Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge Hardcover – June 20, 2017

The book has a really nice cover. I looked at it, and then I looked at it again. Then I picked the Mariner up and began to read. Well, let me tell you...it's not the cover, but the content that keeps one coming back. Malcolm Guite masterfully pilots the reader between the poem, the life of S.T. Coleridge, his writings, and back again. All the way out and all the way back, nuanced...from the "Kirk (the Church), to the Hill, to the Lighthouse..." and back again. A truer look into one of the men involved in the Romantic Movement has never been given. As they say, "it takes one to know one." Malcolm Guite is up there, in the here and now, dwelling with and knowing them, then grasping them and bringing them to life for those the Mariner and Malcolm's book has approached with their twinkling eyes.

Few journeys are worth the while of Malcolm Guite's Mariner. To discover the parallels of a Poet's literature and a Pilgrim's life (and then to find your own life in the liminal spaces between both) is akin to being cast adrift in tumultous seas and suddenly sighting a slice of land where one can harbor for rest and fellowship. Guite's tale of Coleridge is a timely one for a country beset with opiate addictions and spiritual flounderings. Who has not left the hill (nature), the lighthouse (reason), and the kirk (that grand tradition of faith) and hoped to find your way back again to all three. Mariner is such a map that charts the wayward ways of one ancient sailor, whose dreams take us to hell and heaven, but leave us with a strange and beautiful flower whose fragrance lingers longer than its good and honest prose. As St. Augustine overheard the child: take up and read.

Here’s the thing—Guite is excellent, and this book is a treasure. But IVP, the presentation here (vs. the original H&S edition in England) is REGRETTABLE to say the least. I also have it direct from the author himself via online discussion that the edited subtitle (interjecting the word “Theological” for readers here in the States) is annoyingly “unnecessary.” IVP: Please reconsider your cover designer and the subtitle for the next edition.

Guite's insightful look into the life of Coleridge does not fail to captivate and inspire.

I am a friend and 'fan' of Malcolm Guite - "Mariner" is a stunning and engaging 'exegesis' of Coleridge's 'Marinier'.

Every so often a book crosses your radar that is something special. Mariner was one of those books for me. The author, Malcolm Guite, is a well-respected poet and the chaplain of Girton College, Cambridge. He also teaches in the faculty of divinity at Cambridge.Moore: Give us a bit of the back story and/or motivation behind writing this book.Guite: Well, I’ve had a lifelong love of Coleridge’s poetry, ever since my mother used to recite passages of the Ancient Mariner to me when I was a child. But in the last twenty years I have also become deeply interested in him as a philosopher and a thinker whose ideas seem increasingly relevant to our own concerns. When I came to write my book Faith, Hope and Poetry, published ten years ago, which is essentially a defense of the imagination as a truth-bearing faculty, I realized that I had cited Coleridge in every chapter and that the chapter on Coleridge himself was really the central chapter of the book. So I resolved that ‘one day’ I would write a fuller book on Coleridge. The more immediate spur that got me going on the book was a growing frustration with the way that secular academia seemed to be airbrushing Coleridge’s faith and his radical theology right out of the picture, and I very much wanted to set the record straight!Moore: Coleridge, like his buddy, Wordsworth, was a Romantic poet. To orient us, please provide a synopsis of what made one a Romantic poet.Guite: There are lots of ways to answer that, but at the heart of it I would say that Coleridge and Wordsworth, as the founding figures of the Romantic movement, were reacting against the deadly combination of materialism in science, artifice and mere ‘tasteful convention’ in poetry, and an over –reliance on rationalism in philosophy which prevailed in the 18th Century. By contrast they wanted to write in direct, natural and intuitive ways, to delight in nature without needing to reduce or subdue it, and at all times to awaken the kind of intuitive and imaginative response to the world which allows us to explore how the outward and visible appearances of nature ‘out there’ can give us a whole new language of imagery and experience with which to explore what is ‘in here’, the whole realm of our inner experience. In other words they didn’t want to divorce the ‘objective’ from the ‘subjective’ but to see them as mutually flowing between and through one another in our actual lived human experience. In addition Coleridge in particular wanted to ground that experience of renewed beauty and meaning discovered through nature, in a clear theology of God offering us the cosmos, not as a puzzle to be decoded, but as a poem to be celebrated and to learn and grow from. So in Frost at Midnight Coleridge refers to the natural world asThe lovely shapes and sounds intelligibleOf that eternal language, which thy GodUtters, who from eternity doth teachHimself in all, and all things in himself.Great universal Teacher! he shall mouldThy spirit, and by giving make it ask.Moore: Most of us are familiar with two of Coleridge’s poems: Kubla Khan and the subject of your book, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. You brilliantly demonstrate that the latter is not just some detached piece of genius but depicts the spiritual voyage Coleridge was on in his own life. Would you share a few themes from the poem that reflect Coleridge’s own spiritual pilgrimage?Guite: Well, Coleridge once called the imagination ‘the sacred power of self-intuition’ and it is extraordinary how prescient his great poem was, not only in terms of the developing shape of his own life, after he composed it, but also the broad shape and development of our culture in the two centuries since. It is the story of a voyage out and back again, a voyage away from the familiar and into terrible crisis, encounter and transformation. When the ship is surrounded by ice floes with no way out the albatross appears as quite literally a savior, that magically splits the ice and guides them through, and ‘as if it had been a Christian soul’ they hale it ‘in God’s name’. But then of course comes the terrible moment of ‘fall’ and catastrophe in which the savior albatross is slain by the mariner and ‘instead of the cross’ the albatross is hung around his neck. The Christian references are explicit throughout. Coleridge then depicts, with uncanny accuracy the modern experience of utter loneliness, and individualistic isolation living in a Godless and disenchanted world where even the human body has become something loathsome and corrupt. But then comes grace and a turning point. In the act of delighting in and blessing the other creatures of the sea, for their own sake, the mariner recovers the ability to pray and the process of redemption and homecoming begins. This reflected and anticipated Coleridge’s own nightmare voyage into both physical addiction and mental doubt and agony, and then a wonderful recovery of faith as sheer gift and grace, centered on Christ as the Logos who loves and sustains all creation, not just human beings, but it is also a prescient narrative of our own culture’s fall into alienation and anomie, and the possible path of recovery we might take in renewed humility towards God and his good creation, learning, like the mariner that ‘ he prayeth best who loveth best’Moore: The loss of the transcendent is the bitter fruit of living on this side of the Enlightenment. Our universe, sorry Flannery O’Connor, no longer seems Christ-haunted. We live, as Charles Taylor and others say, in a disenchanted world. How does Coleridge’s work slow us down to reconsider the arrogant confidence in the demise of God in the modern world?Guite: Reconsidering arrogance, and re-learning humility is right at the heart of the poem’s meaning. Coleridge was deeply and widely read in Enlightenment philosophy and science as it emerged in his own time and he sounded a warning note about where it might lead us if it wasn’t accompanied by reverence, humility and an imaginative willingness to intuit God’s presence and meaning in the world, rather than just seeing the world as a dead mechanism with which we can tinker at will. The ‘transformation scene’ in the Ancient Mariner, in which the mariner at first sees the water snakes as ‘ a thousand thousand slimy things’ and then looks again, under the moonrise, and sees them as ‘ God’s creatures of the great calm’ and is abled to appreciate them in their own right and bless them, is an object lesson in what it would mean to ‘reconsider the arrogant confidence in the demise of God in the modern world’.Moore: I was struck on several occasions with Coleridge’s acute, observational skills. How do poets like Coleridge help us slow down and pay better attention to our surroundings?Guite: Coleridge himself sets out his aim, together with Wordsworth, in a passage from the Biographia Literaria where he says that in The Lyrical Ballads they aimed at ‘awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.’ Poetry is able to do that because it is language slowed down, the opposite of skimming and speed-reading, it removes the film of familiarity and allows you to see into the depth of things.Moore: What are two or three things you hope your readers gain from Mariner?Guite: I hope that readers will be gripped by Coleridge’s own story and feel an empathy for him and for his ideas, and through that empathy I very much hope that they will sense how his individual story, and the story he tells in the Ancient Mariner, is also our story too: a story of fall, loss and loneliness, but also a story of hope, recovery and redemption. Especially I hope they will thrill to Coleridge’s central idea that when we perceive the world afresh, through a baptized and kindled imagination, we are perceiving it alongside the God who makes and loves it, we are partaking in our own way in what Coleridge called ‘ the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’. Perhaps the best way to summarize my hopes for the reader would be to leave you with the sonnet I wrote about my own response to Coleridge which is in my book The Singing Bowl, but also comes in at the conclusion of Mariner:Samuel Taylor Coleridge'Stop, Christian passer-by!—Stop, child of God!'You made your epitaph imperative,And stopped this wedding guest! But I am gladTo stop with you and start again, to liveFrom that pure source, the all-renewing stream,Whose living power is imagination,And know myself a child of the I AM,Open and loving to his whole creation.Your glittering eye taught mine to pierce the veil,To let his light transfigure all my seeing,To serve the shaping Spirit whom I feel,And make with him the poem of my being.I follow where you sail towards our haven,Your wide wake lit with glimmerings of heaven. (From The Singing Bowl by Malcolm Guite)

This has been one of my favourite poems since I was at school many years ago. I was reminded of it during a recent visit to New Zealand the home of the albatross. I've almost finished reading the book....it was difficult to put down.....but I've been very busy recently so have not had the time to finish it. I love the way Malcolm Guite links the stresses of the mariner to what was going on in Coleridge's own life at the time. I also appreciate the way Guite shows how religion was a major factor in Coleridge's thinking. A wonderful book which I do strongly recommend.

'Marnier: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge' is a brilliant book. Wondering if you should buy it? - the answer is - yes.  Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge  Jump in and do that thing. I think it's brilliant! absolutely wonderful! Malcolm Guite is indeed a poet and a scholar! His writing is beautiful, his research - phenomenal. His faithfulness to Coleridge’s mystical awareness of the holiness of life, contained in and encompassing, the natural world - is awe inspiring. Guite has woven the story of Coleridge's life in and through -- not only 'The Rime of the Ancient Marnier' - but many of his other works and life events. This makes for an extraordinary read, an amazing 'voyage' to interior realms - for all of us. It is simply a GREAT book.And - in case I am one of the first Canadian reviewers - let me also add that the book was delivered very quickly. Order it now! Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge

It takes a gifted poet to be able to fully lift the lid on another esteemed poet's work. And when the author is steeped in the words, their history, effect and circumstance, then the result is a beautiful mix of poetic perusal, an unfolding of the deeper meaning beyond the obvious, and a fascinating glimpse into how the poetry came into being. Malcolm Guite is this kind of invaluable guide, as he deftly steers us through the Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge himself. It's a joy to read and reflect on. One for the poetry lovers.

Guite's own glittering eye and poetic imagination keep the wedding guest ( reader) enthralled as he weaves together his exposition of the Ancient Mariner. He uses its sections to to structure his sympathetic, pastoral but always honest account of the man and the poet whose spiritual and artistic journey has similarities with that of his most famous creation. Superbly readable but clearly underpinned with careful research and deep insight. . Takes a poet to know one.

An excellent and profound guide to Coleridge. One that, in our sleepwalking over the cliff edge, we need to hear. We are currently living through and causing the sixth mass extinction of life on earth. Maybe only a revolution of our heads and hearts will wake us up.