“Water, water everywhere/ nor any drop to drink”.
“The Rime of The Ancient Mariner” is a timeless work of art. Rejection, loneliness, ecocide, plague … the warnings of Coleridge’s poem resound down the ages and reach out to us even today.
Now 40 actors, musicians and authors are performing in a mass-reading, each of them taking a few lines; different voices accompanied by different style visuals. The Ancient Mariner Big Read is an immersive work of art that reflects the majesty and influence of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem: ruin, isolation and loneliness – and the possibility of redemption if we mend our ways.
A man cursed to forever tell a story has learned to cast a spell himself, like all good storytellers. The story he tells is one of catastrophe and nightmare: the loneliness of being the last one left to witness the devastation; mass extinction, burning forests, poisoned seas. The loneliness of leaving the garden, the welcoming, teeming world we always notice too late. The Rime is a nature poem telling us that we must look after earth because if we don’t, nature will turn against us with an almighty wrath and horror will be the price to pay for our arrogance.
And even throughout the horror, the poem has a crystalline calm that pulls at its own despair. Reading “Water, water, everywhere / Nor any drop to drink” and knowing what we know now, It’s hard not to think of migrants set adrift on other seas, undertaking on their own desperate voyages, passing through their own horrors on which we turn a blind eye.
But this Mariner has survived and is now with us; having passed through penance and redemption, so fearful is his look and so true is the story he tells, that he makes us feel uneasy till we recoil in horror. Like in the film The Man Who Fell to Earth, in which David Bowie is an alien who comes as the herald of our own disaster, only to be imprisoned by the CIA.
We always shoot the messenger.
The poem makes a whole lot of sense about life, love, conflict, inner turmoil and outer peace. We are the wedding guests, and the albatross around the Mariner’s neck is an emblem of human abuse of the natural world. Yet in its terror there lies a wondrous solution – that we might wake up and find ourselves saved.
The “Big Read” is available via the click below.