I’m pleased to publish this guest review by Dr. Mischa Willett.
Let’s get one thing straight: there is nothing wrong with shooting an albatross. As even casual readers in the history of English literature will know, a sailor’s shooting the great sea-bird is the central action in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and as one can probably deduce, that poem is the subject of Malcom Guite’s new book Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Hodder and Stoughton, 2017).
The albatross was never taken commonly to be a symbol of Christian piety, nor were they “tutelary spirits” of a particular region, as Coleridge’s friend Wordsworth somewhere suggests, and as guides of a voyage they were perfectly useless. To kill one (or several) was not to declare one’s independence of nature, or of a God’s provision, and thus mount up on waxen wings, but was instead an effective way to get fresh meat at sea. Sailors looked upon them as “good luck,” not because of some superstition, but because it was lucky to get warm meat after a few days of eating salted ship’s provisions. In 1769, the explorer Joseph Banks records, without a touch of remorse, that he’d personally shot “several large albatross,” some with “nine-foot wingspans,” exclaiming that the crew ate food “fresh every morning as at the Covent Garden Market,” and accounting to such dietary provisions a good portion of his voyage’s success (Holmes 13). In fact, a top score on an individual hole in golf (3 under par), equivalent to a “Double Eagle,” is known as “an Albatross,” because it’s so lucky to get one.
The difficulty arises because in Coleridge’s poem, the action sounds fraught. We read it as a motivated symbol because it appears to be one. The deadpan declarative sentence sounds like a confession: “With my cross-bow/ I shot the albatross” (lines 81-82). The mariner’s wearing it like a talisman seems like penance, and the bird’s slipping off his neck and into the sea upon his praising looks like redemption.
The moral ambiguity of the mariner’s action–or, more precisely, the apparently-meaningful setting in Coleridge’s poem of an historically-meaningless action–has touched off, of course, a whole flock of critical opinion. Robert Penn Warren called the act “a crime against nature and against God” and suggests the poem is about the destruction of “the myth of the unity of being” (Warren 681). Frances Ferguson claims that “the Mariner commits the sin of pride in killing the Albatross, and thereby assert[s] his power over it” (Ferguson 700). But these responses are only possible because Coleridge accomplished a great trick: he took an objectively meaningless (and even common) action and made it sound so fraught, so pregnant with implication that it might as well have been the crucifixion of Christ, or the fall of mankind. In short, he turned it into a symbol.
Read the full essay at Mere Orthodoxy →
Originally published in Mere Orthodoxy, 2017-10-27.
