SOURCE: “Death as ‘Refuge and Ruin’: Shelley's ‘A Vision of the Sea’ and Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” in Keats-Shelley Journal, Vol. 43, 1994, pp. 170-92.

In the following essay, McEathron examines Shelley's “A Vision of the Sea” as it relates to Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, focusing particularly on how the former poem articulates Shelley's beliefs about both death and humanity's spiritual isolation.

It has been the persuasion of an immense majority of human beings in all ages and nations that we continue to live after death—that apparent termination of all the functions of sensitive and intellectual existence. … Let us trace the reasonings … [and] discover what we ought to think on a question of such momentous interest.

(Shelley, “On A Future State” [1818])¹

I

The “momentous” question above is one Shelley turned to repeatedly, attempting to reason his way to an account that would lift...