Notebook: Coleridge's Glosses

Most editions of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" published today include Coleridge's marginal glosses, which have come to be seen as an intrinsic part of the poem, though they weren't part of the first printed version (in Lyrical Ballads, 1798). Coleridge tinkered with the text of the poem repeatedly over the years, and by the time of its inclusion in his 1817 collection Sibylline Leaves it had acquired a set of notes by the author, presumably intended as exegesis, the form of which, according to John Livingston Lowes, Coleridge may have borrowed from glosses in some of the narratives of exploration that he was fond of reading. Arguably these glosses aren't "necessary" to the appreciation of the Rime, but — reason not the need — they certainly make it richer.

My favorite of these sidenotes is a sentence so lovely it can stand on its own:

In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and every where the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected, and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.

You can feel the wild onrush of Coleridge's mind here, as he adds clause after clause until the Moon and stars are all but absorbed by the metaphor and the syntax finally comes unmoored at the very end. There is little to prompt any of this in the stanzas it was meant to accompany, which come after the mariner has shot the albatross and the rest of the crew have died:

The moving Moon went up the sky,
And no where did abide:
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside --

Her beams bemocked the sultry main,
Like April hoar-frost spread;
But where the ship's huge shadow lay,
The charmed water burnt alway
A still and awful red.

There's no "yearning" in those lines, and the simple lines about the Moon and the stars provide little foundation for the elaborate imagery of the gloss, but the Rime is fuller for the addition. The same mind that could conceive — but not "finish" — "Kublai Khan" is here seen moving ever outward, finding more and more connections as it weaves of the universe a fabric that can never be completed.