples of the
miniature epic.

Warren Stevenson in his article “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as

Epic Symbol” takes Frye’s argument and applies it to Coleridge’s Rime
suggesting that it is also a miniature epic. (51) The criteria he uses as bases
of his argument are the following:

a) it is of medium length;
b) it sets out to teach a people something of their own tradition;
c) it employs the supernatural; and,
d) it involves a voyage around the world which begins and ends in
the same place.

Stevenson also sites the oral tradition of telling the story in the Rime as
another characteristic that makes it a miniature epic. (51-2)

I would like to add another characteristic, and that is character

transformation. The Rime is the story of a sailor who sets out on a journey.
He kills an albatross which he and his shipmates believe to be a bird of ill-
omen after believing it was the opposite. The mariner and the crew are
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punished for their crime. However, when the Mariner blesses the water-
snakes he rejected earlier, the punishment ends and is journeyed back in the
vessel to his country by a group of angelic beings.

What triggers forgiveness is the acceptance of life. In a letter to

William Sotheby, Coleridge says that “everything has a life of its own, and
that we are all One Life.” (864) Humphry House comments on this point
saying that water-snakes “stand for all ‘happy living things’ ” (l. 282) and
that the “first phase of redemption, the recovery of love and the recovery of
the power to prayer, depends on the recognition of [the Mariner’s] kinship
[…] with other natural characters.” (184-5) Earlier when the mariner tried to
pray “A wicked whisper came, and made/My heart as dry as dust.” (ll. 246-
7) The final two stanzas in Part 4 show the opposite:

“O happy living things! no tongue

Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware;
Surely kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware.

“The selfsame moment I could pray;

And from my neck so free
The albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.” (ll. 282-91)
However, the concluding six stanzas of Part 4 and which comprise the
character transformation of the Mariner have more in them than what have
been said. The section begins with this stanza:

“The moving moon went up the sky,

And nowhere did abide:
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside – (ll. 263-6)

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The final phrase in the gloss to this stanza announces the beginning of the
change within the mariner: “and yet there is silent joy in their arrival.” For
the first time in the poem, the moon is described in positive terms, “softly”
and “joy”. Earlier the moon was a sign of doom:

The horned moon, with one bright star

Within the nether tip.

“One after one, by the star-dogged Moon,

Too quick for groan or sigh,
Each turned his face with a ghastly pang,
And cursed me with his eye. (ll. 210-15)

The moon is the harbinger of evil and Coleridge in a manuscript note

says that “it is a common superstition among sailors that something evil is
about to happen whenever a star dogs the moon.” (Anderson and Buckler,
718n) It lost its ill-omen quality when it shone with full splendor and helped
[page 186] reassuring the Mariner that good might come out of all of this.

Also, the sea is no longer a witch’s caldron where abominations

abound as it used to be:

“The very deep did rot: O Christ!

That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea. (ll. 123-6)
* * *
“The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I. (ll. 236-9)

In fact, the sea is “bemocked” by the moon, i.e., it is no longer a

threat, and the stanza gives a sharp contrast between two extremities: heat
and cold. The water is burning a “still and awful red” while the moonbeams

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are like “April hoar-frost”. The image prepares the reader for the blessing
that is to fall on the Mariner and which will end his suffering: it will
extinguish the fire of thirst, the fire on the sea surface, and the fire inside the
Mariner caused by his guilt for the death of his shipmates. The use of
“April” also signifies the return of life after death. However, the Mariner
“penance more will do.” (l. 409) The flames of torment will be replaced, not
with the tranquil warmth of life, but with the “hoar-frost” ice-cold spectral
half-life, a death-in-life condition (l. 586) which is hardly a life. The Mariner
will be a dark and cold figure, “like night”, (l. 586) who is unable to socially
mingle like the Wedding-Guest.

The stanzas move on systematically: the Mariner's eye moves

from the moon whose beams “bemock the sultry main”, (l. 277) to the sea
“where the ship’s huge shadow lay”, and from there to the pivotal point of
his redemption: the water-snakes. The two stanzas that follow describe the
water-snakes within and without the shadow of the ship, through an
“exquisite structural balance of two stanzas which answer each other, phrase
upon phrase”: (Lowes, 60)

“Beyond the shadow of the ship,

I watched the water-snakes:
They moved in tracks of shining white,
And when they reared, the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes.

“Within the shadow of the ship

I watched their rich attire:
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire. (ll. 272-81)

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 The Mariner watches the water-snakes “Beyond the shadow of the
ship”. The water-snakes move in “tracks of shining white” and when they
“reared, the elfish light/Fell off in hoary flakes.” Again, Coleridge uses the
word “hoary” in association with the water-snakes. The lively beginning of
this sequence is emphasized by the use of the words “shining white”, “elfish
light”, and “hoary”. Different descriptions were used with the "creatures of
the great calm":

“The very deep did rot: O Christ!

That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea. (ll. 242-3)
* * *
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I. (ll. 238-9)

The Mariner is undergoing a transformation that will alter his perceptions

and moral values and will redeem him.

In the second stanza, similar terminology is used: “rich attire”, “blue,

glossy green, and velvet black”, “flash”, and “golden fire.” Interestingly, fire
is now “golden” and is no longer part of the Mariner’s curse but it has
become a sign of his blessing.

Coleridge continues building up his stanzas gradually to the point

when the mariner blesses the water-snakes:

“O happy living things! no tongue

Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware;
Surely my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware. (ll. 272-7)

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The Mariner believes that his guardian saint “took pity” on him and made
him bless the water-snakes “unaware”. Coleridge repeats the word
“unaware” twice in the stanza in order to emphasize the fact that the act of
blessing is an unconscious one. However, this act happens without the help
of an exterior agent. The Mariner thinks that his saint is behind it because of
his earlier inability to pray. (ll. 272-7) Like the act of shooting the albatross
which was based on the Mariner’s accumulative assumption that the
albatross is a fiend: “God save thee, ancient Mariner!\From the fiends, that
plague thee thus! –” (ll. 79-80), the act of [page 187] blessing the water-
snakes is also an accumulative act which was built up after being exposed to
the wonders of nature and “God’s creatures of the great calm” after a long
and agonizing deprivation. The Mariner’s ability to appreciate beauty and
life has never died because he feels the gone beauty of his shipmates. (l.
236) He is a human being who can appreciate the “One Life” and only needs
a strong drive to awaken it up.

The final stanza describes the Mariner’s release from the sign of guilt
which was hung around his neck by his shipmates, the dead albatross:

“The selfsame moment I could pray;

And from my neck so free
The albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.” (ll. 288-91)

The fact that the Mariner was able to pray is the only natural result of his
blessing the water-snakes. Geoffrey Hartman discussing Coleridge refers to
the “link […] between a stasis in nature and a stasis in the soul.” (47) Nature
around the Mariner came to a stand still and was almost rotting dead because
the Mariner himself was morally and spiritually dead by violating the
“Oneness” of nature by killing the albatross. His inability to pray came from

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within: “A wicked whisper came, and made/My heart as dry as dust ” (ll.
246-7) and so is his ability to pray. All nature came back to life when the
Mariner accepted its all-binding law. In other words, he broke the stasis of
nature when he broke the stasis within him and blessed the water snakes.

The parallel in the stasis between nature and the Mariner opens the
way to the suggestion of another parallel between the structure of the
sequence and the change that befell the Mariner: an iconic parallel. In Style
in Fiction, Leech and Short say that “literary expression tend to have not
only a PRESENTATIONAL function … but a REPRESENTATIONAL function
(miming the meaning that it expresses)”. (233) They continue their argument
about the “iconic element of language” (233) saying that “A code is iconic to
the extent that it imitates, in its signals or textual forms, the meaning that
they represent.” (233) Fischer and Nanny argue that “iconicity is basic to all
human beings – not only to poets – and to their use and comprehension of
language.” (4) A closer look at the sequence of the poem that was discussed
will clarify this point.

The general atmosphere of the section is completely different from the

beginning of Part 4. It is lively and optimistic. The moon ceases to be a sign
of doom and is no longer “dogged” by a star. It softly moves in the sky in its
full splendor. The water-snakes are no longer a source of disgust to the
Mariner, and taken by the splendor of nature and its beings, he blesses them.
The section opens with these two stanzas:

“I fear thee, ancient Mariner!

I fear thy skinny hand!
And thou art long, and lank, and brown,
As is the ribbed sea-sand.

“I fear thee and thy glittering eye,

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 And thy skinny hand, so brown.” –
“Fear not, fear not, thou Wedding-Guest!
This body dropt not down. (ll. 224-31)

A sense of fear is dominant and the Wedding-Guest’s description of

the Mariner adds to the gothic atmosphere of the stanzas. The Mariner adds
to this atmosphere by emphasizing his loneliness, through repetition, and his
separation from the grace of God in the middle of a vast ocean:

“Alone, alone, all, all alone

Alone on a wide, wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony. (ll. 232-5)

Disgust of the creatures of the sea and envy for the grace in which the dead
men lie is expressed in lines 236-9:

“The many men, so beautiful!

And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.

The Mariner’s stasis of the soul is emphasized in lines 244-7:

“I look to heaven, and tried to pray;

But or ever a prayer had gusht,
A wicked whisper came, and made
My heart as dry as dust.

The rest of the stanzas focus on other agonies the Mariner suffers: lack of
sleep, the strange preservation of the dead men’s corpses and the look on
their faces. (ll. 248-62) So when the Mariner begins to feel the beauty of
nature, (l. 265) nature begins to loosen its grip on him and starts relieving
him by a splendid show of colours (ll. 274-6, [page 188] 279, 281), and
finally let go of him when he admitted its mastery and his belongingness.
Clearly Coleridge is taking us on a “voyage into the interior” (Grant, 122) of
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the Mariner. What happens outside is a mirror reflection, an icon, of what
was happening inside.

The poem abounds with other instances of such iconic employment of

language, such as lines (103-110) which are of the most celebrated lines in
English poetry. Lines (45-50) are another example of Coleridge’s craft in
using words to draw a picture in words. Indeed, the poem is an icon of
human sin and redemption.

Coleridge, then, uses all the resources of language to clearly portray a

character who sets out on a journey, unaware of the fact that it will turn into
a human epic, with him as the protagonist who goes through all its hardships
to wake up a “sadder” but a “wiser” (l. 642) man with a genuine appreciation
for life in all of its forms. [page 189]

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Works Cited:
 Coleridge, S. T. “Letter to William Sotheby.” 10 Sept. 1802. Letter 459
in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Earl Leslie Griggs.
Vol. 2. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956. 862-7. Questia, 20 July 2007
<http://www.questia.com>.
 Coleridge, S. T. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” The Literature of
England. Eds. George K. Anderson and William E. Buckler. Illinois:
Scott, Foresman and Company, 1967. 714-23.
 Fischer, Olga and Max Nanny. “Introduction: Iconicity and Nature.”
EJES (5:1) 2001: 3-16. Blackwell Synergy, 19 Nov. 2005
<www.blackwell-synergy.com>.
 Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1971.
 Grant, Allen. A Preface to Coleridge. London: Longman Group Ltd.,
1972.
 Hartman, Geoffrey. “Representation in The Ancient Mariner.” Samuel
Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Ed. Harold Bloom.
NY: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986. 45-9. Questia, 12 April 2005
<http://www.questia.com>.
 House, Humphry. “The Ancient Mariner.” English Romantic Poets:
Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. M. H. Abrams. NY: OUP, 1966. 170-
95.
 Leech, N. Geoffrey and Michael H. Short. Style in Fiction. London:
Longman Group UK Ltd., 1981.
 Lowes, John Livingston. The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of
Imagination. NY: Vintage Books, 1959.

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 Stevenson, Warren. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as Epic Symbol.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Ed. Harold
Bloom. NY: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986. 51-6. Questia, 12 April
2005 <http://www.questia.com>.

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 ‫تغّير الشخصية عنصرًا ملحميًا في قصيدة ساميول تايلور كولردج أنشودة البحار‬
‫العجوز‬

‫تعد قصيدة أنشودة البحار العجوز من قصائد الشاعر الرومانسي اإلنكليزي سامويل تايلور‬

‫كولردج المهمة والتي تناولها الكثير من النقاد والكتاب بالبحث والتحليل المستفيضين‪.‬‬

‫وب رغم ك ون القص يدة تنتمي لص نف القص ائد الش عبية األدبي ة (‪ )literary ballad‬إال أنه ا‬

‫تتج اوز ه ذا التص نيف الض يق ل ترتقي إلى مرتب ة الملحم ة‪ .‬فالقص يدة تع الج رحل ة وع ذابات بح ار‬

‫يرتكب جريمة بحق الطبيعة والحياة‪ .‬فيعاقب ألجل ذلك وال ترفع عنه العقوبة حتى يتقبل ما كان قد‬

‫رفضه من مخلوقات الطبيعة في السابق‪.‬‬

‫يتن اول ه ذا البحث اح د الج وانب الملحمي ة للقص يدة وه و ج انب تغّي ر الشخص ية‪ .‬حيث أن‬

‫البحار العجوز يقوم بقتل طير قطرس فيعاقب على فعلته‪ .‬وتتنوع عقوباته من جسدية كفقدان النوم‬

‫والعطش إلى نفس ية وهي اإلحاط ة بم اء البح ر والنظ رة على وج ه رفاق ه البح ارة المي تين على ظه ر‬

‫السفينة‪ .‬إال أن البحار ووسط هذا العذاب يجد في نفسه القدرة على مباركة مخلوقات المحيط لجمالها‬

‫الذي بهره فيرفع عن نفسه العقوبة التي كان قد أنزلها عليه‪.‬‬

‫يعد هذا التغير من خصائص القصيدة الملحمية حيث أن بطل الملحمة يمر بهكذا تغّي ر والذي‬

‫هو مفتاح تحرره من عذاباته وعودته إلى وطنه كما هو الحال في هذه القصيدة‪.‬‬

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