The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW： Chronicles #52 ｜ The Rime of the Ancient Mariner： Part III

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

00:00:17.720 concluding what has become a three-part series talking all about The Rhyme of the Ancient

00:00:23.900 Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I had originally intended to get all of this recorded

00:00:31.180 before I went up to Makerfield, but it just didn't work out that way. So all of that's happened. I'm

00:00:38.000 coming back. I'm sitting now and I've sort of had to reacquaint myself with some of it, go back into

00:00:43.840 my reading. But I'm really, really excited to be finishing it. Honestly, of all of the things I've

00:00:50.940 covered here on Chronicles. It's certainly analysing and looking at this poem and the

00:00:58.460 insights that it has and also looking into the mind of Samuel Taylor Coleridge itself has had

00:01:05.200 a genuinely profound effect on me. And even when I'm not covering Coleridge on Chronicles in the

00:01:12.200 future, though there are a few more poems and materials from him that I definitely want to go

00:01:18.140 into. He's something that I'm never really going to take my eye off now. He's had quite a profound

00:01:23.800 effect on me. I have been very touched by all of his insights on imagination, on re-enchantment,

00:01:31.120 and on faith as well. And I say that as someone who isn't a man of faith, though I would certainly

00:01:40.640 wished to be in many ways, but it's definitely gone some way to chipping away at my armour,

00:01:49.360 as it were. And so I'm just really looking forward to talking about the final few parts

00:01:54.940 of this poem with you to just give a bit of a backtrack and a revision. So in parts one to four,

00:02:03.000 we talked all about the fact that it begins with this framed narrative of a wedding guest,

00:02:08.600 and he's there at the wedding with his two friends, and he's singled out by this old

00:02:14.420 long-bearded loon, this kooky-looking mariner who is not someone who you would otherwise give

00:02:22.160 the time of day, but he fixes a wedding guest with his glittering eye. And what we find more

00:02:28.280 and more as the story goes on is that everything falls away for the wedding guest. He is someone

00:02:35.480 that at the very beginning of it he is constantly distracted he's looking at the wedding he wants

00:02:41.260 to be there but he's just having to deal with the ramblings of this old man but as time goes on

00:02:49.220 he becomes more and more sucked into the story and the mariner's tale and what he's endured

00:02:55.060 in having witnessed the metamorphosis of the mariner it will go on to have a profound effect

00:03:03.340 on the wedding guest as well. And so the mariner tells him this tale of the first four parts of it

00:03:08.880 where he and the rest of the mariners are going out into the Atlantic Ocean. They go right down

00:03:14.940 into the Antarctic Circle and there amidst the gothic terror of the ice sheets and the seeming

00:03:22.700 to be no way out and no triumph over nature itself as the men are boxed in at all sides by the ice

00:03:29.860 we find ourselves an albatross and another sign, a more benevolent part of nature.

00:03:38.900 And this albatross, they hail it in God's name.

00:03:42.080 It's imbued with this rich Christian iconography of its wings spread like a cross.

00:03:48.200 And this is something that Coleridge constantly harkens back to and reminds us of throughout the poem.

00:03:54.040 And the albatross is able to weave throughout the ice sheets.

00:03:58.460 and in doing so, it basically guides the men through. And we can see here nature and humanity

00:04:06.040 working in tandem with an interdependency about them, both working together for the mutual

00:04:14.240 advantage of both, and also as a bond of the sacred pact that, of course, was made by God

00:04:20.980 for mankind to be the stewards of the earth, to not fall into wanton violence. But unfortunately,

00:04:28.460 That's exactly what the mariner does, and he decides that after having this albatross, sharing food with it, playing games with it, it's mentioned the fact that the albatross, in fact, loved the man who shot him, just as Jesus loved those who crucified him and all those who accused him.

00:04:48.720 he rose above to give a profound sense of love to mankind. And the mariner is a man who is

00:04:57.440 without love. He has a very materialistic, very instrumentalist view of the natural world. And it

00:05:05.600 is something only to be conquered and dominated and cast aside when inconvenient or merely at a

00:05:12.600 win. And so the mariner shoots the albatross, and in shooting the albatross, this brings a great

00:05:20.080 curse upon him. And this is where we delve into not just the theological aspects of the poem,

00:05:27.380 but a deep supernaturalism as well. The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner isn't just a poem about

00:05:34.620 mankind's place in the world amongst in the hierarchy of god and man and beast and the

00:05:43.520 environment but it's also a tale of spirits and the supernatural as well these uh these daemons

00:05:51.080 um there is a polar spirit beneath the ice five fathoms deep that we're going to come to in just

00:05:57.680 a minute that has been following the mariner ever since he shot the albatross and has been behaving

00:06:03.900 like a spirit of vengeance following the ship, seeking basically like Pirates of the Caribbean,

00:06:10.820 like the black spot, just as this homing beacon for all these vengeful things to fall upon the

00:06:17.940 ship and the crew. And the reason why the crew are made complicit in the Mariner's crime is because

00:06:25.100 they flip-flop on the issue. Originally, they judged the Mariner and they say, the Albatross

00:06:31.320 led us through the ice and you murdered it in cold blood and therefore you are a damned figure

00:06:39.660 and then actually once they bloom out and once they cross cape horn down in a at the tip of 0.98

00:06:47.160 south america and they cross into the pacific ocean well it seems like all is well the breeze

00:06:52.980 is high you know they're in good spirits again and so they decide that actually the mariner was

00:06:59.360 right to kill the albatross because it was a mariner that brought the fog and mist and actually

00:07:05.460 led them into the Antarctic Circle in the first place. It was that that brought the danger and

00:07:11.380 the mariner overcame the danger. And by siding with the mariner, the crew decide to make themselves

00:07:18.120 complicit in the crime and the deed itself. And so in part three, when we get this spectre bark,

00:07:26.100 this ghost ship come, that is brought along without even a gust of wind, just travelling

00:07:33.200 upon the sea, like a flying Dutchman, come to collect the souls of the dead. Well, death and

00:07:40.660 the lady, life in death, this beautiful exterior figure with radiance and red lips and golden hair,

00:07:49.420 but actually inside she is stone cold death and her and death play a game of dice for

00:07:57.520 the souls of the crew and death wins the souls of the crew but she wins the soul of the mariner

00:08:06.100 and so the mariner has to continue on quite literally as life in death he is alive but all

00:08:14.540 the time he sees the bodies of the dead men around him, of the crew, and he painfully wishes for

00:08:21.680 death, and yet he cannot die. He has to live on with the guilt of what he did, gnawing away at him

00:08:31.760 every day, looking to the water, looking back to the crew in this daily monotony and fatigue,

00:08:38.980 and this absolute isolation. And not just isolation from his fellow shipmates and from

00:08:47.300 any sign of a vessel coming to save him, but also a spiritual isolation as well.

00:08:54.720 His prayers turn to dust. He cannot speak to summon a prayer. He's cut off from not just the

00:09:02.680 horizontal world around him, but the vertical, the spiritual ascent to the heavens as well.

00:09:08.520 and Coleridge is fantastic in the way that he uses the poles and polarity every time there's

00:09:16.000 a crossing of the equator to differentiate the story and its themes and messaging.

00:09:21.900 And so we get to this moment where he is going through all of this and towards, with nothing

00:09:28.680 to do and no real hopes for his own future as well, certainly no hopes for his own soul.

00:09:35.020 He knows he's a deeply damned man at this point, but he looks down into the water at what was once 0.89

00:09:42.220 he perceived these thousand slimy things, these disgusting creatures that revolve him. 0.97

00:09:47.780 And it's not just a question of the fact that they revolve him, but it's also a part of the fact that

00:09:53.200 he's repulsed by himself as well. He's disgusted by himself. He believes himself to be a wretched

00:10:01.680 creature, because he is. But it's not too late for him. Even now, after what he's done, and his 0.98

00:10:11.540 figure of being the man who crucified Christ, he can still turn his life around. And he sees in

00:10:18.840 this moment of a genuine respect and a genuine commitment to the intrinsic value of the water

00:10:29.880 snakes. Not just as something that is aesthetically beautiful, actually, but something that has an

00:10:38.280 innate value within itself, not merely in its value to him and to human utility. And so all of

00:10:46.860 this begins to happen, and his mind begins to break from the instrumentalist view that he's had.

00:10:52.140 and with that he manages to pray. The albatross falls from around his neck like lead into the sea

00:11:00.620 and so we find the Mariner now at the beginning of part five well on the way with a new frame of

00:11:07.460 mind willing to go open himself up to the spiritual metamorphosis that will carry him to safety and

00:11:15.700 home later on through the poem and it's at this moment here in the beginning of part five where

00:11:23.860 we see so much of Coleridge's imagery that he's been using for so long begin to transform in front

00:11:31.040 of the mariner's eyes that which before was filled with gothic imagery and terror which will continue

00:11:37.580 as he transitions into the final salvation towards or hope for salvation I should say

00:11:44.200 and his penitence towards the end of the poem. Well, we begin to see that happening visually

00:11:50.380 here. The Gothic imagery is present, but actually as well, we begin to have something much more

00:11:57.420 cosmic, something much more enchanting about the world as all of this goes on. And part five

00:12:04.080 begins with him saying, oh sleep, it is a gentle thing. That part of the mariner as well, that

00:12:11.500 because of the guilty conscience, because of the curse, he has not been able to sleep. He's been

00:12:18.400 entirely sleep deprived throughout this entire thing. And he invokes, he says, beloved from pole

00:12:24.900 to pole, to Mary queen, the praise be given. She sent the gentle sleep from heaven that slid into

00:12:32.200 my soul. And so we see here the blessed virgin giving him, granting him this grace, right? That

00:12:40.780 grace is coming from the Virgin, who through her, we came to know Christ himself, who came to earth

00:12:48.360 so that we could understand the will of God himself. And so the mariner is able to sleep

00:12:56.280 at last. And it's in these moments of sleep, you know, this, you know, sleep is just, of course,

00:13:02.940 something that we do all the time. And when you're deprived of it, of course, you crave it enormously.

00:13:08.520 but it's also for the mariner here it allows him just a small psychological reprieve it gives him

00:13:15.680 a calm between the storms where he can close his eyes and just shut out you know just enter a world

00:13:23.160 of dreams a world of trance and one of the things that Malcolm Guyte which I have his book here and

00:13:29.420 I'll read from it again later on is the fact that you know it's in this dream state that it can

00:13:36.340 often subconsciously tell us about the things that we actually deeply want to find in our own

00:13:43.040 life as well. And here we get this mention of the silly buckets on the deck. The fact that all this

00:13:49.500 time, you know, when he and the crew were living in this absolute drought under the blistering heat

00:13:55.080 of the sun, they've had these buckets out hoping to collect some rainwater and have been, of course,

00:14:02.360 taunted by water, water everywhere, as it's been around them in this vast ocean that they can't

00:14:08.220 drink from. And the buckets seem silly at this point. They just sat there empty, taunting the

00:14:15.760 mariner of that thirst quenching water that he was never able to have. And without it, that dried

00:14:21.740 his throat that meant that he could not create a call to prayer. And we see this small grace here

00:14:29.400 where the mariner dreams of rain and when he awakes it is in fact raining, which is of course

00:14:36.360 a great blessing for him and will keep him alive a little bit longer on for the journey. And then

00:14:42.800 we get these three stanzas where it goes on to say, and soon I heard a roaring wind, it did not

00:14:48.560 come an ear, but with its sound it shook the sails that were so thin and sear. The upper air burst

00:14:54.900 into life and a hundred fire flag sheen to and fro they were hurried about and to and fro and

00:15:01.180 in and out the one stars danced between and the coming wind did roar more loud and the sails did

00:15:07.280 sigh like sedge and the rain poured down from one black cloud the moon was at its edge and so we get

00:15:15.020 very interesting three um stanzas here because what they're going through first we go through

00:15:19.940 three of the four main elements. We go through air with the wind. We then go through fire with

00:15:26.420 the upper air bursting into life and the fire flag sheen. So once again, we're invoking here

00:15:31.720 the aurora itself. You can see an aurora in the sky. Absolutely dazzling sight. Malcolm Geit

00:15:39.000 remarks on the fact that in his book about the fact that this is really a visual metaphor for

00:15:46.260 divine beauty. And then we, of course, come to the part of water as well. So we go through air,

00:15:52.980 we go through fire, and we go through water. One other thing that's interesting to note as well

00:15:58.840 is that this particular moment here, where it talks about the hundred fire flag sheen,

00:16:04.260 well, previously, when the mariner had seen the aurora before, he described them as death fires,

00:16:10.620 which is of course a much more cynical visual idea than what we're seeing now with this great

00:16:17.180 sheen and it bursting into life and being full of beauty and enchantment and so it's a visual

00:16:23.120 representation of the mariner's changed outlook on the world itself almost at this moment where

00:16:29.740 after the mariner has woken from his dream and it's guided him psychologically to this

00:16:35.100 unfulfilled question of his faith, he wakes up and he sees the grand intelligent design of God's

00:16:44.860 universe before him, just as the storms are about and everything begins. And later on, the lightning,

00:16:51.560 in fact, just here as well, it goes on to say, like water shot from some high crag,

00:16:56.700 the lightning fell with never a jag. The loud wind never reached the ship, yet now the ship

00:17:02.520 moved on. So there's a lot to unpack here. First of all, in going from pole to pole, one of the

00:17:08.940 great insights that Malcolm Guy points out is that this entire idea of polarity, in crossing

00:17:14.740 one boundary into another, is a constant theme of the Mariner's poem. It's both freedom and

00:17:22.000 constraint, it's community and it's isolation, it's blessing and it's curse, it's redemption

00:17:29.240 and its guilt. And now it's sleeping and reawakening. And we see all of these things

00:17:36.860 constantly, you know, at contrition with one another in the mariner's heart. And we will see

00:17:42.440 as time goes on, it falls away from all of the pessimisms of those things and into those that

00:17:50.220 will grant true meaning and purpose and greater harmony and coexistence in the world. This world

00:17:58.260 of interdependence, this divine web of the world and mankind's place in it as God's people.

00:18:06.980 But if I just swap the books over for a moment, in this one here, the Malcolm Geick book,

00:18:13.500 there's just one particular passage that I wanted to read where Malcolm talks about these elements,

00:18:20.040 air, fire, water. And he goes on to say, if we pause now and look at the total effect of these

00:18:27.560 four stanzas, two remarkable things emerge. The first is that Coleridge here evokes in succession

00:18:33.820 three of the four traditional elements of the cosmos, air, fire, and water. That he is playing

00:18:39.480 with the idea of the elements is made clear by the suggestive use of the word element in the gloss

00:18:45.000 that accompanies the first of these four stanzas. The missing fourth element is earth, and it is

00:18:51.800 missing from what the mariner sees, because it is of course the mariner himself. By this time in the

00:18:58.620 poem, he is in some sense the archetypal human being, the one who stands for all of us, the

00:19:05.040 fallen Adam. The name Adam means man of earth, formed from the dust of the ground, but enlivened

00:19:12.760 and lifted into spiritual being by the other three elements, the breath or spirit of God,

00:19:18.980 the divine spark or fire, and the waters of baptism. The mariner's own baptism of full

00:19:25.920 immersion is still to come, but here it is first foreshadowed, which brings us to the second

00:19:32.160 remarkable thing about the symbolism of these four stanzas. Wind, fire, and water are the three great

00:19:39.500 biblical symbols of the Holy Spirit. Coleridge seems almost to be paraphrasing the famous

00:19:45.820 description in the book of Acts of the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. And suddenly there

00:19:52.400 came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were

00:19:58.280 sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of

00:20:05.560 them. Again, just remarkable insights. Cannot praise Malcolm Geith's book enough. So we get

00:20:11.840 this entire vision of enchantment and just this magnificent elemental world, just nature flexing

00:20:20.460 itself before the mariner's eyes, demonstrating its power, demonstrating its own kind of majesty.

00:20:28.760 And then we go right back whiplashed into this feeling of gothic horror again. As I say, we get

00:20:36.840 these thunderstorms and lightning and the storm gathers and then we get this great great moment

00:20:43.880 where it says beneath the lightning and the moon the dead men gave a groan they groaned they

00:20:50.360 stirred they all uprose nor spake nor move their eyes it had been strange even in a dream to have

00:20:58.140 seen those dead men rise if you enjoyed this piece of premium content from the lotus eaters

00:21:03.680 head to our website where you can find more.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - June 27, 2026

PREVIEW： Chronicles #52 ｜ The Rime of the Ancient Mariner： Part III

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