00:00:00.000Hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome back to Chronicles where this week we're going to be
00:00:18.500talking all about The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Very very famous poem
00:00:26.020of course and i happen to have um quite a nice edition of it myself on this occasion i i think
00:00:31.380i bought it at um some second-hand bookstore in tewkesbury but it's actually a folio edition so
00:00:37.860got some wonderful uh sketchings in in it anyway but the point is this is a very very famous poem
00:00:43.860and deservedly so because not only was it a part of the lyric ballads a joint effort from coleridge
00:00:51.060and his lifelong friend William Wordsworth in 1798, but it was also in lyric ballads that most
00:00:59.780people attribute to the very beginning of the Romantic period as well, the Romantic movement,
00:01:05.940moving away from the older forms of Augustine and neoclassical poetry by the likes of Alexander
00:01:13.460Pope and Dryden and moving away here to something that's trying to evoke something very, very
00:01:20.260different and very, very powerful. I would also be remiss not to just mention the fact that there
00:01:25.720is an absolutely stellar Iron Maiden song based on this. So if you're a metalhead, then definitely
00:01:32.760go and check that out. But let's talk a little bit before all of this about Coleridge. In fact,
00:01:38.640before we even do that, I'll just explain to you how I'm going to format this particular
00:01:43.760episode of Chronicles. So I'm going to split this into two parts. I've made this decision not only
00:01:49.560because I've had quite a lot of things on at the moment but also as well you know when I do sit
00:01:54.880down to record these chronicles I really like to go into them in great detail and so it was really
00:02:01.360the question of basically doing a night's worth of sprucing up and research beforehand or giving
00:02:07.220myself the real dedicated time to sit with it to ponder it and ultimately do it the justice that
00:02:13.560both I think the poem and you who are giving me your time and attention of course deserve
00:02:17.920And 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.
00:02:32.100And then we're going to read, well, I'm going to read the poem in its entirety, which will be about half an hour.
00:02:39.980So a bit like when we did T.S. Eliot's Wasteland and I just read the entire poem.
00:02:45.200this is definitely one that justifies doing that as well and I hope as well unlike T.S. Eliot's
00:02:54.100very very modernist abstract you know prose I think this one should have sort of a cadence and
00:03:01.200a rhythm that most people can really get behind so I think you'll enjoy that and then next week
00:03:07.360in part two it will just be pure analysis of the actual poem itself because there is simply
00:03:14.900so much to say about it. And it is, ever since I first discovered it when I did English literature
00:03:21.640at college, it was always one of my absolute favourites and one that I really need no convincing
00:03:28.120to return to. So it deserves definitely two parts. So let's start talking about Coleridge himself.
00:03:35.880So he was born in 1772 in the small village of Otterley on the River Otter in East Devon.
00:03:43.760So, as you can imagine, very, very peaceful, very tranquil life.
00:03:51.280And what's remarkable as well, he was the youngest of 10 children
00:03:56.160between John and Anne Coleridge, his parents.
00:04:00.580And of those, eight were brothers and he had only one sister
00:04:04.700who unfortunately wasn't destined to be too long for this world.
00:04:09.540and many have his, he actually went on to outlive most of his family. This is our Coleridge that
00:04:17.180we're talking about well into 1834, dying in his 60s due to complications that we'll talk about
00:04:24.680later. But Coleridge's life is quite an interesting one. So his father was both headmaster
00:04:32.280and local vicar for the parish in Otterley. Coleridge definitely grew up in a family where
00:04:39.000faith was very important both in the household and within the community as well and also his
00:04:45.340father was quite a benevolent if not a bit buffoonish and an eccentric sort of a man
00:04:50.980but he was very paternal right and he really nurtured little Coleridge's fascination with
00:04:57.700his books and with his vivid almost natural imagination. Coleridge grew up a very very
00:05:05.000precocious child. As soon as he could get out there and he was old enough to go to the pub
00:05:10.340with his uncle, he was always, and for all of his life, really, right up until he would spend his
00:05:16.980final decades living in Highgate, which I suppose wasn't actually probably a part of London right
00:05:23.600then as it is now, but its own separate place. But he was regarded then as the sage of Highgate.
00:05:29.440But Coleridge is a guy that most people seem to have had just a very, very positive impression of.
00:05:37.120An immense conversationalist, a remarkable passion, as women recounted.
00:05:42.700Not attractive on the surface, but give him five minutes to talk to you and he will just sweep your heart away.
00:05:50.720That's kind of the guy he seems to have been.
00:05:52.920is very close to everyone, in fact, it seems, apart from his own children, as he would go on
00:05:59.000to have, and also his wife. He was a distant father himself, and an even more distant husband.
00:06:05.700Part of that was because it was something of a loveless marriage. And of course, he far preferred
00:06:11.080intellectual discussion with the men, the great men of his age. So Coleridge grew up in this
00:06:19.000household. And his father passed away when he was very, very young. And this unfortunately left
00:06:24.900Coleridge with his mother. Now, his mother was a very grim, very brittle, very, very harsh woman.0.93
00:06:33.220She wasn't a woman who had a great deal of natural warmth about her, which I have to say is
00:06:39.960not particularly great when you're the mother of 10. But nonetheless, that's how it was. But this
00:06:46.200meant that because Coleridge didn't get on with his mother very much at all, it meant that he
00:06:52.640spent a great deal of his time alone. And Coleridge was a very lonely child growing up, in fact,
00:06:59.400very lonely indeed. But this meant that in that loneliness, he filled his hours reading Arabian
00:07:06.140Nights and Robinson Crusoe and all of the great poetry to come before him. And he was someone who
00:07:13.520had a remarkable imagination, even as a child. And this is, you see so much of the material in
00:07:22.560Rime of the Ancient Mariner, hearkening back to some of Coleridge's earliest experiences of
00:07:28.960literature, and it just being a real coming together of so many influences that he gathered
00:07:35.940through his time, both at home and then later on at Christ's Hospital, which he moved to in 1782,
00:07:45.640and was a very brutal place, to be honest with you. The headmaster was a very liberal flogger,
00:07:52.860but it did yield one great benefit to his life, which was a lifelong friendship with writer,
00:08:00.420critic philosopher, Charles Lamb, as well, who he went on to have a very wonderful professional
00:08:06.400relationship with. But as time went on, Coleridge ended up in a position where he was always broke,
00:08:15.600right? He was always struggling, he was always in debt. And when actually when Christ's Hospital
00:08:21.640granted him a scholarship to Cambridge, because they saw his natural aptitude, and his passion
00:08:28.040for poetry and literature and writing. So Christ's Hospital gave him a scholarship to go to Christ's
00:08:35.720College at Cambridge, where Coleridge went on to study. And there he wrote all sorts of things like
00:08:43.120Greek, sapphic poetry, speaking out against the slave trade at the time, which was, of course,
00:08:50.200a very popular topic throughout the population itself. It's funny in a way, you see, even if it
00:08:56.980was an issue that didn't have a great amount of political capital and power within Parliament.
00:09:02.380It 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
00:09:14.940as well, Granville Sharp, all of these people were obviously handing out the pamphlets and
00:09:21.320trying to get the voice and get the message out there all across the country.
00:09:25.100And 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.
00:09:36.740When the French Revolution broke out in 1789, Coleridge was a great supporter of it.
00:09:43.600And 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.
00:09:59.960One of the other main things that, of course, dominates any true assessment of the life of Coleridge was his lifelong opium addiction.
00:10:10.540Now, at the time, laudanum was a very, very accessible drug.
00:10:14.780It was very easy to come by and was prescribed very liberally.
00:10:19.260And unfortunately, because of an ailment that Coleridge had, he ended up being prescribed some laudanum and found himself before he knew it.
00:10:28.100before, you know, he had any real personal say in the matter, being entirely dependent on it,
00:10:34.000the withdrawal symptoms being overwhelming with pain. And he ended up being hooked on opium for
00:10:41.580the rest of his life. And there were many accounts, certainly in his later life of him trying
00:10:46.800to sever himself off from it because he knew it was terrible for him. He knew it was damaging him
00:10:53.180and killing him. But at the same time, he couldn't break away from the addiction that had basically
00:10:59.560been with him for most of his life. Though, of course, as well, something has to be said for the
00:11:04.440fact that were it not for his opium addiction, we may not have had, in fact, we almost certainly
00:11:12.280wouldn't have had some of his most famous and cherished works, such as Kublai Khan, which he
00:11:19.260wrote after falling into an opium-induced sleep for about three hours and then having these really
00:11:25.180vivid drug-addled dreams and then coming to and writing the beginning of Kublai Khan, which
00:11:31.900Coleridge tells us was disrupted by some local man coming to knock about some local business
00:11:39.020on his door and it breaking Coleridge's concentration and him not finishing it. Whether
00:11:43.740or not this is just coping an excuse, we don't know, but that's the story that's told to us.
00:11:48.220Coleridge eventually wanted to obviously get out there and make a name for himself.
00:11:54.380He wanted to become a poet and he made all sorts of plans with some of his radical Cambridge
00:12:01.740friends. There was even an idea waived at the time to go to America and start something that
00:12:08.620they called a pantisocracy, which was really sort of like a proto commune type idea, not in the
00:12:17.900in the Marxist sense of the idea, more in the Epicurean sense, I presume, because what Coleridge
00:12:25.060was doing was he was looking at the radical elements and just the suffering that was brought
00:12:33.340on by these grand sweeping movements and these grand political ideologies of the time. And he
00:12:39.200thought, well, maybe true spiritual revolution, like moral elevation of the human condition
00:13:10.700And then from there, try and grow it out
00:13:13.420and bring more people into its way of thinking.
00:13:16.200I mean, this is all very, very fanciful, of course, very, very juvenile stuff.
00:13:22.180But nonetheless, you know, they were they were dealing with a very radical time.
00:13:26.320And I think that it seemed like so many things that had been had until then not been thought possible were.
00:13:34.500And these Enlightenment thinkers were, of course, very much taken by the ideals of the French Revolution, fraternity, equality, equality.
00:13:44.620But 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.
00:14:11.300When 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.
00:14:26.500And Coleridge always held firm on holding true to Christian principle and his unwavering faith.
00:14:36.260And 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.
00:14:47.600If you're not familiar with him, certainly check out his YouTube channel.
00:14:51.180But 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.
00:15:16.160and Coleridge always wanted to be remembered as a great poet and a great writer but the problem was
00:15:23.840that as he was in his Cambridge years he was absolutely broke and he was so in debt and so
00:15:30.280penniless bless him that he was verging on the point of suicide which is a great tragedy when
00:15:35.440anyone does it and would have been an even greater tragedy were we not to be blessed with the later
00:15:40.620life of Coleridge himself, and all that he was yet to do and be remembered for. But Coleridge
00:15:46.580went on to enlist in the army because he became so desperate just to take a wage. And unfortunately,
00:15:54.400though he was never deployed overseas, he actually ended up in Henley, looking after a soldier who
00:15:59.360was dying of smallpox. And then eventually he was released from the army with the help of
00:16:05.660some of his brothers who were also in the army at that time. But then in the middle of the 1790s,
00:16:12.740things would change for Coleridge forever when he was approached by Josiah Wedgwood II and his
00:16:20.600brother Thomas, who were the children of noted industrialist and potter, also Josiah Wedgwood,
00:16:26.760who offered him an annuity of £150 to write then a great poem, to write some great poetry,
00:16:34.960because they could see the potential in Coleridge.
00:16:37.760They could see that burning passion and desire
00:16:39.960and also one of the most remarkable imaginations
00:17:01.800of the Holy Roman Empire, I suppose, at the time,
00:17:05.660so that he could meet some of the great German poets
00:17:08.760and thinkers of the age, people like Goethe,
00:17:11.180and he would later go on to Germany after.
00:17:14.060Though interestingly, at the time when he actually wrote
00:17:17.100Rhyming the Ancient Mariner back in 1797 and into 1798,
00:17:24.340he'd actually never been to sea before,
00:17:26.620and all of his knowledge of mariners and seafaring
00:17:30.840just comes from a breathtaking amount of research
00:17:34.760and speaking to people who knew that world well
00:17:38.340and incorporating those factors into it as much as they could
00:17:42.600to all ground it in something that would be supernatural,
00:17:48.960gothic, dangerous, but would allow you
00:17:52.040to suspend your willingness of disbelief
00:17:54.180so you could be entirely sucked into the story.
00:17:57.700And 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.
00:18:15.880And Coleridge always struggled, actually, with feelings of inadequacy.
00:18:22.680He 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.
00:18:39.700That's not true, but that's how Coleridge felt himself about it at times.
00:18:45.880And so in 1797, as Coleridge was living what sounds like a very peaceful life in a nether
00:18:52.980stowey, which is on the seacoast of Somerset, and he had a wonderful view out to the coast
00:19:00.620and go for walks with Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy.
00:19:05.460And they discussed everything that people of that day were talking about, who had a
00:19:11.420curiosity about the world. And I'm sure they were just some of the most remarkable days for them.
00:19:17.480But it's in this that Coleridge and Wordsworth, this is before Coleridge just came into that
00:19:24.160annuity I was just speaking about. So he's still desperately trying to scrape some money together.
00:19:30.000And he and Wordsworth came up with the idea of, well, why don't we just, you know, write ourselves
00:19:35.960some some quick ballads and some poetry and you know send it off to maybe a magazine or buy it
00:19:43.000off us and uh wordsworth thought you know could get a fiver for it and but so this is how it began
00:19:48.480and they'd based it upon a dream uh that wordsworth had heard from someone who was local a dream about
00:19:57.860um a haunting at sea and some some dark dream of of being out on sea as a mariner and so this was
00:20:05.520inspiration, one of the inspirations that served for it. But very strangely, in this case, actually
00:20:13.100Coleridge began to outright Wordsworth and he was just totally taken and struck by the inspiration
00:20:20.300that he'd been desperately looking for. And so basically most of the Rhyme in the Ancient Mariner
00:20:26.420save a very few number of references and I believe a few lines. It really is solely Coleridge's
00:20:35.300work in this case, though it was first issued in the joint work of lyric ballads that Wordsworth
00:20:43.180and Coleridge put together. And what's interesting about this as well is that Coleridge and
00:20:49.200Wordsworth were looking at the neoclassical forms of poetry I was speaking about, and they wanted
00:20:56.160to return to something that they saw more traditionally English and Scottish, right?
00:21:02.680Because 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.
00:21:24.280But 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.
00:21:50.360And so with all of this displacement of peoples around the land and people losing their local connections and ties,
00:21:58.360Coleridge and Wordsworth are writing to try and preserve something traditional about English and Scottish culture.
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