Deep Readings

John Livingstone Lowe Reading "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, John Livingstone Lowe meticulously traced the source material behind every image in the epic poem. Drawing heavily from Coleridge’s Notebook, Lowe read the sources that Coleridge had been reading before and during the composition of The Rime and found hints and fragments of images that made their way into Coleridge’s own poetic work. The subtitle of Livingstone Lowe’s magnum opus The Road to Xanadu is A Study in the Ways of the Imagination, and Lowe’s project in the book goes beyond a deep analysis of The Rime into a thesis about the way the imagination forms raw materials into art. Lowe and Jones (commentary below) were chosen for this project because they both are intensely interested in Coleridge’s use of factual information in his fantastical poem, but they arrive at very different interpretations of the work itself. Therefore, Lowe and Jones show two diverging twentieth-century academic ‘deep readings’ of a seminal 18th-century text.

Lowe said Xanadu was about “the raw stuff of poetry”, the collected factual references out of which Coleridge built the Mariner’s world¹. His attention to these factual references give us an important grounding for interpretation that frees readers from understanding the poem simply by association with their preconceptions and adds important context. For example, Lowe discovers that Coleridge was reading the “accounts of Captain James Cook’s voyages to the Pacific Ocean” along with other travel narratives.² With this information, the Mariner’s tale is no longer just a fantastic voyage. Almost all of the navigational clues in the poem (with the exception of some of the more magical occurrences near the end), can help the reader to place the Mariner’s ship at specific points on the map which often correspond to Captain James Cook’s third voyage. It is also possible to interpret the poem not as a circumnavigation, but as a loop voyage south from England under Cape Horn, up to the equator in the South Pacific and then immediately back under the Cape of Good Horn and back north to England. The magical ending makes either route possible, because the last clear information in the poem is that the ship is becalmed at the Equator in the South Pacific and then begins to move north back to England, without saying what route it takes. However, the map below follows Cook's third circumnavigation route, partially because of the evidence provided by Lowe that Coleridge had been reading about Cook’s famous voyages.

Lowe’s tracing of the “secret spring of poetry beneath the crust of fact”³ leads him to quite different conclusions about the interpretation of the poem than either the meanings suggested by Gustav Dore in his engravings and explained in this site’s Exhibit page (link to exhibit) or by Jones’ highly mythical and theological interpretation explained below. Jones and Dore ultimately end up with a Christian moral to the Rime, interpreting it as another story of redemptive suffering where the Mariner plays both the sinner and Redeemer, and is ultimately saved by praying, doing penance, and confessing his sins. Lowe’s focus on Coleridge’s grounding in facts leads to his understanding of the poem as a pure experiment of the imagination, which resists a moral. He writes, “Coleridge is not intent on teaching…that what a man soweth, that shall he also reap; he is giving coherence and inner congruity to the dream-like fabric of an imagined world.”⁴ In other words, the entire point of The Rime is to try to create meaning out of unconnected facts, “to give the illusion of inevitable sequence to..superb inconsequence.”⁵

For Lowe, to pin a moral, Christian or otherwise, to the poem is to disregard Coleridge’s entire purpose in creation, a purpose Xanadu backs up with clear support from Coleridge himself. Coleridge does not quite admit to a lack of a moral, but regrets its presence, saying “the..chief fault,,,was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment…in a work of such pure imagination.”⁶ Coleridge’s own words do not preclude the Christian interpretations opened up by Dore and Jones, but shows that it is important not to reduce a poem as rich and significant as The Rime to a single over-determined meaning. For Lowe, the poem remains purely a magnificent feat of imagination and an exploration of Coleridge’s own deep reading, which he transmuted into a poem both Romantic and grounded in traceable references and concrete facts.

David Jones Reading "The Rime"

Like John Livingstone Lowe, David Jones was very interested in the concrete images hidden in Coleridge’s magical tale. He also charts the Mariner’s voyage, though without referencing contemporary explorers like Capt. Cook. Jones figures out the ship’s position based solely on textual clues. Dilworth describes Jones’ route through the poem as a “medieval voyage from England to Antarctica and into the Indian Ocean and back¹”. Jones sees clearly that Coleridge creates his poetic material out of concrete references, much like Jones himself, who famously wrote in his preface for his World War I epic In Parenthesis:

“I have only tried to make a shape in words, using as dats the complex of sights, sounds, fears, hopes, apprehensions, smells, things exterior and interior, the landscape and paraphernalia of that singular time and of those particular men” ²

Similarly Jones writes of the Mariner, “There is fantasy in the poem so long as we exclude altogether from fantasy anything in the nature of whimsy.”³. In this view, the genius of the poem is its lightness and grace despite its density of referents, which Jones calls the “heavy burden with which it is cargoed-up ⁴”. The primary ‘burden’ is the voyage itself, which can be traced from textual hints, and which implies other long voyages - the mythical quest of Odysseus, or the Christian pilgrimage towards heaven. The image of a long journey or quest as a metaphor for life exists across many traditions and time periods; it is a way to frame life as a perilous journey that nevertheless has a goal, be it a new land, treasure, home or heaven, but which always transforms the traveler en route. 

Beyond the voyage route, Jones also sees the Rime as ‘cargoed-up’ with his own poetic preoccupations. In a fifty-seven page 1963 manuscript copy of the commentary held at Boston College’s Burns Library, Jones marked where he inserted sections into his original draft. The 1963 Burns manuscript corresponds to the published commentary in Thomas Dilworth’s 2005 edition of The Ancient Mariner, so it is a final copy, but it helpfully shows how Jones constructed the commentary text. Notably, Jones creates a sixteen-page insertion between pages 14 and 15, and a nine-page insertion between pages 21 and 22⁵. These insertions are moments where Jones is creating his own poetic journey through Coleridge’s text, overlaying the poem with imagery and themes that resurfaces elsewhere in Jones’ own poetry and prose.

The first fourteen-page insertion deals with the strange figure of ‘Life-in Death’ that plays dice for the Mariner’s soul and wins it, allowing him to remain alive although in suffering. Jones places her alongside the mythical Valkyries, but uses her to launch into his own extended Marian meditation. While Life-in-Death has won her man, Mary still acts “as Consolatrix”⁶ and sends “the gentle sleep from heaven”⁷ and the rain that soothes the Mariner. Jones then goes beyond the Mariner’s attribution (“To Mary Queen the praise be given!/ She sent the gentle sleep from heaven…”⁸) and implies that the “roaring wind”⁹ the Mariner hears is also from Mary. He sees Mary’s intervention as an appeal to faith, and addresses the reader:“For how many of us do the celestial formations seem other than very remote?”¹⁰ Jones places us, in our insensitivity to the supernatural alongside the Valkyrie, who “took little heed of that realitas (the presence and power of Mary)”¹¹! It is a quick moment in the commentary, easy to pass over, but very notable in Jones’ certainty of the Marian influence on the wind, and his sincere prompting to faith from the poem. The rest of the first insertion focuses on the ship’s propulsion by the numen of the Antarctic, specifically on the ship’s exact location and the necessity of determining accurately the facts from which Coleridge was drawing.

Such a concern for fact and reference may seem to contradict Jones’ next flight of fancy. First he jumps from the Valkyrie into a summoning of the mother of God, and his next insertion between pages 21 and 22 focuses on the imagery of the cross that he finds within the poem. He goes back in time to the Old Testament, then up through Chaucer, the Renaissance, and Milton to find images of the soul or the Church as ships, with masts and keels that symbolize the cross. He then admits “It will no doubt be felt that all this stuff…ha(s) little or no bearing on Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner&rdquo¹²;, but then defends himself by saying that such implications, however tangential, are still relevant, because the poem is concerned with “the whole argosy of man&rdquo ¹³;, or in other words, all legends of voyaging throughout human history.  Such an assertion may seem like a lazy statement, but this second insertion, like the first, reveals important information about Jones’ poetic process and understanding of history through his idiosyncratic and digressive journey through Coleridge’s Rime. Jones sees history as a palimpsest, where similar events overlay each other, so that a single image, like a ship or a voyage, is freighted backwards and forwards in time with the weight of all other similar voyages. If, as Jones writes, “imagination takes-off best from the flight-deck of the known”¹⁴, it seems that sometimes Jones is tracing Coleridge’s imaginative process but at other times he is using Coleridge as raw material (the ‘known’) for his own flights of imagination. His final interpretation of the poem is both a reading of the meaning of the Rime and indicative of Jones’ unique understanding of history and theology that informed his own poetry:

“...what I take to be the main import of this poem, an import…about the soul of us being sea-borne as in a vessel [captained] by him in whom is comprehended all that is.”¹⁵ 

A perilous voyage, shared by all, and also already won because led by God. This interpretation of the poem corresponds with an interpretation of the Rime as an ultimately traditional story of redemption with the Mariner as both sinner and Christ-figure, approached through Jones’ specific poetic lens. While Livingstone Lowe captures a less predictable side to Coleridge’s tale, Jones alerts us to the poem’s mythic and theological echoes - to the poem as another shape for the same tale “for , after all, there is but one voyager’s yarn to tell.”¹⁶