Repetition, Difference and Liturgical Participation in Coleridge's 'The Ancient Mariner'

Abstract

“The Ancient Mariner” is not good at finishing: it offers a weak formal conclusion and a tale presented as only one of many tellings. The restless self-repetition of the Mariner’s story, together with his more marginal but equally unaccomplished procession to the kirk “With a goodly company!” (604) are not innocent forms of open-endedness but fraught modes of incompletion. The desire for completeness and arrival is doubly skewed within the poem; though telling the tale brings temporary relief and perhaps changes it in some way (we have no means of telling), it is destined to be summoned up at that “uncertain hour,” which will compel the Mariner to repeat it, when it will once more consume narrative space and time without being able to tell what exactly it is a narrative of. Or so we as readers assume. We do not actually know whether the Mariner is telling us the truth of how his tale convulses him with the need to repeat it, and we easily forget that this claim (which we do take seriously) occurs as part of the same weak or Christianizing conclusion we tend not to take seriously. The founding narrative repetition compulsion is not in itself wholly central to the ballad, but is distinctively offset by the Mariner’s wish to walk in company to the kirk, so as to participate in another narrative with, potentially, another mode of interminability.