Crantz, Martens and the "Slimy Things" in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

Abstract

In Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," the poem's protagonist mentions the presence in the "slimy sea" when he is becalmed in the equatorial Pacific doldrums of a "thousand thousand" "slimy things... with legs." John Livingston Lowes argued in The Road to Xanadu that these creatures were principally derived by STC from descriptions of slimy and/or many-legged sea animals in Frederick Martens's The Voyage into Spitzbergen and Greenland. However, a rather more evident source for Coleridge's "slimy things" is the accounts of the cuttlefish and of other slimy and/or multi-legged marine creatures in David Crantz's The History of Greenland. Details from these latter descriptions would have been retained by Coleridge in his remarkably "tenacious" memory. Here, they would have been multiply tied together by linkages both of similarity and of textual propinquity. The resulting associational complex would also have included particulars from those descriptions of marine fauna in Martens which are mentioned by Lowes as sources for the "slimy things" (as well as details from other accounts of sea animals that are described in Spitzbergen). While Coleridge was composing "Mariner," the just-mentioned materials from Martens and from Crantz would have been compressively synthesized through an "esemplastic" "work of condensation" to produce the image of the "slimy things... with legs." This may accordingly have signified for Coleridge himself a motley assortment of sea fauna from very many and multifarious species. The conception of the "slimy things... with legs" could well have been accompanied for STC by the same sort of vivid visual fantasy which was involved in the creation of "Kubla Khan." The results of my further investigation into the origins of the "slimy things" suggest that the conclusions of Lowes regarding the genesis of Coleridge's poetic imagery are in many cases not at all definitive. Rather, the origins of these images were often much more complex than anyone has supposed, endowing them with a very considerable richness of implicit significance.