SOURCE: "Uncertain Hour: The Ancient Mariner's Destiny," in Masterful Images: English Poetry from Metaphysicals to Romantics, Barnes & Noble Books, 1976, pp. 175-92.

In the following essay, Dyson and Lovelock explore the moral and epistemologica! questions evoked by The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

It is an ancient Mariner,
 And he stoppeth one of three.
 'By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
 Now wherefore stop'st thou me?'

'It is' . . . Coleridge's poem starts from the present tense, active, and, as it turns out, irresistible; the tense of absorbed narrative and compulsive confession. It is as if the whole poem is here in embryo: narrative vividness, fixed and immediate; human encounter, intense yet trancelike; questions, asked in terror or nightmare, needing answers but getting none, for whatever 'answer' there is comes obliquely. It is as if the story comes loose from time, gravitating towards that somehow eternal quality which haunts...