Blessing the Water Snakes
​
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by
​​Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
​

​The Yellowbellied Sea Snake the most widespread snake in the world, found on the east coast of Africa all the way to the west coast of America. It lives its whole life in the open ocean and rarely gets close to the shore. 

Praying Well
​

​He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner

"The Happy Little Things"

A Spring of Love Gushed Forth

Blessing the water snakes did not come easily for the ancient mariner. At first, they seemed so slimy, so bizarre, even a little frightening. But they were also so beautiful with their many colors, flashing like golden fire.

Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.

Somehow, as he watched, he found himself honoring them, appreciating them, blessing them, and recognizing his own place in the larger web of life. The blessing came from deep within, gushing forth spontaneously. 

O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:

It was odd to pray in this way, as if a spirit deeper than words was the source of the prayer. Was it God's spirit? The snake's spirit? Both? In any case, he was inwardly prompted to reach out, beyond his fear and presumptions, to love them: "the happy living things."

The prayer did not free him completely from his guilt. He knew what he had done; he had killed the albatross, wantonly and mercilessly. At first the sailors had thought the killing brought them luck, but then they realized it had brought them death. He had to wear the dead albatross around his neck, almost as if it were a cross. They all died; only he survived. The albatross dropped from his neck only when he blessed the water snakes.

Blessing the snakes was a first step, but not a last step. Maybe now, he could move forward with his life, albeit as a wise but lonely storyteller. He had to tell his story again and again: what he had done in killing the albatross and in blessing the water snakes. Reclaiming his place in the larger web of life did not relieve him of guilt. That would be a long process, perhaps lasting his whole life. Still, he would stop people and tell the story, even if they were going to weddings. He was not fun to be around, but he would leave people sadder and wiser. 

And so it is with us. We, too, must bless the water snakes and be honest about what we have done collectively to our creaturely kin.  We, too, have wantonly killed so much in the name of a specious progress. We, too, are ancient mariners.

Our calling is to tell the story of where we have been as a species, of the arrogance by which we have assaulted so much life on the planet, as a species if not also as individuals and local communities. Our story begins with the agricultural revolution, so some say, and proceeds through the industrial revolution to modern times. Along the way we modern urbanites lost our sense of being kin to the other creatures and fellow citizens in the web of life. Indigenous and agricultural peoples carried the wisdom we lost, but the powerful among us colonized them, too. The story must be told again and again. There is a need for honest, healthy guilt, not unlike that of the mariner.

But we cannot stop with the guilt, or be paralyzed by it. Our calling is to step forward and help build a new kind of civilization, kinder and more humble, where we take care of one another and protect the rest of the web of life: an ecological civilization. The units of this civilization are local communities that are creative, compassionate, participatory, inclusive, kind to animals, and good for the earth - with no one left behind.  In such communities people live with respect and care for the community of life. They are not above other creatures; they are with them. They - we - recognize the multiple forms of intelligence enjoyed by other creature, from which we can learn. 

The ancient mariner may or many not have sensed this possibility. But we can sense it, if we have the courage and wisdom. We must find our ways, practically as well as spiritually, to bless the water snakes, to claim ourselves as kindred participants in an Earth community and, yes, an oceanic community, too.

​- Jay McDaniel

Blessing the Water Snakes

from Part IV of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
​by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Beyond the shadow of the ship,
I watched the water-snakes:
They moved in tracks of shining white,
And when they reared, the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes.

Within the shadow of the ship
I watched their rich attire:
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.

O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware.

The self-same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.

A Scholarly Discussion of
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
​

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the best known and most influential of the poems of the Romantic movement. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in 1798 after discussions with his friend Wordsworth. He refined it for the rest of his life, and it came to define him, a foreshadowing of his opium-addicted, lonely wandering and deepening sense of guilt. The poem tells of a sailor compelled to tell and retell the story of a terrible voyage in his youth, this time as guests are heading to a wedding party, where he stoppeth one of three. With Sir Jonathan Bate, Professor of Environmental Humanities at Arizona State University; Tom Mole, Professor of English Literature and Book History at the University of Edinburgh; and Rosemary Ashton, Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London. Producer: Simon Tillotson

Synopsis of the Poem
with selected Quotations

from Wikipedia

The poem begins with an old grey-bearded sailor, the Mariner, stopping a guest at a wedding ceremony to tell him a story of a sailing voyage he took long ago. The Wedding-Guest is at first reluctant to listen, as the ceremony is about to begin, but the mariner's glittering eye captivates him.

The mariner's tale begins with his ship departing on its journey. Despite initial good fortune, the ship is driven south by a storm and eventually reaches the icy waters of the Antarctic. An albatross appears and leads the ship out of the ice jam where it is stuck, but even as the albatross is fed and praised by the ship's crew, the mariner shoots the bird:
​
[...] With my cross-bow
I shot the Albatross.[3]

— lines 81–82The crew is angry with the mariner, believing the albatross brought the south wind that led them out of the Antarctic. However, the sailors change their minds when the weather becomes warmer and the mist disappears:

'Twas right, said they, such birds to slay,
That bring the fog and mist.[3]

— lines 101–102

They soon find that they made a grave mistake in supporting this crime, as it arouses the wrath of spirits who then pursue the ship "from the land of mist and snow"; the south wind that had initially blown them north now sends the ship into uncharted waters near the equator, where it is becalmed:

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

The very deep did rot: Oh Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.[3]

— lines 115–126

The sailors change their minds again and blame the mariner for the torment of their thirst. In anger, the crew forces the mariner to wear the dead albatross about his neck, perhaps to illustrate the burden he must suffer from killing it, or perhaps as a sign of regret:

Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.[3]

— lines 139–142

After a "weary time", the ship encounters a ghostly hulk. On board are Death (a skeleton) and the "Night-mare Life-in-Death", a deathly pale woman, who are playing dice for the souls of the crew. With a roll of the dice, Death wins the lives of the crew members and Life-in-Death the life of the mariner, a prize she considers more valuable. Her name is a clue to the mariner's fate: he will endure a fate worse than death as punishment for his killing of the albatross. One by one, all of the crew members die, but the mariner lives on, seeing for seven days and nights the curse in the eyes of the crew's corpses, whose last expressions remain upon their faces:

Four times fifty living men,
(And I heard nor sigh nor groan)
With heavy thump, a lifeless lump,
They dropped down one by one.

The souls did from their bodies fly,--
They fled to bliss or woe!
And every soul, it passed me by,
Like the whizz of my cross-bow!

— lines 216–223

Eventually, this stage of the mariner's curse is lifted after he begins to appreciate the many sea creatures swimming in the water. Despite his cursing them as "slimy things" earlier in the poem, he suddenly sees their true beauty and blesses them ("A spring of love gush'd from my heart, And I bless'd them unaware"). As he manages to pray, the albatross falls from his neck and his guilt is partially expiated. It then starts to rain, and the bodies of the crew, possessed by good spirits, rise again and help steer the ship. In a trance, the mariner hears two spirits discussing his voyage and penance, and learns that the ship is being powered supernaturally:

The air is cut away before,
And closes from behind.

— lines 424–425

Finally the mariner wakes from his trance and comes in sight of his homeland, but is initially uncertain as to whether or not he is hallucinating:

Oh! dream of joy! is this indeed
The light-house top I see?
Is this the hill? is this the kirk?
Is this mine own countree?

We drifted o'er the harbour-bar,
And I with sobs did pray--
O let me be awake, my God!
Or let me sleep alway.

— lines 464–471

The rotten remains of the ship sink in a whirlpool, leaving only the mariner behind. A hermit on the mainland who has spotted the approaching ship comes to meet it in a boat, rowed by a pilot and his boy. When they pull the mariner from the water, they think he is dead, but when he opens his mouth, the pilot shrieks with fright. The hermit prays, and the mariner picks up the oars to row. The pilot's boy laughs, thinking the mariner is the devil, and cries, "The Devil knows how to row". Back on land, the mariner is compelled by "a woful agony" to tell the hermit his story.

As penance for shooting the albatross, the mariner, driven by the agony of his guilt, is now forced to wander the earth, telling his story over and over, and teaching a lesson to those he meets:

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

— lines 614–617

After finishing his story, the mariner leaves, and the wedding-guest returns home, waking the next morning "a sadder and a wiser man".

About Samuel Taylor Coleridge