Tag Archives: Romanticism

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book recommendation: Mariner

I’ve just finished what will probably turn out to be my favorite book read in 2024. (I think it’s safe to make that prediction in mid-November.) I chose Malcolm Guite’s Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge as a possible book club option for the arts-focused life group we’re starting at church. I was excited about both the author and the subject matter. Malcolm Guite is a poet, scholar, rock band member, and Anglican priest. I’ve heard him read his own poetry in person and speak on some podcasts, and I like what he has to say (and his gravelly British voice) a lot. And of course, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the leaders of the English Romantic movement, both a brilliant Christian philosopher and a renowned poet, known especially for the haunting ballad The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Guite’s book is both literary criticism and biography–an insightful analysis of the Rime and its famous gloss (explanatory notes Coleridge added later in his life), and a careful demonstration of how the text interweaves with the narrative of Coleridge’s own life, especially his tragic descent into opium addiction and eventual recovery. Even if you aren’t a poetry fan or don’t know anything about the English Romantics, you will enjoy this book if you believe nature speaks to us about God, if you like ghost stories and/or seafaring tales, or if you appreciate a great redemption story. You will be captivated both by Guite’s clear, beautiful prose and by Coleridge’s scintillating verse (quoted amply throughout the book–you don’t need to know it ahead of time) and fascinating letters and journals. It’s rare that I read a nonfiction book that I wished wouldn’t end, but this was one of them.

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Meanwhile

While I’m trying to think of a way to revive my readers’ (and my own) interest in my blog, here’s some good writing by someone else: William Wordsworth.  I pulled my Romanticism anthology off the shelf in order to start working on the extensive revisions necessary for my essay “Shelley’s Queen Mab: The Medium versus the Message,” which currently makes me want to shoot myself in the eye.  Instead of shooting myself in the eye, I’ve decided to share with you my favorite Wordsworth poem.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

Little we see in nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for every thing, we are out of tune;

It moves us not.  Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

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Snow and some geese

Ok, I know that every blogger in Central Virginia has already posted pictures of today’s snow.  But not everybody has Walden Pond in their pictures.  By “Walden Pond,” I’m not referring to the place where Thoreau “went to the woods to live deliberately,” but to the little fishing pond in my apartment complex.  It’s not exactly a natural wonder, but snow makes everything beautiful.  I don’t need some transcendentalist to tell me that.