Crossed Lines: The Vernacular Metaphysics of the Ancient Mariner

Christianity and Literature Vol. 59, No.1 (Autumn 2009) Crossed Lines: The Vernacular Metaphysics of the Ancient Mariner Graham Pechey Augustine holds that in relation to God, love has to precede knowledge. With the right direction of love, things become evident which are hidden otherwise. What is new is the modern sense of the place and power of the creative imagination. This is now an integral part of the goodness of things... (Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self)1 I would endeavour to destroy the old antithesis of Words and Things, elevating, as it were, words into Things, and living Things, too. (Coleridge to William Godwin, 1800)2 Lines, whether in poetry or geometry, are living things. Or at least so thought Samuel Taylor Coleridge: lines of both kinds, we learn from him, are works of the imagination, forces put into the world; any line is "an act of length;' and even the points between which a geometric line stretches are themselves not mere positions without magnitude but acts of the same order.' When explaining his ideas he often resorts to lines, and in particular when explicating his law of polarity-"two forces of one power." the great keystone of his metaphysical edifice-he resorts to crossed lines in what appears to be a forerunner of the intersecting-dichotomy diagram which was so beloved of some twentieth-century structuralist thinkers but which here escapes the realm of mere logical possibility and overlapping binary oppositions for something altogether more dynamic and ternary. We are not surprised, then, to find that in the poem which he himself described as a work of "pure imagination' (Warren 199) and which many later commentators have agreed is dominated by the archetype of the Fall and the Redemption, crosses are manifest (or latent) at all levels of verbal expression and all dimensions of referential allusion-that, in short, cruciform signage in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner binds into a strong 51 52 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE semantic bond both the representing and the represented. Wemay compare with this understated ubiquity of the Cross its overt thematic dominance in a much earlier English poem: Swim, and at every stroke, thou art thy Cross; The Mast and yard make one, where seas do toss; Look down, thou spiest out crosses in small things; Look up, thou seest birds rais'd on crossed wings; All the Globe's frame, and sphere's, is nothing else But the Meridians crossing Parallels. (Fausset 257) The collocation of maritime, avian, and geographical motifs in these lines from John Donne's "The Cross" makes it a highly significant (and oddly overlooked) precursor text of Coleridge's poem. Whether the inspiration of Donne's lines was subliminal or conscious on the part of his latter-day champion, it is plain that both patterns of narrative and rhyme schemes in the Rime replicate the figure of the Cross, which is no less to be found in the smallest particulars of its individual words; and not only in the way that sounds and letters are disposed within and between them, but also in their known or poetically hypothesized etymologies. The reading that follows will treat the poem as an early staging-post on its author's route from Unitarian to Trinitarian belief-not in the sense of seeking out thematic allusions to the Holy Trinity but rather of presenting the latter as a condition of the poem's intelligibility. Pace William Empson, there is no anachronism in so doing: in 1797-98 Coleridge was, by his own later admission, already a Trinitarian at the level of the speculative reason and only some seven or eight years short of embracing the Trinity in its "practical and moral bearing" upon his life (Barth Christian Doctrine 9).5 Likethat ofIrene Chayes (only ayear after Empson's),6 this is a"Coleridgean" reading of early Coleridge, inasmuch as it applies to the Rime the elaborated clarities and energies of intellect which already shine through the lines of the poem's earliest version and at which the poet himselfhad largely arrived through the medium of his prose by the time of its most decisive (if not quite final) revision, published in...