Crossed Lines: The Vernacular Metaphysics of theAncient Mariner

Abstract

Augustine holds that in relation to God, love has to precede knowledge. With the right direction of love, things become evident which are hidden otherwise. What is new is the modern sense of the place and power of the creative imagination. This is now an integral part of the goodness of things... (Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self) 1 I would endeavour to destroy the old antithesis of Words and Things, elevating, as it were, words into Things, and living Things, too. (Coleridge to William Godwin, 1800)2 Lines, whether in poetry or geometry, are living things. Or at least so thought Samuel Taylor Coleridge: lines of both kinds, we learn from him, are works of the imagination, forces put into the world; any line is "an act of length;' and even the points between which a geometric line stretches are themselves not mere positions without magnitude but acts of the same order.' When explaining his ideas he often resorts to lines, and in particular when explicating his law of polarity-"two forces of one power." the great keystone of his metaphysical edifice-he resorts to crossed lines in what appears to be a forerunner of the intersecting-dichotomy diagram which was so beloved of some twentieth-century structuralist thinkers but which here escapes the realm of mere logical possibility and overlapping binary oppositions for something altogether more dynamic and ternary. We are not surprised, then, to find that in the poem which he himself described as a work of "pure imagination' (Warren 199) and which many later commentators have agreed is dominated by the archetype of the Fall and the Redemption, crosses are manifest (or latent) at all levels of verbal expression and all dimensions of referential allusion-that, in short, cruciform signage in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner binds into a strong 51

Vulnerabilities of Human Kind in Samuel T. Coleridge’sThe Rime of the Ancient Mariner: A Modernist Formalist Preview

“…However, shooting the albatross raises the question of the reason that makes the mariner kill the bird. Obviously, the mariner has acted so out of his sole sense of pride, -For all averred, I had killed the bird/That made the breeze to blow‖ (II, L. [11][12][13][14]. Despite seeming a social man before launching his fateful voyage, the mariner travels into his mysterious world in search of the lost souls like his.…”