The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner

It's one of the foundational tales of the Romantic movement, an exemplar of horror ('the nightmare life-in-death was she') and grim irony ('water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink'). Its also one of the few of the Lyrical Ballads to actually be a ballad (there are a few others in ballad stanza, but only one or two -- perhaps "We are Seven" -- that really embody the ballad's mixture of lyricism and repetition). And it's proven very durable, still an engaging read in an era in which the combination of the words 'narrative' and 'poetry' elicits a sense of dread -- not of the horror of the tale but the tedium of the form.

Coleridge originally wrote the poem in mock-antique orthography, with "ancient" spelled old-style as "antient," and "mariner" with a completely unnecessary final e as "marinere." Happily, he abandoned this in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, and added helpful side-notes, an early instance of a poet annotating his own work. He chose for its setting the extremes of the ocean, evoking both the Sargasso Sea (a mid-ocean area with much floating vegetation where ships were often becalmed) and the Antarctic -- the mariner's headlong careening south is a journey similar to what we read from Poe  in "MS. Found in a Bottle." The natural sublime, in the form both of the sea's teeming with unknown life, and the sterile and hostile cold of the realm of ice, is perfectly framed here, and the supernatural elements are perfectly integrated into the natural ones. And of course the mariner shoots the albatross, which is later hung about his neck by the superstitious sailors -- giving us a metaphor that's still in political use today.

As I mentioned in class, it's an excellent poem to hear read aloud -- one my favorite versions is by Sir Richard Burton -- though Ian McKellan also does a reasonably good turn, and says "greybeard loon" with real feeling.

Whistle and I'll Come For You, my Lad ...

Everyone likes a good old-fashioned ghost story -- and no one wrote them better than the British author M.R. James. Although he had a very successful academic career, eventually becoming the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University and later the Provost of Eaton, his little side-career of writing ghost stories has proven to be his most lasting legacy.

Although varied in their subjects, a good many of them involve professors and antiquarians, either conducting research or else on holiday, who stumble upon some ancient text, cryptic stained-glass window, or mysterious artifact. The whistle at the center of "Whistle and I'll Come To You" is perhaps the most famous, with its two inscriptions in Latin: Quis est iste qui vent ("Who is this who is coming?") and Fur fla bis fle ("Thief, blow twice, go mad"). But wait -- saying anything more would ruin the story!

One of the reasons that James's tales have had such staying power is that their brief, economical structure made them ideal for adaptation to the new medium of television, with nearly fifty separate versions of various tales, including episodes of Night Gallery, Mystery and Imagination, Omnibus, and Ghost Stories for Christmas (with Christopher Lee). "Whistle and I'll Come To You" has actually been done twice by the BBC. The first was in 1968 starring Michael Hordern (a veteran character actor whom some may recall as Vincent Price's first victim in 1973's Theatre of Blood); the second, made in 2010, features John Hurt. The different ways in which each is handled tell us something about the durability of James's stories, as well as the way a director's mind works -- what's the essence of the story? Is there another angle which could open it up to a fresh treatment? And for the actor, who has the challenging task of portraying a rational, educated man faced with something no rational mind could grasp, there's certainly a lot of great material in James's Professor Parkin; personally, I think Hordern captures it best -- a man perpetually on the edge of knowing what to do, shunned a little for his awkwardness, brilliant but easily perplexed. In this class, though, it's you who will be the judge!

Please choose one of these discussion questions and post your answer below:

The Sandman

A generation before Poe, when the idea of a gothic horror story was decidedly more a German than an English or American notion, E.T.A. Hoffmann was widely regarded as the master of the genre. Not all of Hoffmann's stories involved horror as such -- but they were all "tales," in the sense that they set aside, for a moment, all the particularities of everyday life and took place in a generalized, imaginary realm halfway between moralistic parables and frightening fancies, where children were quite often in the thrall of cruel and unpredictable adults, and fears took palpable form. His tales in many ways resemble those of the Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, which were first published just four years before "Der Sandmann."

Hoffmann was also a musician and a stage director, with the result that his tales often have  a theatre-like three-act structure, with powerful visual imagery and strong atmosphere. These have led them to be frequently adapted for stage, and later for screen; among the more notable versions have been Arthur Saint-Léon's "Coppélia" (1870), Offenbach's opéra fantastique "Tales of Hoffmann" (1881), Powell and Pressburger's 1951 film based upon it, and Paul Berry's 1993 Oscar-nominated stop-motion animation "The Sandman." Most recently, the young German director S. Andreas Dahn has brought out a relatively faithful period version, one which -- alas -- is not yet available on disc or streaming; the image above is of "Bela B." Felsenheimer in the title role.

But there's much more to this story than its dramatic touches, and vivid imagery. There's the primal scene of a child excluded from the adult world, the implicit threat of the Sandman, stealer of eyes (Freud read this as a displaced threat of castration), and the peculiar charms -- or lack thereof -- of an automaton woman. We often think that we today -- with our Terminators, cyborgs, replicants, and other semi-human robotic figures -- have invented the uncanny notion of a non-human human being, but in fact the idea is far older, going well back into the eighteenth century. Some of the automata built then still exist today, such as Maillardet's writing automaton. This small boyish figure, designed to sit at a writing desk and draw, was hard to identify when it was deposited at the steps of Philadelphia's Franklin Institute many years ago. Under patient care, its mechanism was restored, and a pen placed in its hand -- after which it produced six drawings, one of which the machine itself "signed," declaring, "I am the automaton of M. Maillardet" -- and so it identified itself (the idea was incorporated by David Selznick into his graphic novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which was adapted as a film by Martin Scorsese.

So read -- start with the introduction, the section on The Sandman, then the story, then the notes. I suspect you will soon join the ranks of those haunted by its peculiar, shadowy scenes. Then choose one of this week's discussion questions, and post your answer below.

Descent into the Maelstrom/Manuscript Found in a Bottle

Let us all pause and shed a tear for Edgar Poe -- not, as most of us might suppose, because he led a troubled, brief life, but because this life has so often eclipsed the merit and significance of his work. Poe, it appears, will always be with us, peering over our shoulder as we read, and despite his charms, this is far from an ideal situation. The writings of an author must speak for themselves across the gulf of time, and in an ideal world, the author does not, indeed cannot accompany them, save in that subtlest of survivals, the scattered cells of his or her words.

While Poe is best remembered for his macabre tales -- "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Black Cat," or "The Masque of the Red Death," in his time he was noted for his tales of the sea, of explorers and adventurers who risked -- and sometimes lost -- their lives on hazardous voyages that brought them to fantastical countries. Such tales were a stock-in-trade of his day, with those of Sinbad the Sailor the best-known -- but one could easily think of modern science-fiction serials, such as Star Trek, as the inheritors of this tradition.

Poe's unique gift was to blend such fanciful adventures with elements of extraordinary realism, giving a fresh sense of the limited power of humans in the face of the sublime forces of the oceans. The effect was very carefully obtained. Poe had devoured any number of nautical narratives, and always had some navigational manuals, along with the Encyclopedia Brittanica, close at hand. He had not, it is true, the benefit of very much experience at sea -- but he was master and commander of the words, the perfect mixture of nautical terminology and first-person terror, that could make his readers shiver in their imaginary sea-boots.

"A Descent into the Maelstrom" was an early work, and opens innocently enough as a sort of travelogue: the reader is taken to the edge of a cliff, where a wizened old local is going to tell his tale of the sea below. And yet, as it develops, it turns into a horror story, one in which -- as with so many haunted houses -- the experience has driven its teller into old age overnight with fear, escape though he did. It's a perfect little diversion, ending with an almost too-practical solution, rather like a problem in mechanics.

"MS. Found in a Bottle" take Poe's dark romance with the sea to a far deeper and more disturbing level. Published in 1833, it earned him a fifty-dollar prize -- then a considerable sum -- from the Baltimore Saturday Visiter. In it, Poe makes use of a device he would come to rely on frequently: a first-person narrator who is an absolute realist, one to whom "the reveries of fancy have been a dead letter and a nullity." For what better person to tell us of wonders beyond our wildest imaginings? The story draws from other myths and tales as well, such as that of the "Flying Dutchman" (which goes back way before Disney) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner. And yet, in a way that's difficult to entirely pin down, it goes far beyond these tales by evoking the uncanny scene of a ship filled with ancient navigators, all indifferent to their guest, plummeting to their doom with peculiar looks of joy upon their faces.