Rime
of the Ancient Mariner
By Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Newsgroups: soc.culture.iranian
From: Sam Ghandchi
Subject: Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Date:
The following are from "THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER" of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), the English poet and critic. Coleridge was from a generation who had seen the atrocities that the French Revolution had committed against its own children. This may be interesting as one looks at the Iranian Revolution.
Many of Coleridge's friends became fascist anti-revolutionaries after that experience. But some became liberal. Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner expresses the regrets, apology, and the desire for forgiveness by the ones who were tired of the excesses of that Revolution, in a beautiful poetic expression:
The old sea-faring man gets to tell his story to a guest
who is going to a Wedding. The Mariner says how his
ship sailed in good wind and fair until it was drawn by a
storm to the South Pole. The land of ice, and fearful
sounds, where no living thing was to be seen.
Till a great seabird, called Albatross, came through the
snow-fog, and was received with great joy and
hospitality, And lo! the Albatross proveth a bird of good
omen, and followeth the ship as it returned northward
through fog and floating ice.
"At length did cross an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God's name.
"It ate the food it ne'er had eat,
And round and round it flew.
The ice did split with a thunder-fit;
The helmsman steered us through!
"And a good south wind sprung up behind;
The Albatross did follow,
And every day, for food or play,
Came to the mariners' hollo!
"In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,
It perched for vespers nine;
Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,
Glimmered the white Moon-shine.
"God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus!-
Why look'st thou so?" - With my cross-bow
I shot the Albatross"
The ancient Mariner inhospitably killeth the pious bird of
good omen. His shipmates cry out against the ancient
Mariner for killing the bird of good luck. But when the
fog cleared off, they justify the same, and thus make
themselves accomplices in the crime. But a plague befalls
on them and shipmates drop down dead one after
another. Miraculously, The Ancient Mariner is saved in
the Pilot's boat. But the penitence of life befalls on him.
"Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.
"I pass like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.
"Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
"He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
"The Mariner, whose eye is bright,
Whose beard with age is hoar,
Is gone: and now the Wedding-Guest
Turned from the Bridegroom's door.
"He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn."
The use of masculine pronouns for undefined third
person singular is in the old 1834 edition.