Poet’s Corner: Coleridge–Rime 18

23 April 2026

(26 December 2014) We finally come to the end of Coleridge’s tale of the Ancient Mariner! As we left them last week, the Mariner took the oars and rowed the boat ashore, avoiding the whirlpool created by the sudden sinking of his ship; the boat’s occupants are all in various states of stunned disbelief, one of them thinking the Mariner must be the devil himself. As soon as they reach the shore, the Hermit leaves the boat on shaky legs, and the Mariner immediately confesses his ‘Hellish deed’, begging for forgiveness:

‘Oh shrieve [forgive] me, shrieve me, holy man! ‘
The hermit crossed his brow.
‘Say quick, ‘ quoth he, ‘I bid thee say –
What manner of man art thou? ‘

Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched
With a woeful agony,
Which forced me to begin my tale;
And then it left me free.

We are informed that the Hermit, by his words, does not know what to think of this strange man, and then we learn that part of the Mariner’s penance is the telling of his story, ‘a woeful agony,’ he calls it, which then compels him to tell his story. When he finishes his tale, he is ‘free’ from what we must assume is the compulsion to tell his story. Why? He goes on to explain to the Wedding Guest–that guy he found when this poem began:

Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.

I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
The moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.

The Mariner’s penance is thus never over, not really, since each day he sees that one person to whom he must recount his dreadful story, the agony returns, not leaving until that person hears his tale. We also learn what we have suspected from the beginning–that the Mariner has a strange power over this one person each day, forcing him to listen to the story, caught by the Mariner’s ‘glittering eye.’ Come back Saturday for another installment of the Poet’s Corner. Good reading.