Samuel Taylor Coleridge - The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
http://www.bartleby.com/101/549.html


by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772-1834

arranged by R.E. Slater, Poet (May 25, 2011)


In Seven Part Argument


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 her; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own Country. 

An ancient Mariner meeteth three gallants bidden to a wedding feast, and detaineth one.	PART I IT is an ancient Mariner,
	And he stoppeth one of three.
	'By thy long beard and glittering eye,
	Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?
	The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide,
	And I am next of kin;
	The guests are met, the feast is set:
	May'st hear the merry din.'
	He holds him with his skinny hand,
	'There was a ship,' quoth he.
	'Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!'
	Eftsoons his hand dropt he.
The Wedding-Guest is spell-bound by the eye of the old seafaring man, and constrained to hear his tale.	He holds him with his glittering eye—
	The Wedding-Guest stood still,
	And listens like a three years' child:
	The Mariner hath his will.
	The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:
	He cannot choose but hear;
	And thus spake on that ancient man,
	The bright-eyed Mariner.
	'The ship was cheer'd, the harbour clear'd,
	Merrily did we drop
	Below the kirk, below the hill,
	Below the lighthouse top.
The Mariner tells how the ship sailed southward with a good wind and fair weather, till it reached the Line.	The Sun came up upon the left,
	Out of the sea came he!
	And he shone bright, and on the right
	Went down into the sea.
	Higher and higher every day,
	Till over the mast at noon——'
	The Wedding-Guest here beat his breast,
	For he heard the loud bassoon.
The Wedding-Guest heareth the bridal music; but the Mariner continueth his tale.	The bride hath paced into the hall,
	Red as a rose is she;
	Nodding their heads before her goes
	The merry minstrelsy.
	The Wedding-Guest he beat his breast,
	Yet he cannot choose but hear;
	And thus spake on that ancient man,
	The bright-eyed Mariner.
The ship drawn by a storm toward the South Pole.	'And now the Storm-blast came, and he
	Was tyrannous and strong:
	He struck with his o'ertaking wings,
	And chased us south along.
	With sloping masts and dipping prow,
	As who pursued with yell and blow
	Still treads the shadow of his foe,
	And forward bends his head,
	The ship drove fast, loud roar'd the blast,
	The southward aye we fled.
	And now there came both mist and snow,
	And it grew wondrous cold:
	And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
	As green as emerald.
The land of ice, and of fearful sounds, where no living thing was to be seen.	And through the drifts the snowy clifts
	Did send a dismal sheen:
	Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken—
	The ice was all between.
	The ice was here, the ice was there,
	The ice was all around:
	It crack'd and growl'd, and roar'd and howl'd,
	Like noises in a swound!
Till a great sea-bird, called the Albatross, came through the snow-fog, and was received with great joy and hospitality.	At length did cross an Albatross,
	As if it had been a Christian soul,
	We hail'd it in God's name.
	It ate the food it ne'er had eat,
	And round and round it flew.
	The ice did split with a thunder-fit;
	The helmsman steer'd us through!
And lo! the Albatross proveth a bird of good omen, and followeth the ship as it returned northward through fog and floating ice.	And a good south wind sprung up behind;
	The Albatross did follow,
	And every day, for food or play,
	Came to the mariners' hollo!
	In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,
	It perch'd for vespers nine;
	Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,
	Glimmer'd the white moonshine.'
The ancient Mariner inhospitably killeth the pious bird of good omen.	'God save thee, ancient Mariner!
	From the fiends, that plague thee thus!—
	Why look'st thou so?'—'With my crossbow
	I shot the Albatross.
	PART II
	'The Sun now rose upon the right:
	Out of the sea came he,
	Still hid in mist, and on the left
	Went down into the sea.
	And the good south wind still blew behind,
	But no sweet bird did follow,
	Nor any day for food or play
	Came to the mariners' hollo!
His shipmates cry out against the ancient Mariner for killing the bird of good luck.	And I had done an hellish thing,
	And it would work 'em woe:
	For all averr'd, I had kill'd the bird
	That made the breeze to blow.
	Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay,
	That made the breeze to blow!
But when the fog cleared off, they justify the same, and thus make themselves accomplices in the crime.	Nor dim nor red, like God's own head,
	The glorious Sun uprist:
	Then all averr'd, I had kill'd the bird
	That brought the fog and mist.
	'Twas right, said they, such birds to slay,
	That bring the fog and mist.
The fair breeze continues; the ship enters the Pacific Ocean, and sails northward, even till it reaches the Line.	The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
	The furrow follow'd free;
	We were the first that ever burst
	Into that silent sea.
The ship hath been suddenly becalmed.	Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down,
	'Twas sad as sad could be;
	And we did speak only to break
	The silence of the sea!
	All in a hot and copper sky,
	The bloody Sun, at noon,
	Right up above the mast did stand,
	No bigger than the Moon.
	Day after day, day after day,
	We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
	As idle as a painted ship
	Upon a painted ocean.
And the Albatross begins to be avenged.	Water, water, everywhere,
	And all the boards did shrink;
	Water, water, everywhere,
	Nor any drop to drink.
	The very deep did rot: O Christ!
	That ever this should be!
	Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
	Upon the slimy sea.
	About, about, in reel and rout
	The death-fires danced at night;
	The water, like a witch's oils,
	Burnt green, and blue, and white.
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.	And some in dreams assuréd were
	Of the Spirit that plagued us so;
	Nine fathom deep he had followed us
	From the land of mist and snow.
	And every tongue, through utter drought,
	Was wither'd at the root;
	We could not speak, no more than if
	We had been choked with soot.
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.	Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
	Had I from old and young!
	Instead of the cross, the Albatross
	About my neck was hung.
	PART III
	'There passed a weary time. Each throat
	Was parch'd, and glazed each eye.
	A weary time! a weary time!
	How glazed each weary eye!
The ancient Mariner beholdeth a sign in the element afar off.	When looking westward, I beheld
	A something in the sky.
	At first it seem'd a little speck,
	And then it seem'd a mist;
	It moved and moved, and took at last
	A certain shape, I wist.
	A speck, a mist, a shape, I wist!
	And still it near'd and near'd:
	As if it dodged a water-sprite,
	It plunged, and tack'd, and veer'd.
At its nearer approach, it seemeth him to be a ship; and at a dear ransom he freeth his speech from the bonds of thirst.	With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
	We could nor laugh nor wail;
	Through utter drought all dumb we stood!
	I bit my arm, I suck'd the blood,
	And cried, A sail! a sail!
	With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,
	Agape they heard me call:
A flash of joy;	Gramercy! they for joy did grin,
	And all at once their breath drew in,
	As they were drinking all.
And horror follows. For can it be a ship that comes onward without wind or tide?	See! see! (I cried) she tacks no more!
	Hither to work us weal—
	Without a breeze, without a tide,
	She steadies with upright keel!
	The western wave was all aflame,
	The day was wellnigh done!
	Almost upon the western wave
	Rested the broad, bright Sun;
	When that strange shape drove suddenly
	Betwixt us and the Sun.
It seemeth him but the skeleton of a ship.	And straight the Sun was fleck'd with bars
	(Heaven's Mother send us grace!),
	As if through a dungeon-grate he peer'd
	With broad and burning face.
	Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud)
	How fast she nears and nears!
	Are those her sails that glance in the Sun,
	Like restless gossameres?
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!	Are those her ribs through which the Sun
	Did peer, as through a grate?
	And is that Woman all her crew?
	Is that a Death? and are there two?
	Is Death that Woman's mate?
	Her lips were red, her looks were free,
	Her locks were yellow as gold:
	Her skin was as white as leprosy,
	The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she,
	Who thicks man's blood with cold.
Death and Life-in-Death have diced for the ship's crew, and she (the latter) winneth the ancient Mariner.	The naked hulk alongside came,
	And the twain were casting dice;
	"The game is done! I've won! I've won!"
	Quoth she, and whistles thrice.
No twilight within the courts of the Sun.	The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out:
	At one stride comes the dark;
	With far-heard whisper, o'er the sea,
	Off shot the spectre-bark.
	We listen'd and look'd sideways up!
	Fear at my heart, as at a cup,
	My life-blood seem'd to sip!
	The stars were dim, and thick the night,
	The steersman's face by his lamp gleam'd white;
	From the sails the dew did drip—
At the rising of the Moon,	Till clomb above the eastern bar
	The hornéd Moon, with one bright star
	Within the nether tip.
One after another,	One after one, by the star-dogg'd Moon,
	Too quick for groan or sigh,
	Each turn'd his face with a ghastly pang,
	And cursed me with his eye.
His shipmates drop down dead.	Four times fifty living men
	(And I heard nor sigh nor groan),
	With heavy thump, a lifeless lump,
	They dropp'd down one by one.
But Life-in-Death begins her work on the ancient Mariner.	The souls did from their bodies fly—
	They fled to bliss or woe!
	And every soul, it pass'd me by
	Like the whizz of my crossbow!'
PART IV
The Wedding-Guest feareth that a spirit is talking to him;	'I fear thee, ancient Mariner!
	I fear thy skinny hand!
	And thou art long, and lank, and brown,
	As is the ribb'd sea-sand.
	I fear thee and thy glittering eye,
	And thy skinny hand so brown.'—
But the ancient Mariner assureth him of his bodily life, and proceedeth to relate his horrible penance.	'Fear not, fear not, thou Wedding-Guest!
	This body dropt not down.
	Alone, alone, all, all alone,
	Alone on a wide, wide sea!
	And never a saint took pity on
	My soul in agony.
He despiseth the creatures of the calm.	The many men, so beautiful!
	And they all dead did lie:
	And a thousand thousand slimy things
	Lived on; and so did I.
And envieth that they should live, and so many lie dead.	I look'd upon the rotting sea,
	And drew my eyes away;
	I look'd upon the rotting deck,
	And there the dead men lay.
	I look'd to heaven, and tried to pray;
	But or ever a prayer had gusht,
	A wicked whisper came, and made
	My heart as dry as dust.
	I closed my lids, and kept them close,
	And the balls like pulses beat;
	For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky,
	Lay like a load on my weary eye,
	And the dead were at my feet.
But the curse liveth for him in the eye of the dead men.	The cold sweat melted from their limbs,
	Nor rot nor reek did they:
	The look with which they look'd on me
	Had never pass'd away.
	An orphan's curse would drag to hell
	A spirit from on high;
	But oh! more horrible than that
	Is the curse in a dead man's eye!
	Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse,
	And yet I could not die.
In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and everywhere 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.	The moving Moon went up the sky,
	And nowhere did abide;
	Softly she was going up,
	And a star or two beside—
	Her beams bemock'd the sultry main,
	Like April hoar-frost spread;
	But where the ship's huge shadow lay,
	The charméd water burnt alway
	A still and awful red.
By the light of the Moon he beholdeth God's creatures of the great calm.	Beyond the shadow of the ship,
	I watch'd the water-snakes:
	They moved in tracks of shining white,
	And when they rear'd, the elfish light
	Fell off in hoary flakes.
	Within the shadow of the ship
	I watch'd their rich attire:
	Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
	They coil'd and swam; and every track
	Was a flash of golden fire.
Their beauty and their happiness.	O happy living things! no tongue
	Their beauty might declare:
	A spring of love gush'd from my heart,
He blesseth them in his heart.	And I bless'd them unaware:
	Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
	And I bless'd them unaware.
The spell begins to break.	The selfsame moment I could pray;
	And from my neck so free
	The Albatross fell off, and sank
	Like lead into the sea.
	PART V
	'O sleep! it is a gentle thing,
	Beloved from pole to pole!
	To Mary Queen the praise be given!
	She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven,
	That slid into my soul.
By grace of the holy Mother, the ancient Mariner is refreshed with rain.	The silly buckets on the deck,
	That had so long remain'd,
	I dreamt that they were fill'd with dew;
	And when I awoke, it rain'd.
	My lips were wet, my throat was cold,
	My garments all were dank;
	Sure I had drunken in my dreams,
	And still my body drank.
	I moved, and could not feel my limbs:
	I was so light—almost
	I thought that I had died in sleep,
	And was a blesséd ghost.
He heareth sounds and seeth strange sights and commotions in the sky and the element.	And soon I heard a roaring wind:
	It did not come anear;
	But with its sound it shook the sails,
	That were so thin and sere.
	The upper air burst into life;
	And a hundred fire-flags sheen;
	To and fro they were hurried about!
	And to and fro, and in and out,
	The wan stars danced between.
	And the coming wind did roar more loud,
	And the sails did sigh like sedge;
	And the rain pour'd down from one black cloud;
	The Moon was at its edge.
	The thick black cloud was cleft, and still
	The Moon was at its side;
	Like waters shot from some high crag,
	The lightning fell with never a jag,
	A river steep and wide.
The bodies of the ship's crew are inspired, and the ship moves on;	The loud wind never reach'd the ship,
	Yet now the ship moved on!
	Beneath the lightning and the Moon
	The dead men gave a groan.
	They groan'd, they stirr'd, they all uprose,
	Nor spake, nor moved their eyes;
	It had been strange, even in a dream,
	To have seen those dead men rise.
	The helmsman steer'd, the ship moved on;
	Yet never a breeze up-blew;
	The mariners all 'gan work the ropes,
	Where they were wont to do;
	They raised their limbs like lifeless tools—
	We were a ghastly crew.
	The body of my brother's son
	Stood by me, knee to knee:
	The body and I pull'd at one rope,
	But he said naught to me.'
But not by the souls of the men, nor by demons of earth or middle air, but by a blessed troop of angelic spirits, sent down by the invocation of the guardian saint.	'I fear thee, ancient Mariner!'
	Be calm, thou Wedding-Guest:
	'Twas not those souls that fled in pain,
	Which to their corses came again,
	But a troop of spirits blest:
	For when it dawn'd—they dropp'd their arms,
	And cluster'd round the mast;
	Sweet sounds rose slowly through their mouths,
	And from their bodies pass'd.
	Around, around, flew each sweet sound,
	Then darted to the Sun;
	Slowly the sounds came back again,
	Now mix'd, now one by one.
	Sometimes a-dropping from the sky
	I heard the skylark sing;
	Sometimes all little birds that are,
	How they seem'd to fill the sea and air
	With their sweet jargoning!
	And now 'twas like all instruments,
	Now like a lonely flute;
	And now it is an angel's song,
	That makes the Heavens be mute.
	It ceased; yet still the sails made on
	A pleasant noise till noon,
	A noise like of a hidden brook
	In the leafy month of June,
	That to the sleeping woods all night
	Singeth a quiet tune.
	Till noon we quietly sail'd on,
	Yet never a breeze did breathe:
	Slowly and smoothly went the ship,
	Moved onward from beneath.
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.	Under the keel nine fathom deep,
	From the land of mist and snow,
	The Spirit slid: and it was he
	That made the ship to go.
	The sails at noon left off their tune,
	And the ship stood still also.
	The Sun, right up above the mast,
	Had fix'd her to the ocean:
	But in a minute she 'gan stir,
	With a short uneasy motion—
	Backwards and forwards half her length
	With a short uneasy motion.
	Then like a pawing horse let go,
	She made a sudden bound:
	It flung the blood into my head,
	And I fell down in a swound.
The Polar Spirit's fellow-demons, 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.	How long in that same fit I lay,
	I have not to declare;
	But ere my living life return'd,
	I heard, and in my soul discern'd
	Two voices in the air.
	"Is it he?" quoth one, "is this the man?
	By Him who died on cross,
	With his cruel bow he laid full low
	The harmless Albatross.
	The Spirit who bideth by himself
	In the land of mist and snow,
	He loved the bird that loved the man
	Who shot him with his bow."
	The other was a softer voice,
	As soft as honey-dew:
	Quoth he, "The man hath penance done,
	And penance more will do."
	PART VI
	First Voice: '"But tell me, tell me! speak again,
	Thy soft response renewing—
	What makes that ship drive on so fast?
	What is the Ocean doing?"
	Second Voice: "Still as a slave before his lord,
	The Ocean hath no blast;
	His great bright eye most silently
	Up to the Moon is cast—
	If he may know which way to go;
	For she guides him smooth or grim.
	See, brother, see! how graciously
	She looketh down on him."
The Mariner hath been cast into a trance; for the angelic power causeth the vessel to drive northward faster than human life could endure.	First Voice: "But why drives on that ship so fast,
	Without or wave or wind?"
	Second Voice: "The air is cut away before,
	And closes from behind.
	Fly, brother, fly! more high, more high!
	Or we shall be belated:
	For slow and slow that ship will go,
	When the Mariner's trance is abated.'
The supernatural motion is retarded; the Mariner awakes, and his penance begins anew.	I woke, and we were sailing on
	As in a gentle weather:
	'Twas night, calm night, the Moon was high;
	The dead men stood together.
	All stood together on the deck,
	For a charnel-dungeon fitter:
	All fix'd on me their stony eyes,
	That in the Moon did glitter.
	The pang, the curse, with which they died,
	Had never pass'd away:
	I could not draw my eyes from theirs,
	Nor turn them up to pray.
The curse is finally expiated.	And now this spell was snapt: once more
	I viewed the ocean green,
	And look'd far forth, yet little saw
	Of what had else been seen—
	Like one that on a lonesome road
	Doth walk in fear and dread,
	And having once turn'd round, walks on,
	And turns no more his head;
	Because he knows a frightful fiend
	Doth close behind him tread.
	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.
	It raised my hair, it fann'd my cheek
	Like a meadow-gale of spring—
	It mingled strangely with my fears,
	Yet it felt like a welcoming.
	Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship,
	Yet she sail'd softly too:
	Sweetly, sweetly blew the breeze—
	On me alone it blew.
And the ancient Mariner beholdeth his native country.	O dream of joy! is this indeed
	The lighthouse top I see?
	Is this the hill? is this the kirk?
	Is this mine own countree?
	We drifted o'er the harbour-bar,
	And I with sobs did pray—
	O let me be awake, my God!
	Or let me sleep alway.
	The harbour-bay was clear as glass,
	So smoothly it was strewn!
	And on the bay the moonlight lay,
	And the shadow of the Moon.
	The rock shone bright, the kirk no less
	That stands above the rock:
	The moonlight steep'd in silentness
	The steady weathercock.
The angelic spirits leave the dead bodies,	And the bay was white with silent light
	Till rising from the same,
	Full many shapes, that shadows were,
	In crimson colours came.
And appear in their own forms of light.	A little distance from the prow
	Those crimson shadows were:
	I turn'd my eyes upon the deck—
	O Christ! what saw I there!
	Each corse lay flat, lifeless and flat,
	And, by the holy rood!
	A man all light, a seraph-man,
	On every corse there stood.
	This seraph-band, each waved his hand:
	It was a heavenly sight!
	They stood as signals to the land,
	Each one a lovely light;
	This seraph-band, each waved his hand,
	No voice did they impart—
	No voice; but O, the silence sank
	Like music on my heart.
	But soon I heard the dash of oars,
	I heard the Pilot's cheer;
	My head was turn'd perforce away,
	And I saw a boat appear.
	The Pilot and the Pilot's boy,
	I heard them coming fast:
	Dear Lord in Heaven! it was a joy
	The dead men could not blast.
	I saw a third—I heard his voice:
	It is the Hermit good!
	He singeth loud his godly hymns
	That he makes in the wood.
	He'll shrieve my soul, he'll wash away
	The Albatross's blood.
	PART VII
The Hermit of the Wood.	'This Hermit good lives in that wood
	Which slopes down to the sea.
	How loudly his sweet voice he rears!
	He loves to talk with marineres
	That come from a far countree.
	He kneels at morn, and noon, and eve—
	He hath a cushion plump:
	It is the moss that wholly hides
	The rotted old oak-stump.
	The skiff-boat near'd: I heard them talk,
	"Why, this is strange, I trow!
	Where are those lights so many and fair,
	That signal made but now?"
Approacheth the ship with wonder.	"Strange, by my faith!" the Hermit said—
	"And they answer'd not our cheer!
	The planks looked warp'd! and see those sails,
	How thin they are and sere!
	I never saw aught like to them,
	Unless perchance it were
	Brown skeletons of leaves that lag
	My forest-brook along;
	When the ivy-tod is heavy with snow,
	And the owlet whoops to the wolf below,
	That eats the she-wolf's young."
	"Dear Lord! it hath a fiendish look—
	(The Pilot made reply)
	I am a-fear'd"—"Push on, push on!"
	Said the Hermit cheerily.
	The boat came closer to the ship,
	But I nor spake nor stirr'd;
	The boat came close beneath the ship,
	And straight a sound was heard.
The ship suddenly sinketh.	Under the water it rumbled on,
	Still louder and more dread:
	It reach'd the ship, it split the bay;
	The ship went down like lead.
The ancient Mariner is saved in the Pilot's boat.	Stunn'd by that loud and dreadful sound,
	Which sky and ocean smote,
	Like one that hath been seven days drown'd
	My body lay afloat;
	But swift as dreams, myself I found
	Within the Pilot's boat.
	Upon the whirl, where sank the ship,
	The boat spun round and round;
	And all was still, save that the hill
	Was telling of the sound.
	I moved my lips—the Pilot shriek'd
	And fell down in a fit;
	The holy Hermit raised his eyes,
	And pray'd where he did sit.
	I took the oars: the Pilot's boy,
	Who now doth crazy go,
	Laugh'd loud and long, and all the while
	His eyes went to and fro.
	"Ha! ha!" quoth he, "full plain I see
	The Devil knows how to row."
	And now, all in my own countree,
	I stood on the firm land!
	The Hermit stepp'd forth from the boat,
	And scarcely he could stand.
The ancient Mariner earnestly entreateth the Hermit to shrieve him; and the penance of life falls on him.	"O shrieve me, shrieve me, holy man!"
	The Hermit cross'd his brow.
	"Say quick," quoth he, "I bid thee say—
	What manner of man art thou?"
	Forthwith this frame of mine was wrench'd
	With a woful agony,
	Which forced me to begin my tale;
	And then it left me free.
And ever and anon throughout his future life an agony constraineth him to travel from land to land;	Since then, at an uncertain hour,
	That agony returns:
	And till my ghastly tale is told,
	This heart within me burns.
	I pass, like night, from land to land;
	I have strange power of speech;
	That moment that his face I see,
	I know the man that must hear me:
	To him my tale I teach.
	What loud uproar bursts from that door!
	The wedding-guests are there:
	But in the garden-bower the bride
	And bride-maids singing are:
	And hark the little vesper bell,
	Which biddeth me to prayer!
	O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been
	Alone on a wide, wide sea:
	So lonely 'twas, that God Himself
	Scarce seeméd there to be.
	O sweeter than the marriage-feast,
	'Tis sweeter far to me,
	To walk together to the kirk
	With a goodly company!—
	To walk together to the kirk,
	And all together pray,
	While each to his great Father bends,
	Old men, and babes, and loving friends,
	And youths and maidens gay!
And to teach, by his own example, love and reverence to all things that God made and loveth.	Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
	To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!
	He prayeth well, who loveth well
	Both man and bird and beast.
	He prayeth best, who loveth best
	All things both great and small;
	For the dear God who loveth us,
	He made and loveth all.'
	The Mariner, whose eye is bright,
	Whose beard with age is hoar,
	Is gone: and now the Wedding-Guest
	Turn'd from the bridegroom's door.
	He went like one that hath been stunn'd,
	And is of sense forlorn:
	A sadder and a wiser man
	He rose the morrow morn.

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772-1834

1797-1798, first version published 1798, 1800, 1802, 1805; revised version, including addition of his marginal glosses, published in 1817, 1828, 1829, 1834.

(proofed against E. H. Coleridge's 1927 edition of STC's poems and a ca. 1898 edition of STC's Poetical Works, ``reprinted from the early editions'')


Samuel Taylor Coleridge (21 October 1772 – 25 July 1834)

An English poet, critic and philosopher who was, along with his friend William Wordsworth, one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England and one of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as his major prose work Biographia Literaria.

For further information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rime_of_the_Ancient_Mariner

Book Selections:

1

Gustave Dore (Author, Illustrator)

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Author), Gustave Dore (Author, Illustrator), Martin Gardner (Author, Introduction) - http://www.amazon.com/Annotated-Ancient-Mariner-Rime/dp/1591021251/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1306335127&sr=1-1#

2

http://www.amazon.com/Rime-Ancient-Mariner-Samuel-Coleridge/dp/0785823409/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1306334984&sr=1-4

* * * * * * * * * * *

A Note from R. E. Slater

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner quickly became my favorite poem when first discovering it in my youth, so that when attending college much later I decided to write an abridged version of this poem with my own coloration's and themes but left untitled. And as I did, I would emboss it with the same temperament and strong allusions to the sea that Coleridge uses in his Rime while also including several of the more prominent verses as homage to this vivid writer's expressions. Thereafter it sat incomplete for 30 years until I decided to include within its poetic structure nods to Henry Dana's novel, Two Years before the Mast,  and Felicia Heman's poem, Casabianca, and also to James Joyce's Ulysses, again using my own voice and allusions. Then could it be completed over a several month period into a final state of readiness in January 2009 along with a newly crafted title The Seafarers.

From this sprung several other poems on the sea including an adventure poem this time as an ode-tribute to the ancient sailors and legends of Greece utilizing their own myths for my themes and storyline while borrowing the Iliad's style and incorporating proverbial allusions from the Bible. I greatly enjoyed producing this piece and have since produced even more narrative poems borrowing from my own cacophony of mythological figures and external speakers.

Because I am still producing poetic verse and stories, I have committed no time to researching how I might publish my poems (having the very strong preference of not wishing that activity to interfere with my own timeline for writing and creative thinking). Consequently, I have produced only a few works online at my website which I have called my Occasional Poems. They are unlike my other poems but of a sort that I am willing to share as inspiration to the reader.

About a year ago, in the spring of 2011, feeling burned out and requiring a change of writing venue, I then began two websites. This one here, and a theological website to explore contemporary versions of post-modern, post-evangelic Christianity (at one time known as Emergent Theology), going under the name of Relevancy22. It has been a good project to pour myself into and has allowed me to think about life's deeper theo-sophic themes while writing newer poetry that may include some of these more sublime themes. Meanwhile, I am hard at work crafting new poems and editing older ones having completed the rough outlines of several very long stories that I hope to someday share for your thrall and enjoyment. At least that is my hope during these long winter months of duty and self-confinement. Wish me well!

R.E. Slater

January 29, 2012

Dylan Thomas - Elegy

Dylan Thomas

Departures (Soundtrack) - 18 Okuribito (Memory)

January 13, 2010

Elergy

by Dylan Thomas

Too proud to die; broken and blind he died

The darkest way, and did not turn away,
A cold kind man brave in his narrow pride

On that darkest day, Oh, forever may
He lie lightly, at last, on the last, crossed
Hill, under the grass, in love, and there grow

Young among the long flocks, and never lie lost
Or still all the numberless days of his death, though
Above all he longed for his mother's breast

Which was rest and dust, and in the kind ground
The darkest justice of death, blind and unblessed.
Let him find no rest but be fathered and found,

I prayed in the crouching room, by his blind bed,
In the muted house, one minute before
Noon, and night, and light. the rivers of the dead

Veined his poor hand I held, and I saw
Through his unseeing eyes to the roots of the sea.
(An old tormented man three-quarters blind,

I am not too proud to cry that He and he
Will never never go out of my mind.
All his bones crying, and poor in all but pain,

Being innocent, he dreaded that he died
Hating his God, but what he was was plain:
An old kind man brave in his burning pride.

The sticks of the house were his; his books he owned.
Even as a baby he had never cried;
Nor did he now, save to his secret wound.

Out of his eyes I saw the last light glide.
Here among the liught of the lording sky
An old man is with me where I go

Walking in the meadows of his son's eye
On whom a world of ills came down like snow.
He cried as he died, fearing at last the spheres'

Last sound, the world going out without a breath:
Too proud to cry, too frail to check the tears,
And caught between two nights, blindness and death.

O deepest wound of all that he should die
On that darkest day. oh, he could hide
The tears out of his eyes, too proud to cry.

Until I die he will not leave my side.

Dylan Thomas
http://www.dylanthomas.com/

Departures (Soundtrack) - 19 Okuribito (Ending)

January 13, 2010

Dylan Thomas - Author's Prologue

Author's Prologue, Part I

March 26, 2020

Author's Prologue, Part II

March 26, 2020

Author's Prologue, Part III:

Poem on Dylan Thomas' Birthday

March 26, 2020

Author's Prologue

by Dylan Thomas

This day winding down now
At God speeded summer's end
In the torrent salmon sun,
In my seashaken house
On a breakneck of rocks
Tangled with chirrup and fruit,
Froth, flute, fin, and quill
At a wood's dancing hoof,
By scummed, starfish sands
With their fishwife cross

Gulls, pipers, cockles, and snails,
Out there, crow black, men
Tackled with clouds, who kneel
To the sunset nets,
Geese nearly in heaven, boys
Stabbing, and herons, and shells
That speak seven seas,
Eternal waters away
From the cities of nine
Days' night whose towers will catch
In the religious wind
Like stalks of tall, dry straw,
At poor peace I sing
To you strangers (though song
Is a burning and crested act,

The fire of birds in
The world's turning wood,
For my swan, splay sounds),
Out of these seathumbed leaves
That will fly and fall
Like leaves of trees and as soon
Crumble and undie
Into the dogdayed night.
Seaward the salmon, sucked sun slips,
And the dumb swans drub blue
My dabbed bay's dusk, as I hack
This rumpus of shapes
For you to know
How I, a spining man,
Glory also this star, bird
Roared, sea born, man torn, blood blest.
Hark: I trumpet the place,
From fish to jumping hill! Look:
I build my bellowing ark
To the best of my love
As the flood begins,
Out of the fountainhead
Of fear, rage read, manalive,
Molten and mountainous to stream
Over the wound asleep
Sheep white hollow farms

To Wales in my arms.
Hoo, there, in castle keep,
You king singsong owls, who moonbeam
The flickering runs and dive
The dingle furred deer dead!
Huloo, on plumbed bryns,
O my ruffled ring dove
in the hooting, nearly dark
With Welsh and reverent rook,
Coo rooning the woods' praise,
who moons her blue notes from her nest
Down to the curlew herd!
Ho, hullaballoing clan
Agape, with woe
In your beaks, on the gabbing capes!
Heigh, on horseback hill, jack
Whisking hare! who
Hears, there, this fox light, my flood ship's
Clangour as I hew and smite

(A clash of anvils for my
Hubbub and fiddle, this tune
On atounged puffball)
But animals thick as theives
On God's rough tumbling grounds
(Hail to His beasthood!).
Beasts who sleep good and thin,
Hist, in hogback woods! The haystacked
Hollow farms ina throng
Of waters cluck and cling,
And barnroofs cockcrow war!
O kingdom of neighbors finned
Felled and quilled, flash to my patch
Work ark and the moonshine
Drinking Noah of the bay,
With pelt, and scale, and fleece:
Only the drowned deep bells

Of sheep and churches noise

Poor peace as the sun sets
And dark shoals every holy field.
We will ride out alone then,
Under the stars of Wales,
Cry, Multiudes of arks! Across
The water lidded lands,
Manned with their loves they'll move
Like wooden islands, hill to hill.
Huloo, my prowed dove with a flute!

Ahoy, old, sea-legged fox,

Tom tit and Dai mouse!
My ark sings in the sun
At God speeded summer's end
And the flood flowers now.

Dylan Thomas

http://www.dylanthomas.com/

WS Merwin - Biography

SWIMMING UP INTO POETRY

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/poetry/antholog/merwin/pdmerwin.htm

The Atlantic's poetry editor reflects on the career of W. S. Merwin
whose long association with the magazine spans great distances
of geography and art

by Peter Davison

August 28, 1997

Over the past twenty-five years the poems of W. S. Merwin have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly's pages more frequently than those of any other poet. The editors have been deeply attracted to the vivid movement and activity of his poetry, which seem to flow up from an underground river that lies beneath mere speech, as though written in some pre-verbal language of which all later languages have proved to be a mere translation. Here's a sample from a 1970s poem called "The Dreamers":

a man with his eyes shut swam upward
through dark water and came to air
it was the horizon
he felt his way along it and it opened
and let the sun out

Merwin's work has followed his life. Born seventy years ago in Union City, New Jersey, he was raised first in a Presbyterian rectory looking across the Hudson toward the towers of New York and then later in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He graduated in 1947 from Princeton University, where he learned from John Berryman, and set out for Europe to encounter the Romance languages. During the early 1950s he lived as a translator of Latin, French, Spanish, and Portuguese on Majorca (where he tutored the children of the poet Robert Graves) and in Spain, Portugal, and England. He eventually settled in the south of France and headquartered there during most of the 1960s, though after a time he spent parts of nearly every year in New York. Later he wandered into Mexico for several years. Since 1975 he has resided in Hawaii, where he maintains a miniature forest of trees and plants of species that are threatened elsewhere in the world.

Merwin's early poetry was formal and medieval in its overtones, shaded by the influence of Robert Graves and of the medieval poetry Merwin was translating. He was awarded the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1952 by W. H. Auden. In his fourth book, The Drunk in the Furnace (1960), he turned toward American themes, after spending two years in Boston, where he got to know Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Adrienne Rich, Donald Hall, and other poets who were breaking out of the rhetoric of the 1950s. With The Moving Target (1963), The Lice (1967), and The Carrier of Ladders (which won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1970), he began exploring the hazy and animate forms of poetry for which he is famous. Merwin's poems from here on tend to escape from punctuation; they search beneath the surfaces of incident and feeling to the depths of our understanding, a territory of comprehension that anticipates language, that catches perception at the point where it has not yet wholly located words, encountering thought and feeling as they hesitate in the process of formation. In The Carrier of Ladders, for example, the character of a ladder is taken to reside not only in its rails and rungs but in the spaces between them, and the poet carrying it takes responsibility for all the dimensions of a ladder, not only for its character as a climbing contraption.

Merwin's recent poetry, to borrow the words of Robert Frost, may be thought of as "the tribute of the current to the source." During the 1980s and 1990s Merwin has gradually allowed his mind and language (which in a poet are especially hard to separate) to range across the wide regions of his own reading and travelling, while also plumbing the feelings and reasonings that arise from his deeply held beliefs. He is not only profoundly anti-imperialist, pacifist, and environmentalist, but also possessed by an intimate feeling for landscape and language and the ways in which land and language interflow. The Rain in the Trees (1988), Travels (1993), and The Vixen (1996) take the reader inside the implacable intentions of conquistadors, naturalists, and explorers, across the Pacific to the ravaged jungles of the Philippines, into the gentle tilt of a Pennsylvania pasture, to the flicker of health in a New York hospital or the business of a weasel in the wall of an old French farmhouse. Increasingly he has been arrested by an intensely sensuous involvement with place. His beautiful prose work, The Lost Upland (1992), and The Vixen are both book-length eulogies to the ancient farming country above the Dordogne River that Merwin left thirty years earlier -- written in Hawaii about France, a tremendous expedition through time and space to encounter the remnants of our medieval past. And listen to this recollection in another prose work, Unframed Originals (1982):

The smell of barns drifted even through the market towns that were themselves not much larger than villages, and in the evenings cows swayed through the streets guided by peasants with the same long sticks. Pigs grunted behind arched cellar doors, and were butchered in back alleys, with groups of experts standing around, and the cobbles running blood. The farm dogs appeared to be a random mix, but many of them had one pale and one dark eye. They knew their jobs. They ate soup. The language on the farms was a patois descended from a Languedoc tongue older than the French of Tours and Paris.

The intentions of Merwin's poetry are as broad as the biosphere yet as intimate as a whisper. He conveys in the sweet simplicity of grounded language a sense of the self where it belongs, floating between heaven, earth, and underground. The tone and directness of his intentions are clearly declared at the outset of Travels in a poem called "Cover Note":

...reader I do
not know that anyone
else is waiting for these
words that I hoped might seem
as though they had occurred
to you and you would take
them with you as your own

It's that ingratiating tone that Merwin's poems take -- confiding, in the most private way, the most generous of concerns -- that has made him so welcome and frequent a visitor to The Atlantic Monthly's poetry pages.

---

Peter Davison is the poetry editor of The Atlantic Monthly. His books include the memoir The Fading Smile: Poets in Boston, 1955-1960 (1994) and The Poems of Peter Davison 1957-1995, recently published in paperback.

WS Merwin - Three French Poems

VEHICLES

This is a place on the way after the distances
can no longer be kept straight here in this dark corner
of the barn a mound of wheels has convened along
raveling courses to stop in a single moment
and lie down as still as the chariots of the Pharaohs
some in pairs that rolled as one over the same roads
to the end and never touched each other until they
arrived here some that broke by themselves and were left
until they could be repaired some that went only
to occasions before my time and some that have spun
across other countries through uncounted summers
now they go all the way back together the tall
cobweb-hung models of galaxies in their rings
of rust leaning against the stone hail from Rene's
manure cart the year he wanted to store them here
because there was nobody left who could make them like that
in case he should need them and there are the carriage wheels
that Merot said would be worth a lot some day
and the rim of the spare from bald Bleret's green Samson
that rose like Borobudur out of the high grass
behind the old house by the river where he stuffed
mattresses in the morning sunlight and the hens
scavenged around his shoes in the days when the black
top-hat sedan still towered outside Sandeau's cow barn
with velvet upholstery and sconces for flowers and room
for two calves instead of the back seat when their time came.

WS Merwin, publ. September 1994



THE SPEED OF LIGHT

So gradual in those summers was the going
of the age it seemed that the long days setting out
when the stars faded over the mountains were not
leaving us even as the birds woke in full song and the dew
glittered in the webs it appeared then that the clear morning
opening into the sky was something of ours
to have and keep and that the brightness we could not touch
and the air we could not hold had come to be there all the time
for us and would never be gone and that the axle
we did not hear was not turning when the ancient car
coughed in the roofer's barn and rolled out echoing
first thing into the lane and the only tractor
in the village rumbled and went into its rusty
mutterings before heading out of its lean-to
into the cow pats and the shadow of the lime tree
we did not see that the swallows flashing and the sparks
of their cries were fast in the spokes of the hollow
wheel that was turning and turning us taking us
all away as one with the tires of the baker's van
where the wheels of bread were stacked like days in calendars
coming and going all at once we did not hear
the rim of the hour in whatever we were saying
or touching all day we thought it was there and would stay
it was only as the afternoon lengthened on its
dial and the shadows reached out farther and farther
from everything that we began to listen for what
might be escaping us and we heard high voices ringing
the village at sundown calling their animals home
and then the bats after dark and the silence on its road.

WS Merwin, publ. September 1994



END OF A DAY

In the long evening of April through the cool light
Bayle's two sheep dogs sail down the lane like magpies
for the flock a moment before he appears near the oaks
a stub of a man rolling as he approaches
smiling and smiling and his dogs are afraid of him
we stand among the radiant stones looking out over
green lucent wheat and earth combed red under bare walnut limbs
bees hanging late in cowslips and lingering bird cherry
stumps and brush that were the grove of hazel trees
where the land turns above the draped slopes and the valley
filled with its one sunbeam and we exchange a few questions
as though nothing were different but he has bulldozed the upland
pastures and the shepherds' huts into piles of rubble
and has his sheep fenced in everyone's meadows now
the smell of box and damp leaves drifts from the woods where a blackbird
is warning of nightfall Bayle has plans to demolish
the ancient walls of the lane and level it wide
so that trucks can go all the way down to where the lambs
with perhaps two weeks to live are waiting for him at the wire
he hurries toward them while the sun sinks and the hour
turns chill as iron and in the oaks the first nightingales
of the year kindle their unapproachable voices.

WS Merwin, publ. September 1994


 

WS Merwin - Three Poems

ANOTHER RIVER

The friends have gone home far up the valley
of that river into whose estuary
the man from England sailed in his own age
in time to catch sight of the late forests
furring in black the remotest edges
of the majestic water always it
appeared to me that he arrived just as
an evening was beginning and toward the end
of summer when the converging surface
lay as a single vast mirror gazing
upward into the pearl light that was
already stained with the first saffron
of sunset on which the high wavering trails
of migrant birds flowed southward as though there were
no end to them the wind had dropped and the tide
and the current for a moment seemed to hang
still in balance and the creaking and knocking
of wood stopped all at once and the known voices
died away and the smells and rocking
and starvation of the voyage had become
a sleep behind them as they lay becalmed
on the reflection of their Half Moon
while the sky blazed and then the tide lifted them
up the dark passage they had no name for.

WS Merwin, publ. 1997



REMEMBERING

There are threads of old sound heard over and over
phrases of Shakespeare or Mozart the slender
wands of the auroras playing out from them
into dark time the passing of a few
migrants high in the night far from the ancient flocks
far from the rest of the words far from the instruments.

WS Merwin, publ. 1997



ECHOING LIGHT

When I was beginning to read I imagined
that bridges had something to do with birds
and with what seemed to be cages but I knew
that they were not cages it must have been autumn
with the dusty light flashing from the streetcar wires
and those orange places on fire in the pictures
and now indeed it is autumn the clear
days not far from the sea with a small wind nosing
over dry grass that yesterday was green
the empty corn standing trembling and a down
of ghost flowers veiling the ignored fields
and everywhere the colors I cannot take
my eyes from all of them red even the wide streams
red it is the season of migrants
flying at night feeling the turning earth
beneath them and I woke in the city hearing
the call notes of the plover then again and
again before I slept and here far downriver
flocking together echoing close to the shore
the longest bridges have opened their slender wings.

WS Merwin, publ. 1997