Essay On Coleridge Essay Research Paper Question

Essay On Coleridge Essay, Research Paper

Question: How does any writer on the course treat the figure of the social outcast or outsider.

For the purposes of this assignment I will be examining two of Coleridge s most notable poetic works; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan . From The Rime I will be examining the poets treatment of the Mariner himself and from Kubla Khan both Kubla Khan and the unnamed poetic presence that is makes its self know at end of the poem.

At first the Mariner may not immediately seem like a social outcast or outsider because in terms of the thematic nature of the poem more dramatic and relevant features of his character are more instantly notable. However, examination of the text shows otherwise;

Alone, alone, all, all alone,

Alone on a wide, wide sea!

This small extract needs very little explanation. It is quite clear that Coleridge intends The Mariner to be a character who, may not have been out cast from society, but has certainly been placed into a situation of indisputable solitude.

And they all dead did lie,

And a thousand thousand slimy things

Lived on; and so did I.

Here we have the poet, and indeed the Mariner himself, including the wayward seaman with the thousand slimy things . It is important to note that here they are not referred to as creatures or beings or any other description that would imply that they are of earthly origins. Instead they are referred to simply as things .

O Wedding Guest! this soul hath been

Alone on a wide wide sea:

So lonely twas, that god himself

Scarce seemed there to be.

and:

Like one, that on a lonesome road

Doth walk in fear and dread.

The combination of the strength of connotation of the words Alone , lonely , Scare , lonesome , fear and dread acts turn simple loneliness into a complicated psychological state. This is a state whereby fear and dread come from the experience of loneliness. In turn, this loneliness, is a result of the remorse the Mariner feels concerning the slaying of the Albatross. In his essay The Mariner and the Albatross , George Whalley comments:

Life-in Death meant to Coleridge a mixture of remorse and loneliness. Yet loneliness is perhaps too gentle and human a word; let us say aloneness . It is precisely this combination of remorse and aloneness with which the Mariner s experience is steeped.

The Mariner suffers aloneness , is plagued by remorse regarding an action he cannot undo and he is fearful. He is set aside from his shipmates, because they have died and he still lives and he is accompanied only by slimy things which share in his pitiful state of existence. One might call this state of existence Life-in-Death . It would seem fair to me to say then; that the Mariner is an outsider. He is a god fearing, holy man, and as such has been set aside from all he holds dear by one irrational act. To justify this point, I note that John Beer writes in his introduction to the poem;

The shooting of the albatross is only one blatant example of all the offences against life by which men cut themselves off from the central harmony of creation.

The Rime places its central figure in a position whereby he inadvertently commits a sin. The Albatross does after all seem to bring with it the fog that leads to the boat drifting. For this, the Mariner suffers a heavy penance and is pushed to brink of madness. In the midst of this an unconscious faculty of his humanity restores him in the eyes of god, and he is whisked from danger by divine intervention.

Beyond the shadow of the ship,

I watched 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:

Sure my kind saint took pity on me,

And I blessed them unaware.

The saint restores temporary life to his crew and he is sailed back to his country by supernatural motion where he is rescued and begins his final, and eternal penance. The moral of The Rime can, and has been interpreted in many different manners. Of these I will suggest two. Firstly the sequence of; sin, repentance and then rescue and eternal penance can quite simply be interpreted as religious fable, detailing the way in which a sinner can, at any time, achieve salvation. The Rime makes the point that the unfortunate Dr Faustus most certainly missed. Certainly the poem is heavy with religious symbolism; i.e. the sun, the moon and the serpents, the song of the divine beings who inhabit the sailors bodies and the luridly illustrated figures of Death and Life-in-Death .

Alternatively, if we remember that the Mariner was unaware when he blesses the serpents and achieves redemption, just as he was unaware of the consequences of carelessly slaying the albatross, then we might see the poem as extolling the virtue of a reverence for life, without need of a God, except as a symbolic figure.

The Mariner is most likely an allegorical figure, and very much a personal expression of the character of Coleridge himself. In the above referenced essay Whalley provides a wealth of evidence for this conclusion. In this light, Coleridge s treatment of the Mariner, seems to look very much like a treatment on him

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