stunt_muppet

One of the things I really love about my Romanticism class is that we really get to examine the works of poets who typically get a quick name-check and a single poem in our review courses. Not only do I get to poke at some of the typically-ignored Romantic writers (the female poets, especially), but spending some serious time with the Romantics is the only way you find out that many of them were sharp political writers and the rest were absolutely sparkling insane. Blake was both, the Renaissance man.

Coleridge has yet to reach the heights of grandiose madness that Blake has (or, for that matter, Burke during his "My Size Marie Antoinette Barbie" phase), so far as I've seen, but...well, my knowledge of Coleridge up to this point was "Kubla Khan" and the vague knowledge that "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" was about a guy shooting a bird.

And then I actually read "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". And I love how nobody ever talks about how disturbing this poem is. Yes, the Mariner shoots an albatross. But the creepy thing is he is never given any motive for doing so. He never explains why he did it. And then, after a few weeks of scorching heat and no water, he and his crew are left to the mercy of a game of chance between Death and Life-in-Death. The latter wins. The rest of his crew drops dead on the spot.

It gets more surreal from there, involving zombies (seriously), angels, the Mariner going completely loopy from solitude and being unable to sleep, being unable to pray, and then, eventually, *completely arbitrarily*, regaining his ability to pray for mercy and being redirected back to shore. But not before spending more time parched of thirst with his zombie crew and driving the kid in his lifeboat insane.

It's hallucinogenic, it's illogical, and the creepiest part is there's no reason given for any of it - not for the shooting of the albatross, not for the disproportionate retribution, not for the Mariner's sudden ability to pray, not for anything. Nobody has a motive. The Mariner only reacts - he never acts.

It's all one long play from Coleridge on the expectation for romantic/Gothic poetry (which was considered low art at the time) to have some kind of moral message so the silly little womenfolk who read it wouldn't fill their pretty heads with fantastical nonsense (Coleridge makes everything arbitrary and his protagonist at the mercy of a world that hates him), but it all adds up to an unsettling poem.

Anyway, the point of that diversion is that we started reading "Christabel" today. Being a bit more familiar with Coleridge's oerve now, I was expecting something weird.

Not expecting: surreal whispy dream-like forest sequences, the title character basically having a wank in the first few stanzas, and a shapeshifting (or possibly not) witch who first seduces Christabel and then her father (but tempts her father mostly with the prospect of being reunited with his long-lost boyfriend bestest friend ever with whom he had a falling-out and whom he never got over, never ever ever, it is a SCAR across his heart woes), then completely replaces Christabel in her father's eyes while still being creepily seductive and clingy. Oh, and after Christabel first takes the witch into her home, said witch insists that they sleep in the same bed, that Christabel undress in front of her, that she snuggle up to her scantily clad body, etc, and then wipes her memory after Christabel sees her Evil Markings (you can tell she's evil because she's not pretty under her clothes, naturally). It's the most up-front molestation/rape subtext I've yet seen in a Romantic-era poem.

Oh, and "Christabel" is unfinished. If it had been finished, one of Coleridge's plans was for the witch to assume the form of Christabel's fiancee. Who, yes, is who she was thinking of whilst "dreaming" in the opening stanzas.

...have I just been in fandom too long, or is there some seriously creepy subtext all over this thing?

The funniest thing is that this was almost in the Lyrical Ballads, right next to Wordsworth's poems about Tintern Abbey and the transcendant power of nature. Of course, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" was in the lyrical ballads, and even shorn of all the sexual subtext it's arguably the more disturbing.

Of course, Wordworth's rather passive-agressive preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads is rather entertaining in and of itself. "Yeah, I know we put my friend's crazy mariner poem up front last time, but...oh, look, I just told him to write me some filler. Here, we'll put it in the back this time! That way you can get right to the serious poetry. About trees and things."

This post has been brought to you by gratuitous English geekery and "my goodness, I think I read this when it was an Anne Rice novel. The Coleridge version is much more fun."