September 2, 1833, is a typical evening at the table, and this, on Greek particles, is a typical example of the talk: “It is worth particular notice how the style of Greek oratory, so full, in the times of political independence, of connective particles, some of passion, some of sensation only, and escaping the classification of mere grammatical logic, became, in the hands of the declaimers and philosophers of the Alexandrian era, and still later, entirely deprived of this peculiarity.” Also pronounced upon this long September night are Propertius (“I cannot quite understand the grounds of the high admiration …”); Tibullus (“ … is rather insipid to me”); Lucan (“I think Satius a truer poet than Lucan, though he is very extravagant sometimes); Silias Italicus (“I am ashamed to say I have never read …”); and the Characteristic Temperament of Nations:
“The English affect stimulant nourishment – beef and beer. The French, excitants, irritants – nitrous oxide, alcohol, champagne. The Austrians, sedatives – hyoscyamus. The Russians, narcotics – opium, tobacco, and beng.”
This is strongly opinionated learning you might want to leaf through in the corner chair, but, as table talk, it’s insufferable. For God’s sake, Samuel, pass the stimulant nourishment!
Coleridge’s preferred “stimulant nourishment” - there’s no other mention of beer or beef in Table Talk - was laudanum, an opium-alcohol tincture. He wasn’t alone in the preference: Thomas de Quincey had written the book on it (Confessions of an English Opium Eater); Keats, Byron, and Shelley (“I never part from this”) merely begin a long list of other poets with the inclination; and laudanum use was common enough among the laboring poor to be considered a working class habit. (Its medicinal properties exempted it from taxes imposed on alcohol, and this, along with the happy expansion of the British Empire into India, made it cheap - cheaper, in fact, than gin).
Kubla Khan was allegedly written as Coleridge woke from a laudanum-induced dream, and, famously, it remained “a fragment” as the writing was interrupted by a “Person of Porlock,” most likely Coleridge’s doctor, delivering more laudanum. For The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, he went through four pints a week.
“There was a ship,” quoth he, and off the Ancient Mariner goes, holding the Wedding Guest from his purpose by means of a story which he “cannot choose but hear.” The Wedding Guest, caught by the Mariner’s glittering eye, is impatient, bemused, frightened, then terrified of the tale told by the “plagued” old man who shot the albatross and, for his sins, had it hung around his neck.
Wordsworth, after the poem had been poorly received, gloated: over the author’s objections, he was happy to support re-publication, but happier still to note its “great defects,” chief among them “that the principal person has no distinct character, either in his profession of Mariner, or as a human being who having been long under the control of supernatural impressions might be supposed himself to partake of something supernatural …” He also didn’t like the fact that the Mariner “does not act, but is continually acted upon,” the arbitrary nature of the events in the poem, and the “laboriously accumulated” imagery. (“On the other hand, Samuel, I like your use of the word “quoth” and thought the title particularly strong.”)
Charles Lamb was more generous, and addressed the following rebuke to Wordsworth: “For me I was never so affected with any human tale ... I totally differ from your idea that the Mariner should have had a character and a profession … [He] undergoes such trials as overwhelm and bury all individuality or memory of what he was— like the state of a man in a bad dream, one terrible peculiarity of which is, that all consciousness of personality is gone.”
This sounds like an opportune vehicle for a metaphor on alcoholism: “such trials as overwhelm and bury all individuality or memory …” But that wasn’t my drunk. The Mariner might not act so much as be acted upon, but he did at least get to shoot an albatross and carry it around his neck; he witnessed Death and Nightmare Life-In-Death (“Who thicks man’s blood with cold”) casting dice for the souls of his shipmates; and even when his ship was held “[a]s idle as a painted ship/Upon a painted ocean,” the Mariner stood, in fact, on a real ship in a real ocean. My drunk was more the painted boat and water.
There’s a metaphor here, nevertheless. It’s right there at the beginning:
It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
`By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?’
It is curious that Wordsworth and Lamb are both only concerned with the character of the Mariner, at least in this regard: whenever I have heard the Ancient Mariner used metaphorically, it is the perspective of the Wedding-Guest, the man detained from his purpose, which has been invoked. Of the bore, the pontificator, anyone or anything that slowed or obstructed your way to somewhere else, you might say it was Ancient Mariner time. It was the amusement, the inconvenience, the horror, or the absurdity of being waylaid. And drinking did have that characteristic. The plan was to go somewhere else. I got held up.
Of the Wedding-Guest (me, you, the reader), the critics have nothing to say, although, at the end, it is he who is the "sadder and wiser man." The Mariner even offers a reason why this Wedding Guest was stopped while the other two passed on to the festivities:
I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.
The moment that my face he saw. Straight away, perhaps, I showed my appetites. I had the face for it.
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