Ancient Mariner Research Articles

Windward Sailing in Antiquity: The Elephant in the Room

The study of windward sailing in antiquity is subject to discord, misunderstandings and misinterpretations. This paper attempts to broaden the understanding of windward sailing by revisiting the theoretical basis of windward sailing, performing a critical review of previous works, reconstructing historic passages with new methods to re-evaluate them being considered as unfavourable wind passages, and considering the ancient mariner’s limits of windward sailing. It is suggested that ancient ships had less windward capability than commonly perceived, and that the limits of the ancient mariners were more restrictive than ships’ technological windward capabilities, highlighting the necessity to consider practical windward capabilities.

Narrating the Wound: Trauma and Memory in Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’ and Poe’s ‘The Raven’

Demystifying the puzzle of the ancient Mariner's real story and identity has been the aim of many critics. Direct analysis of the poem would always propound a crossing of boundaries between the real and the uncanny without providing a clear interpretation of the actual context of the mariner’s tale. The mariner’s dilemma occurs when he shoots an albatross without any distinct reason, thus resulting in the death of all the crew members who turn into eccentric creatures. Accentuating his sense of guilt, the mariner stops a guest from entering a wedding and starts narrating his story. Whereas the guest never questions the reliability of the fictitious elements of the mariner's account, the readers do. Similarly, Edgar Allan Poe’s speaker posits questions to an un-welcomed guest, a raven, who visits him at night and gets infuriated at the consistent answer he receives from him: ‘Nevermore’. The readers are aware that the speaker is suffering from a psychological disorder since he insists the raven would reply to his distorted inquiries. This paper reads the mariner’s as well as the Raven’s speaker’s quandaries in association with trauma theory highlighting their traumatic experiences and underscoring the unreliability of their narration by diagnosing them as patients of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Reference will be made to the importance of the albatross and the raven as fundamental motifs that project the characters’ psychological predicaments resulting in the implausible tales they both recount.

The adventures of the text in digitalization era: ˋˋthe rime of ancient mariner'' by S.T. Coleridge in the classic translation by Nikolay Gumilev and the ˋˋrevelations'' of digital translation

The possibilities of machine translation in the era of total digitalization seem limitless, however, for poetic text, electronic translation technology has limited application. For the analysis and comparison of machine and literary translation, the text of Coleridge’s 1798 poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was taken for it uses the theme of the sea, which is extremely important in the poet’s work. This poem was translated by N.S. Gumilev in 1919: the translation was made more than a hundred years after the date of the creation of the original, and the author of the translation had to take into account the context of the creation of the work. The translation generated by modern technologies involves the work of a self-learning neural network which is based on corrections made by users. Online translation technology allows users who believe that the translation is inaccurate to either choose from several proposed options or make their own. On the one hand, due to the constant work of users and their corrections, the translation has the property of self-learning and implies that each subsequent translation is better than the previous one. On the other hand, for texts created 200 years ago, this technology may turn out to be unproductive: most texts translated using an electronic translator are modern, they take into account current realities and contexts of use. To test this hypothesis, an experiment was conducted: translations of the same text by the translator-poet of the Silver Age and the modern electronic translator Google were compared. An electronic translation cannot explicitly take into account the rhythmic structure of the text, the assonances and alliterations used in it, etc., however, it can convey the general meaning of the text, its content. It seems interesting that in the text generated by electronic translation, new semantic connections arise which are absent in the original and in the translation of the poet.
 Keywords: Translation, neural network, digitalization, Gumilev, Coleridge

Supernaturalism In Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Major Poems

Samuel taylor coleridge’s the ancient mariner and kubla khan are the major poems regarded as the greatest compositions in the field of supernaturalism. As a poet of supernaturalism, coleridge strictly eschewed crudeness from his writings. Based on the purpose of this study, that is to seek supernaturalism in samuel taylor coleridge’s major poems, the research design of this study is conducted by applying content analysis as proposed by koul (1984). Content analysis is concerned with the phenomenon, elements and comparison. Because of its concern, content analysis is sometimes referred to as ‘documentary activity’ or ‘information analysis’. The data of this study belong to the non –manipulated variables as they are not the result of experiment; these are called the qualitative type. Therefore, the data analyzed with the qualitative descriptive approach. This research will show the nature of the situation as it exists at the time of the study as stated by gay (1987: 189), “descriptive research determines and reports the way the things are”. Dream, suggestiveness and vision are the elements of the supernaturalism in these poems which are presented in the research result.

Storytelling, Liminality & the Textual Fashioning of a Post-Colonial “Ancient Mariner” in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

This paper examines Mohsin Hamid’s 2007 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a post-colonial re-writing of S. T. Coleridge’s narrative poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798). A comparative analysis is carried between these two works to establish their affinities in terms of storytelling technicalities and the space of liminality where they position their narrators. The comparative analysis shall prove that Hamid’s affinities with Coleridge’s work are deliberately employed to fashion his central character Changez as a post-colonial ancient mariner, which ultimately lies to the heart of the novel as both a contemporary politico-moral fable and as an act of resistance to post 9/11 American neo-colonialist discourses.

How the challenging behaviour of a traumatised child tells their trauma story and is a vital part of their recovery

ABSTRACTLike the character in Coleridge’s ‘Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’ who is driven to stop as many people as he can to tell and re-tell his traumatic story, children too are telling us about the traumas they have suffered in order to recover from them. But, unlike Coleridge’s wounded mariner who narrates his trauma, children use their behaviour to tell us their trauma story.

Reaction: Exploring the Chemistry Frontier in Water-Borne Vessels

In 2007, John Warner and Jim Babcock founded the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry and, with Amy Cannon, founded the green chemistry education nonprofit organization Beyond Benign. John is the recipient of the 2004 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science Mentoring and the 2014 Perkin Medal. In addition, John is one of the founders of the field of green chemistry and is co-author of the defining textbook Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice. In 2017, the German Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Technische Universitat Berlin announced the naming of the John Warner Center for Green Chemistry Start-Ups in his honor.

Intrinsic Reactivation of Human Endogenous Retroviruses in the Osteosarcoma

The human genome contains human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) and they occupy around 8% of our genome. These viruses are derived from ancient infections of retroviruses that were reverse transcribed and integrated into the genome of ancestral host animals. These viral genomes were fixed and inherited for tens of millions of years ago. Almost all of the HERVs have lost their infectivity and no known HERV is presently. The role of HERVs has been shown in the different inflammatory diseases and cancers. The goal of present study was to analyse the genome‐wide transcriptional activity of HERVs in osteosarcoma. We performed RNA‐seq analysis of 36 tumor‐normal paired samples, raw sequencing data were used to identify HERV sequences and counts data as expressional activity. DESeq2 package was used for statistical analysis.We found massive and activation of HERVs in the osteosarcoma sample. More precisely, 58 different repeat element were differently described between normal and tumor bone with the FDR levele below 0.05. The most significantly upregulated elements were satellite elements ALR, ALR/ALPHA, ALR2, ALR6 and ALRA SAT elements. In addition, over‐expression of the pericentromeric human satellite II (HSATII) and the ancient mariner transposon (HSMAR1) was found. The most down‐regulated elements were HERVK22I, LTR40A, LTR40B, LTR40C and MER87B. Up‐regulation of the satellite elements during cancer has been described in some previous studies. However, genome‐wide analysis of all repetitive elements in the human genome is novel approach and could give additional information about the oncogenesis.Support or Funding InformationThis study was supported by institutional research funding (IUT20‐46) from the Estonian Research Agency and by the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007‐2013) under grant agreement no. 602398 (Hyporth).

Storm Warnings: Twenty-First Century Challenges for the Law of the Sea

The law of the sea, one of the oldest and most venerable fields of international law, is built on the assumption of environmental stability; that the vast seas, though sometimes tempestuous, are in their essence constant, immutable, dependable, and perpetual. Yet in the Anthropocene, the geological epoch to which humanity has lent its name, the seas are rapidly warming, expanding and rising, and their chemistry is changing, souring, acidifying as they absorb humanity's carbon wastes. Added to this marine environmental transformation are new challenges to the stable legal foundations of the order of the seas, as rising powers seek exception from the rules, principles and processes of the law of the sea set out in the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the 'constitution' of the oceans. Yet for all tempest, flotsam and jetsam swirling around the contemporary law of the sea, there are reasons to be hopeful that the storm warnings will be heeded, and that we will avoid the fate of the ancient mariner, bound to repent for his senseless shooting of a wandering albatross. To offer one, very significant example, negotiations are now underway on a new global treaty to protect marine biodiversity on the high seas. Such an agreement would breathe new and more diverse life into the notions of common heritage and common concern which have animated the modern law of the sea, and which need to do much more work if we are to maintain a healthy and peaceful ocean environment for the centuries to follow.

On Violence, Joy, and Justice: The Poetry of C.k. Williams

On Violence, Joy, and Justice: The Poetry of C.k. Williams

The Rime of the Globalised Mariner: In Six Parts (with Bonus Tracks from a Chorus of Greek Shippers)

This article borrows the form and metre of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner to describe and analyse the social situation of the globalised mariner. The shipping industry is characterised by complex global value chains and an outsourced, casualised labour force. The paper aims to be a piece of ‘public sociology’ and (in seeking to appeal in as vivid a manner as possible) is written in a style that Wright Mills called ‘sociological poetry’, attempting a pastiche of perhaps the best known poem in English. The auditor in the poem is a late-modern consumer and the narration is shared between the mariner, an inspector of shipping and (to remind the reader and the auditor of the mariner’s partisanship) a Chorus of Greek Shippers. The narrative covers deficiencies in seafarer training, reductions in crew numbers, the consequent long hours and seafarer fatigue, and the failure of global governance of the industry.

Wordsworth’s “Away, away, it is the air”: A Textual, Intertextual, and Contextual Reading

AWAY, IT IS THE AIR IS A SINGULAR, UNNERVING, AND ODDLY neglected fragment. It was written at Alfoxden, and the Cornell editors, James Butler and Karen Green, date it as probably penned between March 19 and April 20 1798, though Mark Reed has suggested that it could have been written between the latter date and c May 16 or shortly after (1): Away, away, it is the air That stirs among the wither'd leaves; Away, away, it is not there, Go hunt among the harvest sheaves, There is bed in shape as plain As form of hare or lion's lare; It is the bed where we have lain In anguish and despair. Away, and take the eagle's eyes, tyger's smell, Ears that can hear the agonies And murmurings of hell; And when you there have stood By that same bed of pain-- groans are gone, the tears remain-- Then tell me if the thing be clear, difference betwixt tear Of water and of blood. lines are all the disconcerting for being so unlike Wordsworth in content and mode. Mary Moorman remarked that contain note of genuine though gloomy passion, and critics have tended to avoid construing them, or else to take them as inviting unusually direct and summary, even dismissive, biographical or textual readings. Moorman suggests that they are perhaps reminiscence of his last unhappy days with Annette, (2) and Duncan Wu notes that [t]his fragmentary piece is widely thought to be associated with 'The Thorn.' (3) But despite such speculations the question returns: how we are to respond to the delivery and content of these urgent, mysterious lines? Certainly, the tone is arresting (masterful and lordly Kenneth R. Johnston calls it), (4) and it admits no opposition. speaker is one who seeks to unburden himself of images that are shameful, rending, and destructive. Yet what kind of speaker exactly, and who is he button-holing? Is the poem put together as private monologue of exasperated despair, the self-directed words of someone consumed by guilt or anger? Or does the declamatory tone of the speaker imply an accursed figure, someone like the ancient mariner or Rivers in Borderers, who craves an interlocutor, perhaps to alleviate, even transfer, his own suffering (Away, and take the eagle's eyes / tyger's smell)? Or are the words like those of someone in dream, desperately unfolding for us rebus whose code we cannot construe, for all his crazed insistence? Equally unsettling is the poem's mis-en-scene: redirecting the addressee from place of withered leaves to shared bed amid the harvest sheaves (where we have lain / In anguish and despair). Moreover, all the confusingly this (presumably English or French) setting is figuratively associated with the predations of mostly foreign species--tyger, eagle and lion--and described in ways that veer between the graphically everyday (harvest fields), and the cryptic or visionary (tears of blood, tyger, lion). Further, the poem is itself formally unsettled in mode. It is an unfinished fragment, but it is by no means unformed as poetry. schematic deployment of rhymes and half-rhymes and the relentless anaphoric effects conspire to give pointed intensity to the climactic question (Then tell me if the thing be clear, / difference betwixt tear / Of water and of blood). Taking these features together, it is small wonder that Moorman called the lines strange, (5) and that Ernest de Selincourt termed the piece a curious survival from the more crudely 'romantic' taste of Wordsworth's earliest writings. (6) Presumably, he had in mind The Vale of Esthwaite, and the many overwrought, tragical yet jumbled, fragments from Wordsworth's adolescence that share this irreducible fervor and aura of derangement, by turns visionary, elliptical, and mundane. This article probes such questions and contexts, as well as the language of the poem itself. …

Vestiges of Sea Pilgrims

Vestiges of Sea Pilgrims Karen An-hwei Lee (bio) Water on Sunset Boulevard On Los Angeles's 230th anniversary, Emily Dickinson and I cruise the city. Vernal greenery. We stay on Sunset in search of water. Two unlikely sisters, Emily and I are a pair of cool Berkshire fronds this afternoon. Atlantic sea pilgrims. Woodland ferns. I grew up in Massachusetts before moving to greater Los Angeles. Emily, who lived in the Berkshires her entire life, is no longer alive. Fiddleheads and orchid kin. Lady slippers. No shops, no boutiques, no dermatologists, no glass edifices. Ornamental shade only, trees never sacrificed for poles or coffins. I talk while driving even if no one's there. To live at the end of a blind driveway, I say. You mean an unseen one, Emily says. We drive on Sunset, rows of trees: cedars, stands of white pine, evergreens, junipers twisted in funnel clouds. Blindness. Trees conceal the houses, glimpsed now and then. Our childhood in Massachusetts, I say. Trees, trees, murmurs Emily. The boulevard curves past a cast-iron Bel-Air gate, no signs except citadels of trees. Basilicas of air. Groves of sky. I lived here as a girl, says Emily. Sunset is a myth, I say. No one lives this way, among sentinel firs in Los Angeles. It costs multi-millions to do this. It's the location, I say. Location is in the heart, says Emily. In the cathedral of a soul. One underground river sustains greenery by night, originating from a glacier lake in Beverly Hills. Jurassic glaciers, underground caverns of Los Angeles. There aren't any of those here, I say. Where are glacier hills, says Emily. None, I say. You're thinking of Burbank. La Brea Tar Pits, she coughs. Brea tar flows on the Orange Freeway, black as the spice cake in the basket I once lowered into my garden. Silence. Were the Berkshires formed by glaciers? [End Page 138] Water on Rodeo Drive Did you ever grow heather, Emily? Silence. Radishes? Emily shakes her head. I only remember the daylilies. We're lost, Emily and I. We choose a road with a whimsical name, Rodeo. Of course, Rodeo Drive, the famous one. Shops and boutiques with silk gloves but no ambient music. Strangers photograph one another on a cobbled alley with a steep grade. Los Angelenos, who live in the city year round, do not. Take photographs. Almost vertical: a movie set? Is it Boston, where Emily visited her eye doctor? High noon, yet flash bulbs spark magnesium in the sun. Venice, I say. No, Vegas, Emily says, adjusting her snood, auburn hair awry. Venice section of Vegas, she explains. Venezia. I can tell by walking on it. The stones are machine eroded, not foot worn. You tell genuine sea glass this way, too. We visit an Italian zapateria to ask about women's shoes. Zapateria is Spanish, I say. Are you sure this isn't Paris? says a tourist. We're sure this isn't Paris, we say. Emily, can you speak another language? I ask, but she does not reply. Odor is a saloon in a desert. Saloon, echoes Emily, as an afterthought. It's not a word I used often when I was alive. A saleswoman, two salesmen, and a third man who doesn't identify himself, a fashion spy, emerge from leather-clad halls to hear a tale I recount with raised hands, my ancient mariner toast to wedding guests: Listen! Once upon a time, a woman grew large bone spurs, also called onions, eleven and a half wide . . . We hear tongues in Russian, Portuguese, Czech, Vietnamese. Everyone comes to Rodeo Drive. Bunions, says Emily. Not onions? I remember narcissus. Not the daylilies? A flash bulb strikes. Not white magnesium, we remind ourselves. Not stars. White chrysanthemums. On a street corner, an evangelist shares the gospel in Japanese: イエス・ キリスト. We listen closely. Parking meters hum tangible minutes in a digital staccato. Emily says the parking meters remind her of grave mounds and tombstones in the Berkshires. A person is looking at you, she comments, but it is not a person. The hum summons her memories of the sea. [End Page 139...

Expressive reading: A phenomenological study of readers' experience of Coleridge's The rime of the ancient mariner.

To articulate what constitutes expressive reading, we conducted a phenomenological study of readers’ responses to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. After reading the poem twice during 1 week, each of 40 readers chose five passages that they found striking or evocative and then commented on each one. Numerically aided phenomenological methods [(Kuiken, D., & Miall, D. S. (2001). Numerically aided phenomenology: Procedures for investigating categories of experience. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 2(1). Retrieved from http:// www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/976] were used to (a) compare these commentaries, identifying and paraphrasing recurrent meaning expressions (called constituents); (b) create matrices reflective of the profiles of constituents found in each commentary; (c) create clusters of commentaries according to the similarities in their profiles of constituents; and (d) examine each cluster to ascertain their distinctive attributes. Among the six distinct types of commentary identified, one in particular involved (a) metaphoric and quasi-metaphoric engagement with sensory imagery from the poem; (b) progressive transformation of an emergent affective theme; and (c) metaphoric blurring of boundaries between the reader’s and narrator’s perspectives. This mode of reading, which we call expressive enactment, contrasted with five other types of response: ironic allegoresis, aesthetic feeling, autobiographical assimilation, autobiographical diversion, and nonengagement.

The View from Mencken's Tomb

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Forgive me if I date myself by exhuming H. L. Mencken. He was the patron saint of a certain kind of journalist, and soon the kind of journalism he and I practiced and understood will be consigned to the History department. Or Archaeology. But you're an ancient mariner if you actually read Mencken hot off the presses--the hottest thing available in its day, now a neglected chapter in American studies. The Sage of Baltimore, as both admirers and sarcastic detractors called him, suffered a debilitating stroke in 1948 and died in 1956, so I can't even claim that I read Mencken while he was alive. I discovered him when he was barely cold, though, when Eisenhower was president and I was an adolescent contrarian looking for heroes and role models and finding slim pickings among the adults and celebrities on general display. My grandfather gave me that yellow paperback edition of the 1955 Vintage Mencken, edited by Alistair Cooke, and it became, for a season, my bedside bible. I published an essay claiming that I was fourteen when I began to channel H. L. Mencken, which coincidentally made me sound passably precocious, but my mother shook her head when she read it and told me I was closer to sixteen. You can't exaggerate as much while your mother's still there to pull the wings off certain flights of fancy, and it's my mixed fortune, at this advanced age, to have a mother still available to edit my memory. Why Mencken--why then, why now? What is it that brings a boy, or a man--or, more rarely, a woman--to find common cause with the verbal extravagance and exuberant prejudice of Henry Louis Mencken? None of us over forty accurately remember the way we thought and felt as teenagers--though most memoirists pretend to--but the America of Ed Sullivan, Bishop Fulton Sheen, and John Foster Dulles was very safe and boring, I thought, and Mencken was not. And I immediately recognized that Mencken's family, German-American burghers with a certain cultural over-confidence and a ferocious streak of independence--my ancestors for 300 years back were all bad citizens, he said--was very much like my own, though the Crowthers preferred to call themselves skeptics and nonconformists. The Fifties, at least for America's white middle class, were a time of smugness and political and cultural constipation not unlike the Twenties, when Mencken in his boisterous prime rained contempt on everything prim and stuffy and genteel. For a rebellious boy in a very small town, torn between juvenile delinquency and the kind of obsessive, sex-sublimating reading that made medieval monks go blind, Mencken was a voice of sophistication and freedom, and a career in his tradition was an appealing alternative to armed revolution. I never consciously emulated Mencken, but there's no doubt that the heroes we acquire from our earliest adult reading shape the way we think and the way we express ourselves. Unquestionably I was pleased to win the Baltimore Sun's H. L. Mencken Writing Award. I used to like to say that it honored the meanest son of a bitch in American journalism, though in recent years it's been given to several lackluster right-wingers, and I don't go to any Mencken Prize reunions. I was honored to be asked to deliver the annual Mencken Lecture a few years ago, although it turned out to be the most intimidating assignment I ever accepted. The audience is the Mencken Society, every Mencken scholar and biographer, every Mencken zealot and self-styled curmudgeon in the United States. I imagined that if I made one obvious mistake I'd be driven from the stage in a barrage of crab legs, or whatever they throw at frauds in Baltimore. So I spent a whole summer reading and rereading Mencken and his biographers. That's the only reason I'm not even more humble when I stress that I'm neither an authority on Mencken nor his disciple--nor, despite the kind words of some critics, his direct descendant. But Mencken himself was no authority. …

Coleridge's Uncertain Agony

Coleridge realized that much of the guilt from which he suffered was largely—if not entirely—a symptom of depression; but he found the possibility that feelings of guilt might be reducible to symptoms of mental disease even more disturbing than the depression that troubled him, since it tended to cast doubt on his faith that guilt and remorse were valid indicators of sinfulness. While Coleridge understood that the ultimate reasons for guilt are not to be found in any particular acts we commit, he steadfastly resisted the belief that moral condemnation could not be applied to those who suffered from mental disease. And this very quandary regarding the nature and source of guilt lies at the heart of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner , his greatest poem: a mariner invents a tale of crime, guilt, and punishment in an attempt to validate his chronic feelings of remorse so as to project a sense of moral order onto the otherwise senselessly traumatic events he experienced at sea.

A landlubber with an ancient mariner's leaky vessels

A landlubber with an ancient mariner's leaky vessels

Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp

Like Coleridge's ancient mariner who fixes us with his glittering eye and forces us to hear his tale of horror, survivors of the Nazi concentration camps are plagued by demons.2 In the face of the inexpressible horror of the camps, they have a compulsion to bear witness. They have to offer atonement for their survival. To their audience, they are both frightful and compelling. Like the ancient mariner, survivors seize the attention of their unwilling listeners: Primo Levi, for instance, summons those who live safe in their warm houses to consider his words or face his curse.3 And the lis-

The curse of the ancient mariner

A wide range of genetic disorders could all be related to a gene that jumped into the human lineage 80 million years ago.

Molecular evolution of the second ancient human mariner transposon, Hsmar2, illustrates patterns of neutral evolution in the human genome lineage

A consensus sequence for the second ancient mariner identified in the human genome, Hsmar2, was constructed by majority rule from full-length and partial sequences of 44 of the ± 1000 copies in the genome. This 1300 base pair (bp) consensus has 31 bp imperfect terminal repeats (ITRs) and encodes a 351 amino acid (aa) mariner transposase. The sequence of this transposase has allowed classification of Hsmar2 as a basal lineage of the irritans subfamily of mariners, sharing at most 38% aa identity with other members of the subfamily. The individual copies in the human genome are all highly mutated from the consensus, having suffered numerous small and some large insertions and deletions (indels), including many insertions of S and J subfamily Alu elements. The copies differ, on average, from the consensus by 11.6%, have suffered 11.8 indels per kilobase (kb), and only 3.7% of the 30 hypermutable CpG dinucleotide pairs in the consensus remain intact. This level of divergence indicates that the ancestrally active Hsmar2 element represented by the consensus was present in the human genome lineage about 80 million years (Myr) ago. Each copy has apparently evolved since then largely independently of the others, and with little constraint on its transposase coding capacity. This pattern of molecular evolution fits the current model for mariner transposon evolution. These copies provide multiple independent datasets for evaluating the pattern of neutral evolution in the human genome, for example, they confirm that most indels are very short and that deletions are twice as common as insertions.