Episode 248: “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by S. T. Coleridge, Part 1

On today’s episode of The Literary Life, Angelina and Thomas discuss the first half of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. They review some of the ideas covered last week, particularly Romanticism and the harkening back to the medieval tradition in contrast to the Neo-Classicism that preceded this period. Thomas sets up the plot with an explanation of the “frame tale,” then reads several of the opening stanzas, pausing frequently for commentary and discussion with Angelina. They talk about the symbolism of the albatross, plus so much more!

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Commonplace Quotes:

He was a lamp that spent its oil in burning.
Samuel Johnson, from The Lives of the Poets

In religion, many Romantics, especially on the Continent, adopted a conservative or traditional Christian position, usually Roman Catholic, and saw in Romanticism a revival of an age of faith, in reaction to the sterile enlightenment of the eighteenth century, when a rational analytic perspective was thought to have reached an extreme. In British Romanticism, Edmund Burke, with his conception of a continuous social contract and his elegy over the passing of the age of chivalry with the French Revolution, and Carlyle, with his effort to reactivate the aristocracy and his vision of the “organic filaments” of a new religion, represent this conservative tendency, along with the later religious writings of Coleridge.
Northrop Frye, from A Study of English Romanticism

At the Wedding March

by Girard Manly Hopkins

God with honour hang your head,
Groom, and grace you, bride, your bed
With lissome scions, sweet scions,
Out of hallowed bodies bred.

Each be other’s comfort kind:
Déep, déeper than divined,
Divine charity, dear charity,
Fast you ever, fast bind.

Then let the March tread our ears:
I to him turn with tears   
Who to wedlock, his wonder wedlock,
Déals tríumph and immortal years.

Source: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985). Reproduced here for educational purposes only.

Book List:

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Alexander Pope

The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

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