What is the point of a great work of art? My quick reply is that it provides solace to the human spirit in its restless quest for meaning and transcendence. I asked myself this question on reading Coleridge’s extraordinary and profound poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, alongside a recent book about it, The Mariner, by Malcolm Guite. (I also discovered a fine old tape recording of the poem, made by the young Richard Burton in 1955.)
Guite, the chaplain at Girton College, Cambridge and a lecturer in Divinity, is a published poet himself. Reading his book, with its insightful and sympathetic commentary on how The Rime seemed to foreshadow its author’s own strange circumstances, reminded me of Coleridge’s singular life: his early evidence of genius; his long struggle with opium addiction; his abiding religious sense which grew and developed during his life, alongside the reasoning powers of his brilliant mind and evidenced by the many extracts Guite includes from Coleridge’s Notebooks.
