00:03:08.540it will just be pure analysis of the actual poem itself, because there is simply so much to say
00:03:16.360about it. And it is ever since I first discovered it, when I did English literature at college,
00:03:22.640it was always one of my absolute favorites and one that I really need no convincing to return to.
00:03:29.360So it deserves definitely two parts. So let's start talking about Coleridge himself. So he was
00:03:36.420born in 1772 in the small village of Otterley on the River Otter in East Devon. So as you can
00:03:44.700imagine, very, very peaceful, very tranquil life. Honestly, I'm quite envious. But he lived there.
00:03:51.320And what's remarkable as well, he was the youngest of 10 children between John and Anne Coleridge,
00:03:58.980his parents and of those eight were brothers and he had only one sister who unfortunately didn't
00:04:06.920wasn't destined to be too long for this world and many have his he actually went on to outlive
00:04:13.540most of his family this is our Coleridge that we're talking about well into 1834 dying in his
00:04:21.54060s due to complications that we'll talk about later. But Coleridge's life is quite an interesting
00:04:29.080one. So his father was both headmaster and local vicar for the parish in Otterley. Coleridge
00:04:36.880definitely grew up in a family where faith was very important, both in the household and within
00:04:42.860the community as well. And also his father was quite a benevolent, if not a bit buffoonish and
00:04:49.200an eccentric sort of a man. But he was very paternal, right? And he really nurtured
00:04:54.980Little Coleridge's fascination with his books and with his vivid, almost natural imagination.
00:05:03.600Coleridge grew up a very, very precocious child. As soon as he could get out there and he was old
00:05:09.200enough to go to the pub with his uncle, he was always, and for all of his life, really, right up
00:05:15.260until he would spend his final decades living in Highgate, which I suppose wasn't actually
00:05:21.480probably a part of London right then as it is now, but its own separate place.
00:05:26.640But he was regarded then as the sage of Highgate. Coleridge is a guy that most people seem to have
00:05:33.480had just a very, very positive impression of, an immense conversationalist, a remarkable passion,
00:05:40.760as women recounted not attractive on the surface but give him five minutes to talk to you and he
00:05:49.120will just sweep your heart away right that's kind of the guy he seems to have been he's very close
00:05:54.100to everyone in fact it seems apart from his own children as he would go on to have and also his
00:06:00.240wife he was um he was a distant father himself and an even more distant husband part of that was
00:06:06.500because it was something of a loveless marriage.
00:06:09.840And of course, he far preferred intellectual discussion with the men, the great men of his age.
00:06:15.740So Coleridge grew up in this household and his father passed away when he was very, very young.
00:06:23.280And this unfortunately left Coleridge with his mother.
00:06:27.540Now, his mother was a very grim, very brittle, very, very harsh woman.
00:06:33.260She wasn't a woman who had a great deal of natural warmth about her, which I have to say is not particularly great when you're the mother of 10.
00:06:45.820But this meant that because Coleridge didn't get on with his mother very much at all, it meant that he spent a great deal of his time alone.
00:06:55.700And Coleridge was a very lonely child growing up, in fact, very lonely indeed.
00:07:00.520But this meant that in that loneliness, he filled his hours reading Arabian Nights and Robinson Crusoe and all of the great poetry to come before him.
00:07:12.340And he was someone who had a remarkable imagination, even as a child.
00:07:17.980And this is, you see so much of the material in Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, hearkening back to some of Coleridge's earliest experiences of literature.
00:07:29.460and it just being a real coming together of so many influences
00:07:35.040that he gathered through his time both at home
00:07:39.840and then later on at Christ's Hospital, which he moved to in 1782
00:07:45.680and was a very brutal place, to be honest with you.
00:07:49.000The headmaster was a very liberal flogger.
00:07:52.940But it did yield one great benefit to his life,
00:07:56.340which was a lifelong friendship with writer, critic, philosopher Charles Lamb as well,
00:08:03.880who he went on to have a very wonderful professional relationship with.
00:08:08.740But as time went on, Coleridge ended up in a position where he was always broke, right?
00:08:15.860He was always struggling. He was always in debt.
00:08:19.440And when actually when Christ's Hospital granted him a scholarship to Cambridge
00:08:23.700because they saw his natural aptitude and his passion for poetry and literature and writing.
00:08:30.880So Christ's Hospital gave him a scholarship to go to Christ's College at Cambridge,
00:08:40.580And there he wrote all sorts of things like Greek, sapphic poetry,
00:08:46.960speaking out against the slave trade at the time,
00:08:49.380which was, of course, a very popular topic throughout the population itself.
00:08:54.200It's funny in a way, you see, even if it was an issue that didn't have a great amount of political capital and power within Parliament,
00:09:02.740it was one of the many things that the actual people of England really wanted to talk about.
00:09:09.000And of course, all of those famous abolitionists of the time, Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce as well, Granville Sharp,
00:09:17.320All of these people were obviously handing out the pamphlets and trying to get the voice and get the message out there all across the country.
00:09:25.900And this was something that really touched on Coleridge's heart.
00:09:28.780And indeed, like most men of their generation, of any generation, in fact, he was his uni years were defined by radicalism.
00:09:37.080When the French Revolution broke out in 1789, Coleridge was a great supporter of it.
00:09:43.660And then as time went on, of course, he came to temper his own expectations of such things and such volatile occurrences and certainly found himself more aligned with the Burkean vein of thinking about all of this.
00:10:00.000One of the other main things that, of course, dominates any true assessment of the life of Coleridge was his lifelong opium addiction.
00:10:10.580Now, at the time, laudanum was a very, very accessible drug.
00:10:14.840It was very easy to come by and was prescribed very liberally.
00:10:19.300And unfortunately, because of an ailment that Coleridge had, he ended up being prescribed some laudanum and found himself before he knew it.
00:10:28.160before, you know, he had any real personal say in the matter, being entirely dependent on it,
00:10:34.040the withdrawal symptoms being overwhelming with pain. And he ended up being hooked on opium for
00:10:41.620the rest of his life. And there were many accounts, certainly in his later life of him trying
00:10:46.840to sever himself off from it because he knew it was terrible for him. He knew it was damaging him
00:10:53.220and killing him. But at the same time, he couldn't break away from the addiction that had basically
00:10:59.620been with him for most of his life. Though, of course, as well, something has to be said for the
00:11:04.480fact that were it not for his opium addiction, we may not have had, in fact, we almost certainly
00:11:12.320wouldn't have had some of his most famous and cherished works, such as Kublai Khan, which he
00:11:19.320wrote after falling into an opium-induced sleep for about three hours and then having these really
00:11:25.220vivid drug-addled dreams and then coming to and writing the beginning of Kublai Khan, which
00:11:31.940Coleridge tells us was disrupted by some local man coming to knock about some local business
00:11:39.060on his door and it breaking Coleridge's concentration and him not finishing it. Whether or not this is
00:11:44.480just cope in an excuse. We don't know. But that's the story
00:11:47.420that's told to us. Coleridge eventually wanted to obviously
00:11:52.580get out there and make a name for himself. He wanted to become
00:11:55.940a poet and he made all sorts of plans with some of his radical
00:12:01.340Cambridge friends. There was even an idea waived at the time
00:12:05.160to go to America and start something that they called a
00:12:09.560a pantisocracy, which was really sort of like a proto commune type idea, not in the Marxist
00:12:19.080sense of the idea, more in the Epicurean sense, I presume. Because what Coleridge was doing was
00:12:25.760he was looking at the radical elements and just the suffering that was brought on by these grand
00:12:34.560sweeping movements and these grand political ideologies of the time and he thought well
00:12:39.660pure maybe true spiritual revolution like moral elevation of the human condition can only begin
00:12:48.480on a smaller scale and so what we'll do is we'll start this pantisocracy and we'll dedicate it to
00:12:54.480there'll be me and some of my close friends and our wives and everything and we'll go out to
00:12:59.960America together and we'll try to build just a small society
00:13:04.760based around trying to create as a microcosm of moral
00:13:09.260excellence. And then from there, try and grow it out and bring
00:13:14.480more people into its way of thinking. I mean, this is all
00:13:17.520very, very fanciful, of course, very, very juvenile stuff. But
00:13:22.280nonetheless, you know, they were they were dealing with a very
00:13:25.300radical time. And I think that it seemed like so many things
00:13:29.580that had until then not been thought possible, were.
00:13:34.760And these Enlightenment thinkers were, of course,
00:13:37.520very much taken by the ideals of the French Revolution,
00:13:55.240and though he was in favour of the French Revolution,
00:13:57.900One thing that really made him distinct from the other sort of radicals of his age was that Coleridge was never willing to do away with his Christian faith when he came into contact with other liberals in London society, such as William Godwin.
00:14:17.620These are circles that were predominantly made up of atheists and people who thought of atheism as a way forward.
00:14:26.860And Coleridge always held firm on holding true to Christian principle and his unwavering faith.
00:14:35.540And even in, you see this in Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, and it's something that the great, one of the great thinkers, I believe, of our time, Malcolm Gite.
00:14:47.640If you're not familiar with him, certainly check out his YouTube channel.
00:14:51.860But you go on to see how Coleridge, through the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, it's an allegory for so many different,
00:15:00.720It's obviously a voyage of faith, as Guy himself describes it,
00:15:06.460but also as well, it's allegorical for the creative process of the artist
00:15:12.020and trying to create something brilliant.
00:15:17.260And Coleridge always wanted to be remembered as a great poet and a great writer.
00:15:22.200But the problem was that as he was in his Cambridge years, he was absolutely broke.
00:15:27.480and he was so in debt and so penniless, bless him, that he was verging on the point of suicide
00:15:33.460which is a great tragedy when anyone does it and would have been an even greater
00:15:37.700tragedy were we not to be blessed with the later life of Coleridge himself
00:15:42.220and all that he was yet to do and be remembered for.
00:15:45.540But Coleridge went on to enlist in the army because he became so desperate just to take a wage
00:15:53.080And then fortunately, though he was never deployed overseas, he actually ended up in Henley looking after a soldier who was dying of smallpox.
00:16:01.800And then eventually he was released from the army with the help of some of his brothers who were also in the army at that time.
00:16:09.500But then in the middle of the 1790s, things would change for Coleridge forever when he was approached by Josiah Wedgwood II and his brother Thomas, who were the children of noted industrialist and potter, also Josiah Wedgwood, who offered him an annuity of £150 to write then a great poem, to write some great poetry.
00:16:35.000because they could see the potential in Coleridge.
00:16:37.820They could see that burning passion and desire
00:16:40.000and also one of the most remarkable imaginations
00:19:12.940and I'm sure they were just some of the most remarkable days for them
00:19:17.360but it's in this that Coleridge and Wordsworth
00:19:21.460this is before Coleridge just came into that annuity I was just speaking about
00:19:25.840So he's still desperately trying to scrape some money together.
00:19:30.120And he and Wordsworth came up with the idea of, well, why don't we just, you know, write ourselves some quick ballads and some poetry and, you know, send it off to maybe a magazine or buy it off us.
00:19:44.000And Wordsworth thought, you know, could get a fiver for it.
00:19:46.740So this is how it began. And they'd based it upon a dream that Wordsworth had heard from someone who was local.
00:19:56.900A dream about a haunting at sea and some dark dream of being out on sea as a mariner.
00:20:04.380And so this was one of the inspirations that served for it.
00:20:08.680But very strangely, in this case, actually, Coleridge began to outright Wordsworth and he was just totally taken and struck by the inspiration that he'd been desperately looking for.
00:20:22.280And so basically most of the Rhyme and Ancient Mariner, save a very few number of references and I believe a few lines, it really is solely Coleridge's work in this case, though it was first issued in the joint work of lyric ballads that Wordsworth and Coleridge put together.
00:20:45.200And what's interesting about this as well is that Coleridge and Wordsworth were looking at the neoclassical forms of poetry I was speaking about, and they wanted to return to something that they saw more traditionally English and Scottish, right?
00:21:02.740Because obviously the poets like Pope and Dryden, they're all basing themselves off of Horace and Greco-Roman writers from antiquity and trying to hold themselves to those standards of poetry to recapture the magic of that age and those virtues that were highly regarded back then.
00:21:24.320But Wordsworth and Coleridge are writing in reaction to the French Revolution, in reaction to industrialisation, and that means the huge displacements of people up and down England and Scotland as more and more people evacuated their rural heartlands and where their ancestors would have been, of course, for hundreds and hundreds of years to go and seek working factories throughout the cities.
00:21:50.400And so with all of this displacement of peoples around the land and people losing their local connections and ties, Coleridge and Wordsworth are writing to try and preserve something traditional about English and Scottish culture.
00:22:05.840And one of those things was the lyric ballad, these grand medieval lyric ballads that they're doing.
00:22:13.920And so the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner is in the ballad form and it gives the entire thing.
00:22:20.960Not only was it good enough for Iron Maiden, but it also gives the entire thing this fantastic unfolding, this dreamlike progression to it.
00:22:31.240And, you know, you can really have fun with the tempo of it and you can barrel it forward as things get intense or you can slow it down as things get intimate.
00:22:40.140And it's really fun to play with when you read it out loud.
00:22:44.480For Wordsworth particularly, he wanted to get away from the neoclassical era.
00:22:50.880He wanted to get away from the sort of elevated language and the classical allusions
00:22:56.880and try to bring about a poetry that was much more rustic, much more ordinary,
00:23:03.760that was spoken in the language of everyday people.
00:23:07.260Now, to avoid confusion, in fact, Coleridge's Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner
00:23:10.840doesn't adhere to that whatsoever, really.
00:23:13.780In fact, this version that I've got here is, I think, Coleridge's third personal revision of the poem himself.
00:23:22.760And generally speaking, it was always towards diluting and trying to make more accessible the very purposefully archaic choices of language, medieval choices of language, that the original 1798 version of the poem had.
00:23:40.160And in fact, one of the reasons Wordsworth had a little bit of a gripe that he thought that one of the reasons why the lyric ballads didn't immediately become successful was because it was hamstrung by Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.
00:23:55.340But as we'll see later on, this came to become a very greatly adored poem in its own right.
00:24:01.760But nonetheless, Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner does still have many of the hallmarks of romantic literature.
00:24:07.880It puts a focus on, not on gods and kings and antiquity, but on the lives of the ordinary.
00:24:16.440And that's what we see just in this person, in the tale of this ancient mariner.
00:24:24.620He's no one in any other time would be anyone of significant consequence.
00:24:29.880And yet he goes on this profound spiritual journey that is just as powerful and has the
00:24:36.080opportunity to change the lives of other people for the better as much as any aristocrat ever
00:24:44.140could and of course the other thing that is always at the forefront of or a hallmark of romantic
00:24:50.960poetry is of course the presence of nature within the poem we obviously talked about this quite
00:24:57.940a lot when we did that two-parter on Wuthering Heights and how much Bronte employs nature into
00:25:05.020that as a character in and of itself and that's certainly something that you see in rhyming ancient
00:25:11.040marin as well taking nature away from being something uh that is merely window dressing and
00:25:18.340is you know can create very idyllic imagery but really is something that is an active participant
00:25:24.460in the story itself in the tale itself something that has a will of its own and something that
00:25:31.940mankind actually have to reckon with and you can see this obviously being a strong reaction
00:25:38.340to the industrial revolution i mean this is very much immortalized by william blake of course who
00:25:45.060wrote the original lyrics slash poem for jerusalem you know about those dark satanic mills uh this is
00:25:52.900all very much in reaction to that and what they saw as a spoiling of the land and of course that
00:25:58.580kind of trajectory follows all the way through to Tolkien when he's writing The Lord of the Rings
00:26:04.300and certainly, you know, further on into our day with more insufferable sorts of environmental
00:26:11.500voices. But nonetheless, it's definitely present in there and is the source of some wisdom. And
00:26:17.680the last thing as well to say about it before we read it as well and something to be mindful is
00:26:22.160The level of feeling put into it as well, as opposed to the neoclassical poetry that put a great deal of emphasis on logic and decorum and reason.
00:26:36.000And when you read those poems, they're just very orderly as they are.
00:26:41.080You know, the romantics were really involved.
00:26:43.880I mean, and obviously Byron himself would go on to immortalize this in the figure of the Byronic hero.
00:26:49.860But it's really about a man who is feeling the emotions and it's about letting the words revel in the volatility of the emotional state and how these experiences make you feel on the inside and how through that feeling you can arrive at greater moral clarity about a situation.
00:27:11.160And so The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner is a poem that really focuses in on the mariner's psychological state.
00:27:19.560It's something that forces you to indulge in his loneliness, in his fear, in his relief towards the end.
00:27:27.800And all of these things, it really makes a point of the emotional state and the emotional stakes of the poem.
00:27:35.620So, with all that said, I think that I've front-loaded this with a good enough amount
00:27:41.840of information for you to get us started off, and like I say, we'll discuss the entire analysis
00:27:47.280of the poem next week. But for now, let us read, and let me regale you with the tale