Coleridge: Selections from his Prose

Letter from Coleridge to Thomas Poole (October 9, 1797)

MY father's sister kept an every-thing shop at Crediton —and there I read through all the gilt-
cover little books that could be had at that time, and likewise all the uncovered tales of Tom
Hickathrift, Jack the Giant-killer, etc. and etc. etc. etc. —and I used to lie by the wall, and
mope—and my spirits used to come upon me suddenly, and in a flood—and then I was
accustomed to run up and down the church-yard, and act over all I had been reading on the
docks, the nettles, and the rank-grass. At six years old I remember to have read Belisarius,
Robinson Crusoe, and Philip Quarll— and then I found the Arabian Nights' entertainments—
one tale of which (the tale of a man who was compelled to seek for a pure virgin) made so
deep an impression on me (I had read it in the evening while my mother was mending
stockings) that I was haunted by spectres whenever I was in the dark—and I distinctly
remember the anxious and fearful eagerness with which I used to watch the window in which
the books lay—and whenever the sun lay upon them, I would seize it, carry it by the wall,
and bask, and read. My father found out the effect which these books had produced — and
burnt them. So I became a dreamer—and acquired an indisposition to all bodily activity—and
I was fretful, and inordinately passionate, and as I could not play at anything, and was
slothful, I was despised and hated by the boys; and because I could read and spell, and had, I
may truly say, a memory and understanding forced into almost an unnatural ripeness, I was
flattered and wondered at by all the old women— and so I became very vain, and despised
most of the boys that were at all near my own age, and before I was eight years old I was
a character: sensibility, imagination, vanity, sloth, and feelings of deep and bitter contempt
for almost all who traversed the orbit of my understanding were even then prominent and
manifest.

Prose additions to “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”:

First edition: THE RIME OF THE ANCYENT MARINERE, IN SEVEN PARTS from
Lyrical Ballads [London: J. & A. Arch, 1798]

ARGUMENT.
How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by Storms to the cold Country towards the
South Pole; and how from thence she made her course to the tropical Latitude of the Great
Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent
Marinere came back to his own Country.

Second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800):

ARGUMENT.
How a Ship, having first sailed to the Equator, was driven by Storms, to the cold Country
towards the South Pole; how the Ancient Mariner cruelly, and in contempt of the laws of
hospitality, killed a Sea-bird; and how he was followed by many and strange Judgements; and
in what manner he came back to his own Country.
THE PROSE GLOSS TO “THE ANCIENT MARINER” (ADDED IN 1817):

Part I

An ancient Mariner meeteth three Gallants bidden to a wedding feast and detaineth one.

The Wedding Guest is spell-bound by the eye of the old seafaring man, and constrained to
hear his tale.

The Mariner tells how the ship sailed southward with a good wind and fair weather till it
reached the line.

The Wedding-Guest heareth the bridal music; but the Mariner continueth his tale

The ship driven by a storm toward the south pole.

The land of ice, and of fearful sounds, where no living thing was to be seen.

Till a great sea-bird, called the Albatross, came through the snow-fog, and was received with
great joy and hospitality.

And lo! the Albatross proveth a bird of good omen, and followeth the ship as it returned
northward through fog and floating ice.

The ancient Mariner inhospitably killeth the pious bird of good omen.

Part II

His shipmates cry out against the ancient Mariner, for killing the bird of good luck.

But when the fog cleared off, they justify the same, and thus make themselves accomplices in
the crime.

The fair breeze continues; the ship enters the Pacific Ocean, and sails northward, even till it
reaches the Line.

The ship hath been suddenly becalmed.

And the Albatross begins to be avenged.

A Spirit had followed them; one of the invisible inhabitants of this planet, neither departed
souls nor angels; concerning whom the learned Jew Josephus, and the Platonic
Constantinopolitan, Michael Psellus, may be consulted. They are very numerous, and there is
no climate or element without one or more.

The shipmates, in their sore distress, would fain throw the whole guilt on the ancient
Mariner: in sign whereof they hang the dead sea-bird round his neck.
 Part III

The ancient Mariner beholdeth a sign in the element afar off.

At its nearer approach, it seemeth to be a ship; and at a dear ransom he freeth his speech
from the bonds of thirst.

And horror follows. For can it be a ship that comes onward without wind or tide?

It seemeth him but the skeleton of a ship.

And its ribs are seen as bars on the face of the setting Sun.

The Spectre-Woman and her Death-mate, and no other on board the skeleton ship.

Like vessel, like crew!

Death and Life-in-Death have diced for the ship's crew, and she (the latter) winneth the
ancient Mariner.

No twilight within the courts of the sun.

At the rising of the Moon,

One after another,

His shipmates drop down dead.

But Life-in-Death begins her work on the ancient Mariner.

Part IV

The Wedding-Guest feareth that a Spirit is talking to him;

But the ancient Mariner assureth him of his bodily life, and proceedeth to relate his horrible
penance.

He despiseth the creatures of the calm,

And envieth that they should live, and so many lie dead.

But the curse liveth for him in the eye of the dead men.

In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that
still sojourn, yet still move onward; and every where the blue sky belongs to them, and is
their appointed rest, and their native country and their own natural homes, which they enter
unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected, and yet there is a silent joy at their
arrival.
By the light of the Moon he beholdeth God's creatures of the great calm.

Their beauty and their happiness.

The spell begins to break.

Part V

By grace of the holy Mother, the ancient Mariner is refreshed with rain.

He heareth sounds and seeth strange sights and commotions in the sky and the element.

The bodies of the ship's crew are inspired and the ship moves on;

But not by the souls of the men, nor by daemons of earth or middle air, but by a blessed troop
of angelic spirits, sent down by the invocation of the guardian saint.

The lonesome Spirit from the south-pole carries on the ship as far as the Line, in obedience
to the angelic troop, but still requireth vengeance.

The Polar Spirit's fellow-daemons, the invisible inhabitants of the element, take part in his
wrong; and two of them relate, one to the other, that penance long and heavy for the ancient
Mariner hath been accorded to the Polar Spirit, who returneth southward.

Part VI

The mariner hath been cast into a trance; for the angelic power causeth the vessel to drive
northward faster than human life could endure.

The supernatural motion is retarded; the Mariner awakes, and his penance begins anew.

The curse is finally expiated.

And the ancient Mariner beholdeth his native country

The angelic spirits leave the dead bodies;

And appear in their own forms of light.

Part VII

The Hermit of the Wood,

Approacheth the ship with wonder.

The ship suddenly sinketh.

The ancient Mariner is saved in the Pilot's boat.

The ancient Mariner earnestly entreateth the Hermit to shrieve him; and the penance of life
falls on him.

And ever and anon throughout his future life an agony constraineth him to travel from land
to land.

And to teach by his own example, love and reverence to all things that God made and loveth.

FROM BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA (1817),

CHAPTER XIII On the imagination, or esemplastic power

Conclusion of chapter:
The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary
Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a
repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary
Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still
as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the
mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this
process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is
essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.
FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites.
The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and
space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phaenomenon of the will,
which we express by the word Choice. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must
receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.

Chapter XIV
(On Lyrical Ballads)
During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversations
turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of
the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest
of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm, which accidents of
light and shade, which moon-light or sun-set diffused over a known and familiar landscape,
appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature.
The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might
be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least,
supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by
the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing
them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever
source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the
second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were
to be such, as will be found in every village and its vicinity, where there is a meditative and
feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them, when they present themselves.
In this idea originated the plan of the "Lyrical Ballads;" in which it was agreed, that
my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least
romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of
truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of
disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand,
was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day,
and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from
the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before
us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which in consequence of the film of familiarity and
selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor
understand.