This stanza, which reminds us of Hamlet's soliloquy on Yorick's skull, and of Goethe's apostrophe in "Faust, "Thou hollow skull! What meanings lurk beneath that grin?" was suppressed in later editions. Line 210. "The horned moon, with one bright star Within the nether tip." Can a star ever be seen within the nether (lower) tip of the new moon? Line 223. 66 'My crossbow." The use of the crossbow fixes the date of the Ancient Mariner's supposed life in or before the sixteenth century. The crossbow, or arbalest, was not used in England after the reign of Henry VIII. Line 224. Part IV. begins in a manner which enhances the horror of the Ancient Mariner's situation. The Wedding-guest's remark emphasizes this horror: "I fear thee and thy glittering eye, And thy skinny hand so brown." Line 246. "A wicked whisper came." His punishment makes his heart hard and rebellious. The climax of obduracy, fear, hatred, is now reached. Line 251. "Lay like a load." Coleridge wrote "cloud" at first. "Reek." To emit vapor from putrefaction. Line 254. Line 260. "Is the curse in a dead man's eye?" As if he had slain them as well as the Albatross. Line 263. "The moving moon," etc. Recall Wordsworth's lines in his poem "To The Moon": "Yes, lovely Moon! if thou, so mildly bright, Line 282. "O happy living things!" After his seven days and nights (a mystic number) of punishment, the Ancient Mariner relents, and becomes changed. The poet attributes the change to angelic, supernatural spirits, who break the spell and cause a "spring of love" to gush forth from his heart. He now blesses all things that he had cursed, and in Part V. the scene wholly changes. The dead bird falls from his neck in token of his pardon. Line 294. "To Mary Queen the praise be given." The poet accepts the tenets of the Roman Catholic Church as the faith of the Ancient Mariner, although he himself was a Protestant. Line 297. "The silly buckets." Weak; in this case, useless. Line 340. Compare "We were a ghastly crew," with the beautiful picture in lines 350-375. "The spirit slid." Supernatural agency again. Line 379. Line 397. "Two voices in the air." Unheard by the Ancient Mariner. Compare this with Tennyson's poem "The Two Voices." The voices, like a Greek chorus, explain the situation. One accuses, the other speaks of pardon, after Line 429. "The man hath penance done, And penance more will do." "When the Mariner's trance is abated." The pace of Compare line 430. Read Wordsworth's the ship was too rapid for a waking man to live. Then mark him, him who could so long rebel; Was the poet thinking of the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner "? Line 446. "Like one that on a lonesome road." Notice the ex pressive illustration (often quoted). Line 464. Recall the picture in the lines 21-24. Line 472. Notice the beauty of this description, with the suggestive reference (line 479) to "The steady weathercock." Line 569. "The Devil knows how to row." A touch of humor, without which no poet is fully equipped. Compare Milton's "gamesome mood" of Belial, "Paradise Lost," Book VI. 621. Line 575. cross. Line 582. this world. "The Hermit crossed his brow." With the sign of the "Since then.” His sin was not absolutely expiated in Compare the "Wandering Jew." Line 589. "I know the man that must hear me." Recall line 18. In the last stanzas of the poem it is seen that the Ancient Mariner's tale is intended to teach a lesson to the reader as well as to the Wedding-guest. Line 601. "Oh, sweeter than the marriage feast." The contrast between a marriage feast and the worship of God, as told by the Ancient Mariner, proves the sincerity of his repentance. The use of the word "kirk," however, does not carry out the idea of a true Romanist. Line 620. "The Wedding-guest turned." He had now no inclina tion for the wedding revelries. For the moment, "of sense forlorn," or deprived of feeling, he turned away; but "A sadder and a wiser man, He rose the morrow morn."? This poem, "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," may be called objective rather than subjective; that is, it manifests the inward exercises of conscience more by external illustrations and scenic descriptions than by any deep analysis of the hidden workings of the human soul. Indeed, Coleridge, when he wrote the poem, at twenty-five years of age, was full of exuberant spirits, hopeful, and under no bondage yet to that opium habit which brought so much misery upon him. Morepver, as he grew older, he became more metaphysical and philosophical in style, so that the world is fortunate in having the "Ancient Mariner," weird as it is in some parts, a product of the author's mind, while his airy fancy was in full play. It is, therefore, not as "wedding-guests," but as delighted listeners, that we "cannot choose but hear." Thomas De Quincey, in his story of "The Spanish Nun," gives us his exposition of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," in the following words: "There are three readers of the Ancient Mariner. The first is gross enough to fancy all the imagery of the Mariner's visions delivered by the poet for actual facts of experience, which being impossible, the whole pulverizes for that reader into a baseless fairy tale. "The second reader is wiser than that. He knows that the imagery is not baseless; it is the imagery of febrile delirium, really seen, but not seen as an external reality. The Mariner had caught the pestilential fever which carried off all his mates; he only had survivedthe delirium had vanished, but the visions that had haunted the delirium remained. 666 'Yes,' says the third reader, 'they remained; naturally they did, being scorched by fever into his brain; but how did they happen to remain on his belief as gospel truths? The delirium had vanished; why had not the painted scenery of the delirium vanished except as visionary memorials of a sorrow that was canceled? Why was it that craziness settled upon this mariner's brain, driving him as if he were a Cain or another Wandering Tew, to "pass like night, from land to land," and at certain intervals wrenching him until he made rehearsal of his errors, even at the hard price of “holding chil LIBRARY dren from their play, and old men from the chimney corner"? That craziness, as the third reader deciphers, rose out of a deeper soi than any bodily affection. It had its root in penitential sorrow. Oh bitter is the sorrow to a conscientious heart, when too late it discovers the depth of a love that has been trampled under foot! "This mariner had slain the creature that, on all the earth, loved him best. In the darkness of his cruel superstition he had done it to save his human brothers from a fancied inconvenience; and yet by that very act of cruelty, he had himself called destruction upon their heads. The Nemesis that followed punished him through them — him that wronged, through those that wrongfully he sought to bene fit. That spirit who watches over the sanctities of love is a strong angel is a jealous angel; and this angel it was "That loved the bird, that loved the man That shot him with his bow.' He it was that followed the cruel archer into silent and slumbering seas: "Nine fathom deep he had followed him Through the realms of mist and snow.' This jealous angel it was that pursued the man into noonday darkness and the vision of dying oceans, into delirium, and finally (when recov ered from disease) into an unsettled mind." |