Binding the Mariner's Craft: On the Alienated Speech of Revolution in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

This thesis aims to understand the motivations behind the form of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”—to find the reason behind the Mariner’s rhyme. The first phase of this exploration considers Coleridge’s contribution to the question of form-content continuity and culminates in a hypothesis that drives the rest of the paper: that though Coleridge’s location of poetic language as above nature participates in the view that form-content continuous poems (poems crafted exclusively in the realm of language) cannot exist as interrelated to nature, such a displacement of language fundamentally misconstrues the premises of mysticism Coleridge hybridizes it with. Namely, I consider Coleridge’s misuse of Jacob Boehme’s “The Seven Forms of Spirits” model.The remainder of the thesis analyzes “The Ancient Mariner” with two goals in mind: 1) to propose that Coleridge’s displacement of language outside of nature catalyzes the disjunctions between form and content that render the poem’s verse so unregulated; and 2) to argue that Coleridge’s desire for such supernatural language is rooted in his attempts to draw readers out of that lethargic human condition the poet perceives as fueling the violence of the French Revolution. That is, I interpret “The Ancient Mariner” as an allegorical instructive that tries to guide its audiences’ imaginative faculties toward the embrace of a supernatural language Coleridge believes can instate peaceful revolution. Its failure to do so will enlighten as to the need for language to exist within and in line with nature, rather than beyond and against it.