The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

In Our Time: Culture

BBC

History

4.6 • 978 Ratings

🗓️ 4 March 2021

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this 900th edition of the programme, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the best known and most influential of the poems of the Romantic movement. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in 1798 after discussions with his friend Wordsworth. He refined it for the rest of his life, and it came to define him, a foreshadowing of his opium-addicted, lonely wandering and deepening sense of guilt. The poem tells of a sailor compelled to tell and retell the story of a terrible voyage in his youth, this time as guests are heading to a wedding party, where he stoppeth one of three.

The image above is from Gustave Doré's illustration of the mariner's shooting of the albatross, for an 1877 German language edition of the poem

With

Sir Jonathan Bate Professor of Environmental Humanities at Arizona State University

Tom Mole Professor of English Literature and Book History at the University of Edinburgh

And

Rosemary Ashton Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:04.6	Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time.
0:07.2	There's a reading list to go with it on our website and you can get news about our
0:10.8	programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC in our time. I hope you
0:15.1	enjoy the programs. Hello the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner is one of the
0:18.8	best known and most influential of the poems of the romantic movement and one of the most loved.
0:24.4	Coleridge wrote it in 1798 and refined it over the next 40 years and he came to define him
0:31.1	a foreshadowing of his opium addicted, lonely wandering life.
0:35.8	The poem tells of a sailor compelled to tell and retell the story of a terrible voyage in his
0:40.3	youth, this time as guests are heading to a wedding party where he stoppeth one in three.
0:45.7	With me to discuss the rhyme of the ancient mariner on this our 900 edition,
0:50.1	Ah Sir Jonathan Bates, Professor of Environmental Humanities at Arizona State University,
0:55.0	Tom Mole Professor of English Literature and Book History at the University of Edinburgh,
0:59.0	and Rosemary Ashton, Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College, London.
1:05.6	Rosemary Ashton, can you tell us about the early life of Coleridge?
1:09.2	Coleridge was born in October 1772, the 10th and youngest son of the Reverend Don Coleridge, who was
1:17.3	vicar of the church at Otterrey, St Mary, near Exeter in Devon, and also headmaster of the local school. His father was
1:25.6	53 when a young Samuel was born and we know very little about his mother from
1:31.7	the surviving family letters there's not much about her but what we do
1:35.2	know from the few remarks that they come down from Coleridge himself is that she was a
1:40.5	rather cold and distant figure, particularly to young Sam, who was intellectually
1:45.7	precocious and emotionally needy right from the start.
	...

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