A Critical Engagement with Stephen Weissman’s Analysis of “The Rime of the Ancient

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

and Coleridge himself.

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.

Weissman’s approach to “The Ancient Mariner” is obviously psychoanalytical. The focus

on the desire for the mother, and punishment for this desire, show a critic who agrees with Freud

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

life, his approach may be most accurately identified as psychobiographical.

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

his desire for a greater claim to his mother.

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

poetry--with a provocation of her wrath.

(600 words)
 Works Cited

Weissman, Stephen M. His Brother’s Keeper: A Psychobiography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Madison: International Universities Press, 1989. xviii-xiv; 9; 118-129.