Take the ice the ship encounters: first it floats by 'mast-high' and 'green as emerald', before morphing into a floating prison: It cries to be read aloud, and the visions come to life in synesthetic surround sound. Like those two twentieth century geniuses, Coleridge takes us on a journey of the imagination floating on currents of dream logic, the subconscious, and steered by pure delight in language. Without the Mariner there could have been no Dr Seuss: the 'bright-eyed', enigmatic mariner was ancestor to the Lorax surely, and Seuss could easily have penned such lines as 'When looking westward, I beheld/ A something in the sky.' It seems to me Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are is also the Mariner replayed as gleeful child power fantasy. The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, No wonder then that it is the most illustrated poem in the English language. And unlike so much poetry, where the focus is on the abstract or internal, the Mariner revels in colour and vision.

It's a cracking yarn, full of rambunctious twists and swashbuckling thrills: a ship blown off-course, sea-monsters, wracking thirst, a ghost-crew, dead men's curses, isolation, visions in the sky, rescue by a wild mystic and a man transformed. Just like The Beatles' animation, The Ancient Mariner is a psychedelic sea voyage, a tale of the unexpected and a playground of sight, sound and uncertain mysticism.īut while the The Yellow Submarine revels in acid-steeped distraction, constantly losing the plot, Coleridge's poem is a masterpiece of narrative. It pushed all the same gleeful buttons in my fifteen-year-old brain. I first met this poem at exactly the time I discovered The Yellow Submarine. Introduced by a variety of writers, artists and other guests, the Scottish Poetry Library’s classic poem selections are a reminder of wonderful poems to rediscover.įrancis Bickmore on 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner': The steersman’s face by his lamp gleamed white Įach turned his face with a ghastly pang, With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,Īnd straight the sun was flecked with bars,Īlas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud)Īre those her sails that glance in the sun,

The ancient mariner by st coleridge