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Mariner”
Stephen Weissman argues in his book, His Brother’s Keeper, that “The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner” was an attempt by Samuel Taylor Coleridge both to bring his brother Frank
back to life (even if only in a poem), and to address and perhaps resolve feelings of guilt for his
brother’s (and father’s) demise. He argues that the mariner (who retraces geographically the
journey Frank went on that brought about his death) is simultaneously both Coleridge’s brother
The mariner that is Coleridge is the mariner who is punished to revisit a crime he once
committed, over and over again. Weissman argues that Coleridge was greatly affected by a
childhood incident where he threatened his brother with a knife. Coleridge once described
himself as his “Mother’s darling” (9), and Weissman believes Coleridge and his brother had been
fighting “over who was their mother’s favorite” (125). Unconsciously, Weissman speculates, the
premature death(s) of his brother (and his father) was imagined by Coleridge to be the
consequence of his desire to be the sole claimant of his mother’s affection. The death of the
mariner’s crew is a narrative event that owes its existence to Coleridge’s own unconscious belief
that he was responsible for the death of his brother (and father). Coleridge’s visits upon his
surrogate a punishment that he felt he himself deserved for fratricide (and patricide) (124-125).
Weissman argues that the mariner is also Coleridge’s brother, Frank. In performing this
“poetic miracle” (123), the resurrection of his brother, Coleridge used poetry not only to end the
agony of awaiting a punishment for a remembered crime (by creating one himself), he used it to
repair a loss.
that the “oedipal” stage of a child’s development has a profound influence on adult life.
Freudian, too, is Weissman’s emphasis on the dream-like symbolic transformations that occur in
poetry. However, since Weissman attends very closely to the biographic details of Coleridge's
Weissman’s analysis is delightfully provocative and speculative. His thesis that the
mariner is simultaneously both Coleridge and his brother is intriguing. However, Weissman
constructs through biographic detail a Coleridge who might better be understood as having used
the mariner to imagine himself as or like his brother. Assuming that Coleridge was his mother’s
darling, which resulted in him being “fretful, and timorous . . . [and driven by his brother] from
play” (9), his desire to be like his masculine, sea-venturing brother may have been stronger than
It is possible that the knifing incident was, for Coleridge, less traumatizing than it was
intriguing. Weissman believes that Coleridge fled his home and did not return (that night) out of
fear of being punished (xviii). Perhaps, instead, knowing his mother would assume he would
return once “the sulks had evaporated,” he stayed out all night to see if he might indeed be “the
adventurous sort” (xix). Indeed, the death of the crew, the visitation of the Spectre-Woman, and
the mariner’s curse may owe their narrative existence in “The Ancient Mariner” to Coleridge
imagining himself once again as an adventurer. If Coleridge was more affected by being the son
of a mother who wanted to possess him, than by his own desire to possess his mother, Coleridge
may have associated independent actions--whether those of his own or those by his surrogates in
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