00:03:39.040I really, I'm kind of needed somewhere else right now.
00:03:42.540There's something important and something joyful that I'm supposed to be experiencing.
00:03:47.560My friends have wandered off without me.
00:03:49.940And now I'm just stuck here listening or indulging this old grade beard.
00:03:56.600So what on earth does he want with me? And then we get to that point that the mariner fixed him
00:04:03.720with his glittering eye. The wedding guest begins to listen like a three years child,
00:04:10.040with that same fascination and intoxication that you have when you're brought into a world of
00:04:16.760imagination and storytelling, when you are first a child, when you're first discovering
00:04:21.960all of these things for the first time. It's very important in the use of language here,
00:04:27.640where Coleridge explicitly says he has his will, and how the guests cannot choose but hear.
00:04:36.520Actually, something grander is at work here. This is not mere randomness. This all becomes clearer,
00:04:45.640of course, later on, and for the wedding guest's musings about, well, why me? Why have I been
00:04:51.920stopped? Well, that is really what the poem is asking. That's what the entire narrative is about.
00:05:00.340So the mariner goes through this experience that he's going to go through so that the wedding
00:05:06.120guest can hear it. This is all a part of what will become the mariner's penance. It's also a
00:05:13.000wonderful meta point to employ to the audience, to the reader, to say, you have been fixed by his
00:05:19.840will. You have been stopped to listen to this story amongst your daily life and all of the
00:05:25.680things that you're doing. You're here now going to be fixed by his will, and you're going to listen
00:05:31.260to his tale as well. So the wedding guest and the reader are about to go on the same spiritual and
00:05:38.820emotional journey as all of this takes hold. The wedding guest sits upon the rock and he begins to
00:05:46.720listen. He's abandoned his thoughts of the wedding now and he's totally suckered in to what the
00:05:53.840mariner is about to try to communicate with him. And the mariner begins to tell the story and he
00:05:59.520talks about how high spirits they were and how cheerful they were as they left the port and
00:06:06.200they saw just retreating from the horizon, you know, as they go on first the kirk, archaic
00:06:12.880word for the church, and then the hill, and then the lighthouse, and all of these three
00:06:18.080things just slowly pass into the distance and they're slowly left behind. Now each one
00:06:23.880of these three things, of course, has an enormous symbolic significance. The church, or the
00:06:32.440The kirk is obviously symbolic of the institution of religion itself.
00:06:39.200It's also symbolic of that building in which the community congregate together to be to
00:06:45.200one heart and one mind as servants of God and to revere him and to revere Christ.
00:06:51.560But it also as well harkens back to some of Coleridge's earliest childhood memories growing
00:06:58.460up in Otterley where he would go out to the church and you find these glorious vivid letters
00:07:04.500of him recounting how when he was reading all of these great stories as a child, reading
00:07:10.260the Arabian Nights, reading Robinson Crusoe and many other adventure tales and things
00:07:16.100that startled and stimulated his imagination, how Coleridge would go out as a child and
00:07:22.240reenact the stories he was reading in the churchyard. And so the church was not just
00:07:29.340where spiritual community was had, but it was also Coleridge's playground for his imagination
00:07:37.100as well. So a very, very special place to him from the very beginning. The hill, of course,
00:07:43.540is obviously symbolic of the land, the land itself. And there are so many instrumental
00:07:50.740ways that the hill can be utilised, of course. It can be built upon, it can be climbed for the
00:07:57.440advantage of spectacle and to see the horizons, to gather intelligence about one's surroundings.
00:08:04.160But of course, also it presents something not instrumental as well, something truly sacred
00:08:10.920and earthy. That is the land itself, the natural form of this hill that struts above the rest and
00:08:18.740is there as a product of God's divine creation. All of these things are there.
00:08:24.420And then the lighthouse is really symbolic of the light of knowledge, right? It's the light of
00:08:32.500mankind's civilization, the erection of the lighthouse to put the light out to sea,
00:08:38.260to guide others to safety. But in order to obviously create the lighthouse in the first
00:08:43.620place, it requires knowledge. And so it's a two-way thing. You have the actual knowledge
00:08:50.100required to create the civilization in the first place. And then you also have the light atop of
00:08:56.340the house, which is really symbolizing the light of knowledge and civilization and all of the
00:09:03.280things that Coleridge came to appreciate and obviously found intellectually fascinating about
00:09:09.440the modern day and his own contemporary time and the questions that he was dealing with.
00:09:15.300And so all of these things are abandoned. All of the safety of civilization, the safety of
00:09:22.520the grounded land, that hill that has been ever-present for eons and eons, you know,
00:09:29.700and also, of course, the organized church where you would meet your fellow members of the community,
00:09:35.380All of those rich things that help to cultivate a luscious life are set aside now, and the
00:09:44.180mariner and the rest of the crew are going to sail off into the ocean, into the unknown,
00:09:50.920and it's described very poetically as the sun coming up on the left.
00:09:55.580So with that, of course, the sun being on the left, it means that the ship is going
00:09:59.340southwardly and they're sailing south down the Atlantic. And we'll see later on in the
00:10:06.740journey they'll pass under Cape Horn through what will become the Straits of Magellan and
00:10:11.780up into the Pacific Ocean. So for now, the sun is shining upon them and everything seems
00:10:19.140to be going really well. Nothing wrong so far. However, it all seems to fall apart quite
00:10:26.280quickly, because before we know it, Coleridge has introduced us to the fact that these men
00:10:31.320have been blown southward into the land of mist and snow. Now, for Coleridge, of course,
00:10:39.240at the time writing this when he was in the late 1790s, he would have already been very
00:10:45.000much aware of the adventures of people such as Captain Cook, who I do believe, if my history
00:10:52.120serves right and bloody better, given that I did the Epoch on him with Bo, is the fact that Cook
00:10:59.020and his crew were the first to sail into the Antarctic Circle itself. I don't believe Magellan
00:11:06.500actually did that. But nonetheless, as Coleridge was listening more and more to the adventures of
00:11:13.320mariners and people who had gone to sea and folk from the Navy, of course, so many generations
00:11:19.220before, certainly through the decades of the 1700s, had gone to find terra incognita, this great
00:11:26.580unknown southern land that was thought to be an entire another continent of bounty and plenty.
00:11:33.620But of course, what it actually turned out to be was Antarctica. And so we have this interminable
00:11:40.420stretch of ice going out before them. And to reinforce his point, Coleridge says in this
00:11:47.060stanza. The ice was here, the ice was there, the ice was all around. It's cracked and growled and
00:11:53.540roared and howled like noises in a swound. And that word swound is very important here because
00:12:00.820it gives this connotation of a swooning, right? There is something disorientating about the entire
00:12:07.540experience. There's kind of a between consciousness and people are very confused by everything about
00:12:15.460them. It's so unfamiliar and that it's used to reinforce just how lost they are. But then,
00:12:23.540within the very next stanza, we get, of course, at length did cross an albatross, through the fog
00:12:29.860it came, as if it had been the Christian soul, we hailed it in God's name. And so we get a double
00:12:37.620rhyme within the first line as well, at length did cross an albatross. Now part of the reason,
00:12:43.940of course for why albatross is the bird of choice that is used here is that it is a large and
00:12:52.020magnificent majestic creature, a genuinely incredible bird, but also as well because of
00:12:58.980the obvious poetic value within its name it rhymes with cross and not only does it rhyme with cross
00:13:06.340but when the albatross is eventually hung around the the mariner's neck and its wings are spread
00:13:11.620of course, it is in the shape of the cross as well. And so it lends itself to this marvellous
00:13:17.060religious Christian symbolism. Coleridge doesn't leave any ambiguity on this point. He says,
00:13:23.540as if it had been a Christian soul, we hailed it in God's name. Because when they're all about
00:13:30.580surrounded by nothing, there are no other men, there's no other civilization, this bird comes
00:13:36.100to them like a good omen, out of nowhere, with the grace of God, to guide them through these
00:13:44.660uncharted ice plains. And that's exactly what it does. And what's more as well, the rest of the
00:13:51.940crew are very, very wonderful and compassionate with the albatross. They share food with it,
00:13:57.220it's playful with them, they become very familiar and very comfortable with having it around. It
00:14:02.740It becomes, in a way, a part of the crew itself.
00:14:07.020And so the albatross is guiding them through the fog and mist,
00:14:10.400and the moon shines brightly upon them.
00:14:12.980And we'll come to the significance of the moon in a little bit.
00:14:17.240But for now, the albatross is guiding them through all of this.
00:14:21.020And as it does so, we get this remarkable moment where actually it's the first time since the story has began
00:14:28.380where the wedding guest interrupts the story and lends his own voice in and he says,
00:14:34.720God save the ancient mariner from the fiends that plagued thee thus, why lookest thou so?
00:14:40.460And so before we even actually hear what has happened, what is the fate of the albatross,
00:14:46.800we have already been teed up for the fact that the mariner still to this moment wears on his face
00:14:53.640the shame and guilt of what happens. And Malcolm Guy really fantastically in his book lays out the
00:15:00.760fact that when this line lands, that I shot the albatross, it lands with all of the weight of
00:15:07.680and then they crucified him. Right. There's this bluntness of force that Coleridge uses in how he
00:15:15.020delivers this truth. And of course, it brings about the remarkable question of why? Why does a
00:15:23.080mariner shoot the albatross with his crossbow? And the answer to that question is, we don't know.
00:15:31.140We have no idea. The mariner doesn't attempt to rationalize it out loud. He doesn't attempt to
00:15:37.400justify it to the wedding guest or explain it to him. He just simply says, I shot the albatross.
00:15:44.720This one singular, unnecessary, petty act of violence ends up forcing the mariner to go on this entire spiritual journey in which he must basically atone for the sin of what he has done by shooting this albatross.
00:16:06.100Because it's not just the albatross itself, but it's the entire, as Geit describes it in his book,
00:16:13.880it's the entire sort of instrumentalist, instrumental view of the world as against that which is personal and sacred.
00:16:22.800There's a mechanistic view, and then there's a sacred view.
00:16:27.320And that's really what Coleridge is reacting to here.
00:16:30.980When he talks about the fact that he just shot the albatross, it's like, well, as far as the mariner is concerned, the albatross has served its purpose, right?
00:16:43.840It has guided them safely through the ice and fog.
00:16:48.960And now that they're on the other side and they're beginning to travel northward again up into the Pacific Ocean, it can just simply be discarded.
00:16:57.900It has no intrinsic value within itself, and this is really the lesson that the mariner
00:17:05.800is going to be forced to learn about the intrinsic value of other things in the world other
00:17:12.720than how instrumental they can be to the ambitions of human beings and to the ambitions
00:17:21.700Because the Antarctic is a perfect example of an ecosystem that still, according to Christian theology, of course, has been crafted by intelligent design, by God's grand plan.
00:17:37.020Everything about it, its ecosystem, its habitats, its wildlife, its geology, the physics by which it even exists in the first place, all of this is according to God's will.
00:17:49.200And therefore also, even though there are no human settlers there, that doesn't make it any less valuable or any less worthy of the respect of man.
00:18:01.300And so when the sun comes up upon the right and the ship is now going north again into the Pacific, we see at first all of the crew basically damning the mariner, right?
00:18:15.260They say, and the mariner himself says, I have done a hellish thing.
00:18:19.860This is the language of damnation. This is the language of sin.
00:18:23.840Because all of the crew are saying that it was the albatross that brought the breeze,
00:18:28.700that brought the wind, that pushed them through out of that situation and out into the ocean.
00:18:35.540Then something very interesting happens.
00:18:38.320So to begin with, after the mariner shoots the albatross with his crossbow,
00:18:43.200We have this moment where the crew, once they're up and going north again into the Pacific,
00:18:49.440the crew decide that they're going to blame the mariner for this, for this act of just savagery, frankly.
00:18:57.360And they say that you killed the albatross, you killed the bird that was the omen that brought the winds
00:19:03.220that have now got us sailing safely on the ocean again.
00:19:07.140And so they damn the mariner, and the mariner in his language says, I had done a hellish thing.
00:19:12.400this is the language of damnation. This is the language of sin. But then something very puzzling
00:19:19.860happens, which is that it says, nor dim nor red like God's own head, the glorious sun oppressed.
00:19:26.180Then all averred I had killed the bird that brought the fog and the mist.
00:19:30.300Twas right, they said, such birds to slay that bring the fog and mist. So within two stanzas,
00:19:37.100the crew go from blaming the mariner for killing the bird to basically thanking the mariner for
00:19:42.760killing the bird. They go from this was the bird that brought the wind that saved us to actually
00:19:48.440this was the bird that brought the fog and the mist and therefore you killing it is what actually
00:19:54.220saved us and got us out of the mess and are now safe again under the bright sun. So there is one
00:20:01.260thing here about the superstitiousness of the crew and how seriously they take these omens,
00:20:07.500but also as well, it seems to be that they blame the mariner immediately to begin with
00:20:14.260on what appears to be just to be on the safe side, right? That's really what seems to be going on
00:20:21.120here. And the moment that there seems to be no present danger from the mariner do this,
00:20:26.440they all begin just patting him on the back and saying, good job, it looks like it's all been fine.
00:20:31.260That's when it all happens, that's when the tragedy begins to happen, and that's when
00:20:35.900the journey starts to go, and the curses start to fly out, and also as well, importantly,