60 for 60: The Dancing Mariner

By Zachary Erickson

It isn’t difficult to want to write about the sea. The open ocean is a cliché that one can’t get away from—at least, I can’t, or don’t, want to. Of the many poems that participate in this ocean-obsession, Coleridge’s weird and wonderful Rime of the Ancient Mariner is about as famous as famous can be. The poem is historically important because Coleridge, by writing in a ballad form, was intending to renew English prosody. (This is at least how he and Wordsworth looked at it.) But the poem is important in another way, too; it’s important because it’s indispensably fun, and certainly unforgettable.

In its 1995 issue, Columbia Journal published “The Dancing Mariner,” by Richard Holmes, a noted British biographer. Notice the whimsy of his Mariner rhapsody, as much an academic reflection as it is a pleasant dream. Holmes reimagines the poem in ballet form. (Said ballet is as heavy with archetypes as any Romantic’s mind.) This kind of pleasure keeps Coleridge’s poem fresh, and this is as it should be: no poetic revolution is worth much without enjoyment. 


The Dancing Mariner

Richard Holmes


I once had a dream that I was dancing with an Albatross.

The Albatross was a woman, but this did not seem strange. She held me in her white feathers, close to her breast, and we danced in the air. We were suspended high above a tilting sea, which glittered to the horizon with no land in sight. The rhythm of our dancing was strong and surging, not at all like flying, but like blood pulsing. The sense of height and rhythm was exciting, but terrifying. In the dream I knew that the Albatross would eventually let me fall into the sea. So I danced like someone condemned to death when the music stops. But the Albatross never let me go, and we were still dancing when I awoke.

This dream occurred while I was in Malta, working on a biography of Coleridge. It was not hard to see where its images came from, though less easy to see what they might mean.

Malta is a yellow, sand-stone island set in the Mediterranean between Sicily and North Africa. Beyond the old historic harbor of Valletta. it is a rocky plateau surrounded by high cliffs, caves and seabirds. Coleridge exiled  himself here for two years in 1804-5,  when  it was  occupied by the British during the Napoleonic Wars. He was trying to cure himself of opium addiction.

But he was also working with surprising efficiency as the First Secretary to the wartime Governor, Sir Alexander Ball. He drew up emergency legislation, wrote strategic re­ ports, and drafted dispatches which were sent to Nelson in the months before Trafalgar. Coleridge also kept extensive private diaries in Malta. In one of these, he noted that the ballad of the “Ancient Mariner”—written six years before, and based on the shooting of the Albatross—had now be­ come the symbolic story of his own life.

All this was much in my mind. During the day, I was working on Coleridge’s papers at the Royal Library, Valletta, in a paneled room overlooking the drowsy fountain in Queen’s Square. In the evenings, I walked along the cliffs and swam from the rocks beyond Slima until it got dark. It was November, and though the sea was still warm, there were few visitors and the coast was deserted. Sometimes I met people by chance: an arms dealer from Libya, a sculptress from Catania. On the evening before the dream I had gone dancing at a little run-down bar, with an open terrace strung with colored lights, on a promontory high above the sea.

In my experience, such dreams are not unusual for a biographer, who spends many solitary hours both waking and sleeping in the company of his subject, often over many years. They are usually connected with the biographer’s sup­ pressed feelings about the subject; or with parts of the subject’s life that are not fully understood; or with insights into the subject’s work which do not fit within the normal terms of criticism. They can rarely be used within the strict confines of the conventional biography; and will probably never reach the final book at all. But the dream material can sometimes be valuable. (I have often thought that it would be interesting to write a biography entirely in the form of dreams about the subject, set within the barest skeleton of documentation. It would, I suppose, be a form of Illustrated Life.)

This particular dream of dancing with the Albatross had several repercussions for me, but one immediate outcome. I began to think of Coleridge’s great poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” in terms of a modern ballet.

It struck me that the Ancient Mariner’s whole story could be brilliantly interpreted, not through criticism. but through physical performance. Its powerful rhythms. its haunting music, its mysterious confrontations between human and supernatural forces. are peculiarly suited to the expression­ ism of ballet. Though metaphysical in its implications, the poem is directly and even violently physical in its action and imagery. This physical immediacy is the essence of ballet. in which the most subtle feeling can be rendered as movement and gesture.

Coleridge also said (in his Table Talk,) that critics al­ ways forgot that the Mariner was young at the time of his original voyage. He grew old only in the obsessional retelling of his tale. over many years. So the Mariner is a young sailor when he meets the Albatross, and there is something erotic in their confrontation. Here emerged my central idea: the Mariner dancing with some beautiful but dangerous embodiment of Nature’s power, which had first surfaced in my Malta dream. My sketch for the ballet. which of course never got into my biography, was roughly as follows. It can perhaps be imagined more vividly than it could be staged. But one never knows with dreams.

Concept

An adaptation of Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner” for mod­ ern dance and music. Two basic sets: an 18th-century Somersetshire village with church, tavern and green (like Nether Stowey); and a square-rigged galleon on the high sea, with deck and rigging of the type used by Captain Cook to explore the Southern Pacific. The choreography and music score adapt traditional English and folklore forms: the country jig, the naval hornpipe. the sea shanty. the wedding and funeral march. the danse macabre. Scenery and laser lighting produce haunting visual effects of dawn, sunset, star­ light. moon, and sea storms.

The ballet company dance both the villagers on land, and the ship’s crew at sea. The leading solo dancers each take more than one part, and this duplication of roles-one identity melting into another-is central to the concept and should be clear to the audience. The main dance roles include:

The Mariner: as ancient bearded sea-salt, and as young sailor.

The Albatross: as beautiful bride; as sea-bird; as the terrible Nightmare Life-in-Death; and as the Female Spirit.

The Hermit:    who also dances as the village priest, and the Male Spirit of Nature.

The ballet has three movements, which are divided into five acts. It begins in the bucolic morning atmosphere of a country wedding (Act 1); it then moves backwards in time to the Mariner’s nightmare voyage (Acts 2, 3, 4); and finally it returns to a solemn evening wedding-feast, where the hope of happiness is tempered by the tragic presence of the haunted Ancient Mariner. The whole ballet reflects Coleridge’s original “vision” of some profound but inexplicable metaphysical crime, leading to a struggle between love and cruelty in Nature.

Synopsis

Act 1. The villagers dance and celebrate a country wed­ ding outside the church door. They pay homage to the beautiful young Bride in her long white dress. The village band plays a wedding march. The celebrations are abruptly interrupted by the appearance of the bearded Ancient Mariner. who dances across the village green and  insists on telling the story of his voyage. Unwillingly at first, the villagers circle round the Mariner and are gradually drawn under his spell. Helplessly. they start to mime the parts of the ship’s crew. The Bride confronts the Mariner, but is also spellbound.

Act 2. The village is transformed into the ship. The green becomes the deck, an oak tree becomes the mast and shrouds, the church door becomes the poop. The ship’s crew are joyfully dancing the hornpipe. The Mariner—now young—spies a lovely white Albatross (the erstwhile Bride) dancing alluringly across the deck. He dances after her. and the crew join in wildly. But when the Albatross refuses to dance with him, the Mariner is overcome with the desire to possess her, and maddened by her repulses, suddenly turns and shoots her with a cross-bow. A terrible storm immediately descends, and the Act ends in terror and confusion among the sailors.

Act 3. The ship is becalmed under a burning tropical sun. The crew perform a dance of death, as one by one they drop to the deck, stricken by drought. As they die, they curse the Mariner. The Pacific night comes on, and under a huge moon the ghastly taunting figure of the Nightmare Life-in­ Death appears. She dances provocatively across the ship, mocking the Mariner. As the moon begins to set, the Mariner is left alone, the sole survivor, exhausted and grief stricken, dancing over the bodies of his shipmates. The ship slowly fades into twilit unreality. as the Mariner collapses on the deck.

Act 4. In a haunting dream-sequence (one might say a dream-within-a-dream), the Male and Female Spirits of Nature dance over the prone body of the Mariner. They argue and decide his fate, the Female Spirit pleading for mercy. They transform the dead crew into glittering sea-creatures, who weave hypnotically over the Mariner. He wakens, and astonished by their unearthly beauty, joins in the dance and blesses them. The heavens open, rain pours down, and the ship sails on into moonlight and safe harbor as the dream dissolves. The Old Hermit comes aboard, and absolves the Mariner; while the crew form a silent tableaux carrying the dead Albatross in their arms.

Act 5. In a sudden blaze of light and music, the same tableaux bursts back into life, now as the country villagers carrying the Bride to the evening wedding supper outside the tavern. But the Mariner-a old, bearded figure again (as in Act 1)-moves among the revelers like the traditional ghost at the feast. As night comes on, he stands silently watching them, as he had watched the beautiful sea-creatures. Stars come out, candles are lit, a long table is laid (a white cloth billowing like a sail). The Bride and groom are toasted in wine by the villagers, and blessed by the priest. In a final movement of love and forgiveness, the Bride dances round the table and brings the Mariner a cup of wine to drink. She draws him back into the company, and the whole village rises and dances together happily. But at the last moment the music stops, and all the dancers freeze motionless as the sound of a rising wind fills the air. All that is, except the Mariner, who silently dances on by himself as the curtain drops.

END