Art in Literature: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

The teacher training college I went to was old & growing near to unfit for purpose status even when my friends & I went, although we didn’t know it at the time. Almost everyone hand-wrote essays, even if, like me, they could touch-type. The campus was lovely; self-contained & leafy, it sat at the top of a hill overlooking the city. In the café you could see for miles thanks to the enormous windows reaching from one side of the building to the other. But several of the other buildings spoke of a much earlier time in education. They probably smelled exactly as they had when they were built, of floor polish & wooden panels. Some buildings barely ever seemed to be used. No surprise perhaps that the whole area was flattened & sold for flats but a sadness nevertheless.

Gustave Doré (1832-1883)

In the science department people actually wore lab coats. There was more equipment in that building than you’d ever find in all the primary schools in Aberdeen but we didn’t know that yet. I can’t remember a single thing about science class except that I once flooded the corridor by mistake. Along said corridors there were huge tanks of gerbils. It was difficult to ascertain how many gerbils there were in any given tank & they were allowed to take the various courses of nature. Gerbils will be gerbils after all. Occasionally, you’d see a dead gerbil among the torn-up nesting & burrowing material & feel the need to alert one of the technicians. They in turn would shrug & promise to deal with it, knowing you wouldn’t be back to science class for another week & they’d plenty of time to remove it or let it be further buried in the deep layers of shredded paper.

Clara Scintilla

All this is a roundabout way of saying there was a stuffed albatross in the science department. A real one. & he was absolutely ruddy enormous. I’d never seen an albatross of any sort, in any state & every time I encountered him he brought me not inconsiderable shock & amazement. I rarely thought about his demise as I usually would with stuffed animals because there was something about him that seemed alive. Either the taxidermist had done their job well or any albatross alive or dead has a presence. In any case, this one had presence. I can recall his beady false eye following me round the room, but in quite a genial way for a dead thing. In fact his whole bearing suggested a distinct matiness most wild animals sensibly tend to avoid. He was standing up, without context & I’m sure came up to my waist in height. I’ve always been a bit taller than average & the seagulls in Aberdeen are huge so to have what’s frankly a gigantic dead seagull stand next to you apparently imploring you to be his friend (you hope) is disconcerting & certainly memorable.

Arthur C Michael (1881-1965)

Utkarsh Chaturvedi 

All this is a roundabout way of saying I can’t see how the ancient mariner of Samuel Coleridge's poem could have shot the albatross, much less carried him around his neck, but quite honestly he had it all coming to him. His idiot shipmates were perhaps right to be superstitious & it’s likely long sea voyages do strange things to a person, especially back then but the only character I have sympathy for in the whole sorry tale is the giant, chummy bird himself. I’ll admit a little pity for the wedding guest – no-one likes to be cornered by random types, especially if they’re in a hurry. 

William Strang (1859-1921)

Greg Irons (1947-1984)

Said wedding guest is stopped by said random type – the eponymous mariner - & as always in these situations, made to listen to his tale of woe. & what a tale! The hapless wedding guest has no idea what he’s in for & in fairness does an about turn in his patience with the mariner. The mariner begins his story as this ship sets sail but when they hit a storm they are in peril. An albatross emerges & seems to lead them out of danger. Inexplicably the mariner shoots the bird & the crew are fuming. I can’t imagine the albatross was too happy either. When they emerge into better weather, the crew are less angry with the mariner but this story twists & turns & they end up more or less lost & without drinking water. The unreliable crew grow peevish again & in another baffling move, force the mariner to wear the albatross round his neck, hence the idiom still used today for something that drags us down or burdens us.

Nick Hayes

I’m not going to spoil the rest of the poem – everyone should read it once at least. I feel this way about most texts that enrich our figurative language. For a poem it’s long, Coleridge’s longest & it’s powerful stuff. What good illustrations should do of course is add to the words rather than replace them. By all means interpret the text, but as someone who has illustrated the poetry of others it’s not worthwhile trying to replicate what’s there. It’s the poet’s job to create images in the reader’s mind. Sometimes illustrations will make sense of more difficult passages for the reader, but with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1797-98) which is chilling & evocatively written, the isolation, desolation & doom is all very clearly laid out in words. 

Harry Clarke (1889-1931)

In my opinion, to be effective, the illustrations of the Ancient Mariner must convey the sense of desert living since without drinking water that is almost literally what the sailors were suffering. Images should express the feeling of abandonment & emptiness that exists within humans, even aside from Coleridge’s supernatural hoo-hah. What is so brilliant about the Ancient Mariner is its successful description of universal human experience within a situation that most humans never find themselves in, then or now. Nowadays Coleridge’s poem can also be read as a cautionary environmental story – when it’s gone it’s gone & too much time’s already drifted by.

Mervyn Peake (1911-1968)

It’s nice to have an illustrated physical copy (Doré’s & Peake’s images are dazzling, as Doré’s & Peake’s work always is, Clarke’s controlled accomplishment astonishing of course – recommended) but you can read the poem online here for free if you want instant gratification & don’t mind relying on your own imagination to fill in any gaps…

https://www.oatridge.co.uk/poems/s/samuel-taylor-coleridge-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner.php

Alan B Herriot (b. 1952)