What Silence Can Do: Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

My grandfather once told me he hated poetry because of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Despite being the child of German immigrants in the less-than-ideal New York City public school system in the first half of the 20^th century, a man who learned to read by having individual English words thrown up on a wall one-by-one (as opposed to hearing sounds strung together), my grandfather became, as an adult, a voracious reader. Yet, he remained (and perhaps still is) rather opposed to poetry, all because of his initial forced experience with Coleridge’s long poem. My grandfather, like the Wedding Guest, could not “choose but hear” and was thus made weary (18) (38).

Last week I discussed sound in Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight.” Sound and the senses are what draw me to Coleridge’s work. I had long avoided “Rime” because of my grandfather’s omen (what many parallels there are here, weirdly, with the poem itself). Upon encountering it for the first time, I was amazed by how difficult the poem was to follow (even with the glosses, which often served to only confuse me further at points, sometimes similar to Eliot’s notes on The Waste Land). But I was further amazed by how monosyllabic and non-melodic the poem sounded.

The voice of the Mariner, while eloquent or melodramatic, often relies on repetition of key phrases that are almost childlike. “Water, water every where,” he recalls. “And all the boards did shrink; / Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink” (119-122). At times, I found myself laughing at the poem because of its “darkness” that was told in such a simple spirit. Examples abound of this kind of repeated vocabulary: “As idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean” (117-118), “Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs / Upon the slimy sea” (125-126), “A weary time! a weary time! / How glazed each weary eye” (145-146), and “Alone, alone, all, all, alone, / Alone on the wide wide sea!” (232-233). I found the last example actually moving and indicative of one of the ways the repetition works in the poem. Although it is haunting and ghostly, the narrative often seems rather plodding, not unlike being out on the sea where, in every direction, everything looks the same wave to wave “on the wide wide sea!” We feel adrift like the mariner himself does, or did.

The repetition also gives voice to the “silence” of the poem. The crew finds themselves mute, and this silence is a curse and a tragedy: “And every tongue, through utter drought, / Was withered at the root; / We could not speak, nore more than if / We had been choked with soot” (135-139). For “all dumb we stood!” (159) – this not long before each crew member, save the Mariner, drops dead like the albatross he shot at the start of the poem. They become silent like the sea – save a recognized boy, they are undifferentiated and alike, like the waves to each wave. The silence, from the moon (or nature in general), and from ghosts, heightens the supernatural quality of the piece.

Perhaps the Mariner feels too ill-equipped to tell this tale, though he feels, as he relates by the end of “Rime,” that it is his duty to do so. “O happy living things!” he cries. “No tongue Their beauty might declare” (282-283). Those things that are happy and living, like those that are sad and dead, cannot be described by the tongue.

But silence moves and acts in the poem: dead things are like things alive – i.e, life-in-Death. They are certainly different, but the similarity is striking. “But soon there breathed a wind on me, / Nor sound nor motion made: / Its path was not upon the sea, / In ripple or in shade,” the Mariner relates, showing how the wind could breath and act without sound or motion (452-455). Later, there is “No voice; but oh! The silence sank / Like music on my heart” (498-499). Silence sinks; silence somehow comes and goes without sound or motion. This paradox transgressed throughout the poem seems its central tension and force. How it relates to the overall framing of the poem with the held up wedding guest I don’t know, but it does seem like maybe it has to do with motion/inertia. The “moving” or riveting tale is told completely to a man who is stopped; it is the story of a journey, but a failed journey. Something happens and, yet, nothing really does happen. Instead we find our poor guest, and perhaps ourselves, as “he went like one that hath been stunned” (622). We go, yet we are knocked to a standstill. Perhaps this paradox made no sense to my grandfather, a man who was and is always on-the-go and traveling and has no time for archaic-sounding rimes, told by ancient mariners or otherwise. Yet exploring this tension is what gives the poem, I think, its bizarre power and makes one feel a little less forlorn (623).