The ship
suddenly
sinketh.
Coleridge - Poems
By the light of the Moon he beholdeth God's creatures of the great calm.
Their beauty and their happiness.
He blesseth them in his heart.
The spell begins to break.
PART V
By grace of the holy Mother, the ancient Mariner is refreshed with rain.
He heareth sounds and seeth strange sights and commotions in the sky and
the element.
The bodies of the ship's crew are inspired, and the ship moves on;
But not by the souls of the men, nor by daemons of earth or middle air, but
by a blessed troop of angelic spirits, sent down by the invocation of the
guardian saint.
The lonesome Spirit from the south-pole carries on the ship as far as the
Line, in obedience to the angelic troop, but still requireth vengeance.
The Polar Spirit's fellow-daemons, the invisible inhabitants of the element,
take part in his wrong; and two of them relate, one to the other, that
penance long and heavy for the ancient Mariner hath been accorded to the
Polar Spirit, who returneth southward.
PART VI
The Mariner hath been cast into a trance; for the angelic power causeth the
vessel to drive northward faster than human life could endure.
The supernatural motion is retarded; the Mariner awakes, and his penance
begins anew.
The curse is finally expiated.
And the ancient Mariner beholdeth his native country.
The angelic spirits leave the dead bodies,
And appear in their own forms of light.
PART VII
The Hermit of the Wood,
Approacheth the ship with wonder.
The ship suddenly sinketh.
The ancient Mariner is saved in the Pilot's boat.
The ancient Mariner earnestly entreateth the Hermit to shrieve him; and the
penance of life falls on him.
And ever and anon throughout his future life an agony constraineth him to
travel from land to land,
And to teach, by his own example, love and reverence to all things that God
made and loveth.
p. 27. _Christabel_. Coleridge at his best represents the imaginative
temper in its essence, pure gold, with only just enough alloy to give it
firm bodily substance. "Christabel" is not, like "Kubla Khan," a
disembodied ecstasy, but a coherent effort of the imagination. Yet, when we
come to the second part, the magic is already half gone out of it. Rossetti
says, in a printed letter, with admirable truth: "The conception, and
partly the execution, of the passage in which Christabel repeats by
fascination the serpent-glance of Geraldine, is magnificent; but that is
the only good narrative passage in part two. The rest seems to have reached
a fatal facility of jingling, at the heels whereof followed Scott. " A few
of the lines seem to sink almost lower than Scott, and suggest a Gilbert
parody:
"He bids thee come without delay
With all thy numerous array.
* * * * *
And he will meet thee on the way
With all his numerous array. "
But in the conclusion, which has nothing whatever to do with the poem,
Coleridge is his finest self again: a magical psychologist. It is
interesting to know that Crashaw was the main influence upon Coleridge
while writing "Christabel," and that the "Hymn to the Name and Honour of
the admirable S.
