The Ocean-Desert: the Ancient Mariner and the Wasteland
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The Ocean-Desert: The Ancient Mariner and. The Waste Land
FLORENCE MARSH
WHEN Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land are juxtaposed, the two poems become mutually illuminating. Nor is the juxtaposition arbitrary, since both are essentially religious poems concerned with salvation. In both, the protagonist needs to recover from a living death, from spiritual dryness. Structurally, The Waste Land has almost no narrative thread, no story, but it sounds motifs that interweave, develop, recur, much as in music. The title points to the basic image that contains the dominant theme, the waste land, arid, stony, infertile. In its ugliness and emptiness this land symbolises a spiritual condition which is both a state of mind and a state of civilisation. The seven languages used in the poem and the various characters other than the protagonist who inhabit the waste land and share in its plight indicate the universal reference of the theme. A second motif, that of the Unreal City, with its brown fog, its dull canal, and its falling towers, suggests the collapse of a whole civilisation. Coleridge's poem seems on the surface much simpler. It begins with the Mariner's stopping 'one of three' and ends with the Wedding Guest, stunned and forlorn, a sadder and a wiser man. The strange tale of terrible solitude is set in the framework of relationship, the unattended wedding in the background. Within this framework, the Mariner tells his tale—of the voyage into ice and snow, of his shooting the albatross, and of the strange events that followed with the spectre ship carrying Death and Life-in-Death, with the Polar Daemon, and with the angelic spirits who animated dead bodies and carried the ship home. The story element in this poem is so strong that many readers accept the poem simply as a weird adventure tale.
THE
OCEAN-DESERT
127
Others who see the pattern of crime and punishment are so baifled by the disproportion of the punishment to
The Ocean-Desert: The Ancient Mariner and. The Waste Land
FLORENCE MARSH
WHEN Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land are juxtaposed, the two poems become mutually illuminating. Nor is the juxtaposition arbitrary, since both are essentially religious poems concerned with salvation. In both, the protagonist needs to recover from a living death, from spiritual dryness. Structurally, The Waste Land has almost no narrative thread, no story, but it sounds motifs that interweave, develop, recur, much as in music. The title points to the basic image that contains the dominant theme, the waste land, arid, stony, infertile. In its ugliness and emptiness this land symbolises a spiritual condition which is both a state of mind and a state of civilisation. The seven languages used in the poem and the various characters other than the protagonist who inhabit the waste land and share in its plight indicate the universal reference of the theme. A second motif, that of the Unreal City, with its brown fog, its dull canal, and its falling towers, suggests the collapse of a whole civilisation. Coleridge's poem seems on the surface much simpler. It begins with the Mariner's stopping 'one of three' and ends with the Wedding Guest, stunned and forlorn, a sadder and a wiser man. The strange tale of terrible solitude is set in the framework of relationship, the unattended wedding in the background. Within this framework, the Mariner tells his tale—of the voyage into ice and snow, of his shooting the albatross, and of the strange events that followed with the spectre ship carrying Death and Life-in-Death, with the Polar Daemon, and with the angelic spirits who animated dead bodies and carried the ship home. The story element in this poem is so strong that many readers accept the poem simply as a weird adventure tale.
THE
OCEAN-DESERT
127
Others who see the pattern of crime and punishment are so baifled by the disproportion of the punishment to