The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW： Chronicles #48 ｜ The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

00:00:00.000 Hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome back to Chronicles where this week we're going to be

00:00:18.500 talking all about The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Very very famous poem

00:00:26.020 of course and i happen to have um quite a nice edition of it myself on this occasion i i think

00:00:31.380 i bought it at um some second-hand bookstore in tewkesbury but it's actually a folio edition so

00:00:37.860 got some wonderful uh sketchings in in it anyway but the point is this is a very very famous poem

00:00:43.860 and deservedly so because not only was it a part of the lyric ballads a joint effort from coleridge

00:00:51.060 and his lifelong friend William Wordsworth in 1798, but it was also in lyric ballads that most

00:00:59.780 people attribute to the very beginning of the Romantic period as well, the Romantic movement,

00:01:05.940 moving away from the older forms of Augustine and neoclassical poetry by the likes of Alexander

00:01:13.460 Pope and Dryden and moving away here to something that's trying to evoke something very, very

00:01:20.260 different and very, very powerful. I would also be remiss not to just mention the fact that there

00:01:25.720 is an absolutely stellar Iron Maiden song based on this. So if you're a metalhead, then definitely

00:01:32.760 go and check that out. But let's talk a little bit before all of this about Coleridge. In fact,

00:01:38.640 before we even do that, I'll just explain to you how I'm going to format this particular

00:01:43.760 episode of Chronicles. So I'm going to split this into two parts. I've made this decision not only

00:01:49.560 because I've had quite a lot of things on at the moment but also as well you know when I do sit

00:01:54.880 down to record these chronicles I really like to go into them in great detail and so it was really

00:02:01.360 the question of basically doing a night's worth of sprucing up and research beforehand or giving

00:02:07.220 myself the real dedicated time to sit with it to ponder it and ultimately do it the justice that

00:02:13.560 both I think the poem and you who are giving me your time and attention of course deserve

00:02:17.920 And so how we're going to do it is in this first part of Chronicles, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about Coleridge's life, because it's very, very interesting and I think something definitely worth discussing.

00:02:32.100 And then we're going to read, well, I'm going to read the poem in its entirety, which will be about half an hour.

00:02:39.980 So a bit like when we did T.S. Eliot's Wasteland and I just read the entire poem.

00:02:45.200 this is definitely one that justifies doing that as well and I hope as well unlike T.S. Eliot's

00:02:54.100 very very modernist abstract you know prose I think this one should have sort of a cadence and

00:03:01.200 a rhythm that most people can really get behind so I think you'll enjoy that and then next week

00:03:07.360 in part two it will just be pure analysis of the actual poem itself because there is simply

00:03:14.900 so much to say about it. And it is, ever since I first discovered it when I did English literature

00:03:21.640 at college, it was always one of my absolute favourites and one that I really need no convincing

00:03:28.120 to return to. So it deserves definitely two parts. So let's start talking about Coleridge himself.

00:03:35.880 So he was born in 1772 in the small village of Otterley on the River Otter in East Devon.

00:03:43.760 So, as you can imagine, very, very peaceful, very tranquil life.

00:03:47.320 Honestly, I'm quite envious.

00:03:49.380 But he lived there.

00:03:51.280 And what's remarkable as well, he was the youngest of 10 children

00:03:56.160 between John and Anne Coleridge, his parents.

00:04:00.580 And of those, eight were brothers and he had only one sister

00:04:04.700 who unfortunately wasn't destined to be too long for this world.

00:04:09.540 and many have his, he actually went on to outlive most of his family. This is our Coleridge that

00:04:17.180 we're talking about well into 1834, dying in his 60s due to complications that we'll talk about

00:04:24.680 later. But Coleridge's life is quite an interesting one. So his father was both headmaster

00:04:32.280 and local vicar for the parish in Otterley. Coleridge definitely grew up in a family where

00:04:39.000 faith was very important both in the household and within the community as well and also his

00:04:45.340 father was quite a benevolent if not a bit buffoonish and an eccentric sort of a man

00:04:50.980 but he was very paternal right and he really nurtured little Coleridge's fascination with

00:04:57.700 his books and with his vivid almost natural imagination. Coleridge grew up a very very

00:05:05.000 precocious child. As soon as he could get out there and he was old enough to go to the pub

00:05:10.340 with his uncle, he was always, and for all of his life, really, right up until he would spend his

00:05:16.980 final decades living in Highgate, which I suppose wasn't actually probably a part of London right

00:05:23.600 then as it is now, but its own separate place. But he was regarded then as the sage of Highgate.

00:05:29.440 But Coleridge is a guy that most people seem to have had just a very, very positive impression of.

00:05:37.120 An immense conversationalist, a remarkable passion, as women recounted.

00:05:42.700 Not attractive on the surface, but give him five minutes to talk to you and he will just sweep your heart away.

00:05:50.720 That's kind of the guy he seems to have been.

00:05:52.920 is very close to everyone, in fact, it seems, apart from his own children, as he would go on

00:05:59.000 to have, and also his wife. He was a distant father himself, and an even more distant husband.

00:06:05.700 Part of that was because it was something of a loveless marriage. And of course, he far preferred

00:06:11.080 intellectual discussion with the men, the great men of his age. So Coleridge grew up in this

00:06:19.000 household. And his father passed away when he was very, very young. And this unfortunately left

00:06:24.900 Coleridge with his mother. Now, his mother was a very grim, very brittle, very, very harsh woman. 0.93

00:06:33.220 She wasn't a woman who had a great deal of natural warmth about her, which I have to say is

00:06:39.960 not particularly great when you're the mother of 10. But nonetheless, that's how it was. But this

00:06:46.200 meant that because Coleridge didn't get on with his mother very much at all, it meant that he

00:06:52.640 spent a great deal of his time alone. And Coleridge was a very lonely child growing up, in fact,

00:06:59.400 very lonely indeed. But this meant that in that loneliness, he filled his hours reading Arabian

00:07:06.140 Nights and Robinson Crusoe and all of the great poetry to come before him. And he was someone who

00:07:13.520 had a remarkable imagination, even as a child. And this is, you see so much of the material in

00:07:22.560 Rime of the Ancient Mariner, hearkening back to some of Coleridge's earliest experiences of

00:07:28.960 literature, and it just being a real coming together of so many influences that he gathered

00:07:35.940 through his time, both at home and then later on at Christ's Hospital, which he moved to in 1782,

00:07:45.640 and was a very brutal place, to be honest with you. The headmaster was a very liberal flogger,

00:07:52.860 but it did yield one great benefit to his life, which was a lifelong friendship with writer,

00:08:00.420 critic philosopher, Charles Lamb, as well, who he went on to have a very wonderful professional

00:08:06.400 relationship with. But as time went on, Coleridge ended up in a position where he was always broke,

00:08:15.600 right? He was always struggling, he was always in debt. And when actually when Christ's Hospital

00:08:21.640 granted him a scholarship to Cambridge, because they saw his natural aptitude, and his passion

00:08:28.040 for poetry and literature and writing. So Christ's Hospital gave him a scholarship to go to Christ's

00:08:35.720 College at Cambridge, where Coleridge went on to study. And there he wrote all sorts of things like

00:08:43.120 Greek, sapphic poetry, speaking out against the slave trade at the time, which was, of course,

00:08:50.200 a very popular topic throughout the population itself. It's funny in a way, you see, even if it

00:08:56.980 was an issue that didn't have a great amount of political capital and power within Parliament.

00:09:02.380 It was one of the many things that the actual people of England really wanted to talk about.

00:09:09.000 And of course, all of those famous abolitionists of the time, Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce

00:09:14.940 as well, Granville Sharp, all of these people were obviously handing out the pamphlets and

00:09:21.320 trying to get the voice and get the message out there all across the country.

00:09:25.100 And this was something that really touched on Coleridge's heart. And indeed, like most men of their generation, of any generation, in fact, he was his uni years were defined by radicalism.

00:09:36.740 When the French Revolution broke out in 1789, Coleridge was a great supporter of it.

00:09:43.600 And 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.

00:09:59.960 One of the other main things that, of course, dominates any true assessment of the life of Coleridge was his lifelong opium addiction.

00:10:10.540 Now, at the time, laudanum was a very, very accessible drug.

00:10:14.780 It was very easy to come by and was prescribed very liberally.

00:10:19.260 And unfortunately, because of an ailment that Coleridge had, he ended up being prescribed some laudanum and found himself before he knew it.

00:10:28.100 before, you know, he had any real personal say in the matter, being entirely dependent on it,

00:10:34.000 the withdrawal symptoms being overwhelming with pain. And he ended up being hooked on opium for

00:10:41.580 the rest of his life. And there were many accounts, certainly in his later life of him trying

00:10:46.800 to sever himself off from it because he knew it was terrible for him. He knew it was damaging him

00:10:53.180 and killing him. But at the same time, he couldn't break away from the addiction that had basically

00:10:59.560 been with him for most of his life. Though, of course, as well, something has to be said for the

00:11:04.440 fact that were it not for his opium addiction, we may not have had, in fact, we almost certainly

00:11:12.280 wouldn't have had some of his most famous and cherished works, such as Kublai Khan, which he

00:11:19.260 wrote after falling into an opium-induced sleep for about three hours and then having these really

00:11:25.180 vivid drug-addled dreams and then coming to and writing the beginning of Kublai Khan, which

00:11:31.900 Coleridge tells us was disrupted by some local man coming to knock about some local business

00:11:39.020 on his door and it breaking Coleridge's concentration and him not finishing it. Whether

00:11:43.740 or not this is just coping an excuse, we don't know, but that's the story that's told to us.

00:11:48.220 Coleridge eventually wanted to obviously get out there and make a name for himself.

00:11:54.380 He wanted to become a poet and he made all sorts of plans with some of his radical Cambridge

00:12:01.740 friends. There was even an idea waived at the time to go to America and start something that

00:12:08.620 they called a pantisocracy, which was really sort of like a proto commune type idea, not in the

00:12:17.900 in the Marxist sense of the idea, more in the Epicurean sense, I presume, because what Coleridge

00:12:25.060 was doing was he was looking at the radical elements and just the suffering that was brought

00:12:33.340 on by these grand sweeping movements and these grand political ideologies of the time. And he

00:12:39.200 thought, well, maybe true spiritual revolution, like moral elevation of the human condition

00:12:47.260 can only begin on a smaller scale.

00:12:50.120 And so what we'll do is we'll start this pantisocracy

00:12:52.520 and we'll dedicate it to,

00:12:54.560 there'll be me and some of my close friends

00:12:56.540 and our wives and everything.

00:12:58.780 And we'll go out to America together

00:13:00.920 and we'll try to build just a small society

00:13:04.400 based around trying to create

00:13:07.000 a microcosm of moral excellence.

00:13:10.700 And then from there, try and grow it out

00:13:13.420 and bring more people into its way of thinking.

00:13:16.200 I mean, this is all very, very fanciful, of course, very, very juvenile stuff.

00:13:22.180 But nonetheless, you know, they were they were dealing with a very radical time.

00:13:26.320 And I think that it seemed like so many things that had been had until then not been thought possible were.

00:13:34.500 And these Enlightenment thinkers were, of course, very much taken by the ideals of the French Revolution, fraternity, equality, equality.

00:13:44.620 But one thing that's very interesting about Coleridge in his earlier life, in his early student years, I should say, is that though he was a radical and though he was in favor of the French Revolution, one 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.

00:14:11.300 When he came into contact with other liberals in London society, such as William Godwin, these are circles that were predominantly made up of atheists and people who thought of atheism as a way forward.

00:14:26.500 And Coleridge always held firm on holding true to Christian principle and his unwavering faith.

00:14:36.260 And 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.

00:14:47.600 If you're not familiar with him, certainly check out his YouTube channel.

00:14:51.180 But you go on to see how Coleridge, through the rhyme of the ancient mariner, it's an allegory for so many different, it's obviously, it's a voyage of faith, as Guyton himself describes it, but also as well, it's allegorical for the creative process of the artist and trying to create something brilliant.

00:15:16.160 and Coleridge always wanted to be remembered as a great poet and a great writer but the problem was

00:15:23.840 that as he was in his Cambridge years he was absolutely broke and he was so in debt and so

00:15:30.280 penniless bless him that he was verging on the point of suicide which is a great tragedy when

00:15:35.440 anyone does it and would have been an even greater tragedy were we not to be blessed with the later

00:15:40.620 life of Coleridge himself, and all that he was yet to do and be remembered for. But Coleridge

00:15:46.580 went on to enlist in the army because he became so desperate just to take a wage. And unfortunately,

00:15:54.400 though he was never deployed overseas, he actually ended up in Henley, looking after a soldier who

00:15:59.360 was dying of smallpox. And then eventually he was released from the army with the help of

00:16:05.660 some of his brothers who were also in the army at that time. But then in the middle of the 1790s,

00:16:12.740 things would change for Coleridge forever when he was approached by Josiah Wedgwood II and his

00:16:20.600 brother Thomas, who were the children of noted industrialist and potter, also Josiah Wedgwood,

00:16:26.760 who offered him an annuity of £150 to write then a great poem, to write some great poetry,

00:16:34.960 because they could see the potential in Coleridge.

00:16:37.760 They could see that burning passion and desire

00:16:39.960 and also one of the most remarkable imaginations

00:16:43.740 they'd ever witnessed.

00:16:46.900 And so they saw the untapped potential in this man

00:16:49.840 and just saw that this was a guy who he just needed his lucky break.

00:16:54.040 And so Coleridge came into finally some money at last

00:16:58.260 and he also wanted to go to Germany,

00:17:01.800 of the Holy Roman Empire, I suppose, at the time,

00:17:05.660 so that he could meet some of the great German poets

00:17:08.760 and thinkers of the age, people like Goethe,

00:17:11.180 and he would later go on to Germany after.

00:17:14.060 Though interestingly, at the time when he actually wrote

00:17:17.100 Rhyming the Ancient Mariner back in 1797 and into 1798,

00:17:24.340 he'd actually never been to sea before,

00:17:26.620 and all of his knowledge of mariners and seafaring

00:17:30.840 just comes from a breathtaking amount of research

00:17:34.760 and speaking to people who knew that world well

00:17:38.340 and incorporating those factors into it as much as they could

00:17:42.600 to all ground it in something that would be supernatural,

00:17:48.960 gothic, dangerous, but would allow you

00:17:52.040 to suspend your willingness of disbelief

00:17:54.180 so you could be entirely sucked into the story.

00:17:57.700 And between Rhyme the Ancient Mariner and Christabel and Kublai Khan and so many of his early poems, because actually it's interesting as well, a lot of the things that we associate with Coleridge and his fame came about really in the middle part of his life.

00:18:15.880 And Coleridge always struggled, actually, with feelings of inadequacy.

00:18:22.680 He always felt like a little bit of envy towards William Wordsworth that his career was taking off and Coleridge's seemed to constantly stagnate and stall and how his creative abilities seemed to dry up.

00:18:39.700 That's not true, but that's how Coleridge felt himself about it at times.

00:18:45.880 And so in 1797, as Coleridge was living what sounds like a very peaceful life in a nether

00:18:52.980 stowey, which is on the seacoast of Somerset, and he had a wonderful view out to the coast

00:19:00.620 and go for walks with Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy.

00:19:05.460 And they discussed everything that people of that day were talking about, who had a

00:19:11.420 curiosity about the world. And I'm sure they were just some of the most remarkable days for them.

00:19:17.480 But it's in this that Coleridge and Wordsworth, this is before Coleridge just came into that

00:19:24.160 annuity I was just speaking about. So he's still desperately trying to scrape some money together.

00:19:30.000 And he and Wordsworth came up with the idea of, well, why don't we just, you know, write ourselves

00:19:35.960 some some quick ballads and some poetry and you know send it off to maybe a magazine or buy it

00:19:43.000 off us and uh wordsworth thought you know could get a fiver for it and but so this is how it began

00:19:48.480 and they'd based it upon a dream uh that wordsworth had heard from someone who was local a dream about

00:19:57.860 um a haunting at sea and some some dark dream of of being out on sea as a mariner and so this was

00:20:05.520 inspiration, one of the inspirations that served for it. But very strangely, in this case, actually

00:20:13.100 Coleridge began to outright Wordsworth and he was just totally taken and struck by the inspiration

00:20:20.300 that he'd been desperately looking for. And so basically most of the Rhyme in the Ancient Mariner

00:20:26.420 save a very few number of references and I believe a few lines. It really is solely Coleridge's

00:20:35.300 work in this case, though it was first issued in the joint work of lyric ballads that Wordsworth

00:20:43.180 and Coleridge put together. And what's interesting about this as well is that Coleridge and

00:20:49.200 Wordsworth were looking at the neoclassical forms of poetry I was speaking about, and they wanted

00:20:56.160 to return to something that they saw more traditionally English and Scottish, right?

00:21:02.680 Because 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.

00:21:24.280 But 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.

00:21:50.360 And so with all of this displacement of peoples around the land and people losing their local connections and ties,

00:21:58.360 Coleridge and Wordsworth are writing to try and preserve something traditional about English and Scottish culture.

00:22:05.360 If you enjoyed this piece of premium content from The Lotus Eaters, head to our website where you can find more.

00:22:20.360 Thank you.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - May 23, 2026

PREVIEW： Chronicles #48 ｜ The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

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