Week 2: Dreams, Dew and Death: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Not often do I read out loud. Not enough, now I should say, because my favorite parts of Coleridge's  The Rime of the Ancient Mariner I like because of the way they sound when I read them aloud.

"The silly buckets on the deck,
That had so long remained,
I dreamt that they were filled with dew;
And when I awoke, it rained."

The magic in this part in particular seems to stem from my ability to put myself into the situation, which reading aloud greatly helped me do. I could see the rain filling buckets around me, dripping from clouds like the dew off the morning grass, my mouth was open and I could taste it. Magic is experiencing something surreal--magic is a dream, just like in this stanza.

"They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose,
Nor spake, nor moved their eyes;
It had been strange, even in a dream,
To have seen those dead men rise."

First when I read this I thought, is Pirates of the Caribbean based on this poem? Which I will look up the answer to later, but after that I again noticed the presence of dreams. I think why dreams catch me, and maybe this applies to more people as well, is that dreams are a medium through which we can relate to anything and everything. Maybe I have never seen an albatross or sailed the seas; surely I have never seen dead men rise, but through dreams I can experience it, or at least pretend to experience it, depending on what one thinks dreams are.

A favorite image of mine was,

"For when it dawned--they dropped their arms,
And clustered round the mast;
Sweet sounds rose slowly through their mouths,
And from their bodies passed. 

Around, around, flew each sweet sound,
Then darted to the Sun;
Slowly the sounds came back again,
Now mixed, now one by one."

What made this magical to me was that all of the descriptions they gave easily matched an object in my head--birds. The descriptions he chose to give the souls really forces the human brain into connecting the souls to birds. Here, we pair the natural with the supernatural when we picture souls flying, singing as birds do. Like Samuel Coleridge writes in Biographia Literaria, "For the second class, subjects [of supernatural poetry] were to be chose from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such, as will be found in every village and its vicinity".