Susan Eilenberg, "Voice and Ventriloquy in 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'" (1992)

Discussion Questions:
282-83:

• Explain: "The 'Rime,' one of the most deeply and elaborately anonymous poems ever written, comes to speech through the medium of an alien voice" (282-83).

283:

• How, according to Eilenberg, is the Ancient Mariner's first words--"There was a ship"--"the first in a series of dislocations--translations, displacements, metonymies--that spring from the Mariner's refusal of his own name" (283),
• Explain: "He has no name because he has no identity" (283).

284:

• What, according to Eilenberg, might the Mariner's "difficulties with language" suggest?

285:

• Explain: "we have a hard time deciding how much the tale's oddity has to do with the oddity of its teller and how much has to do with the oddity of its material" (285).

286:

• Explain: "the Mariner is only the perpetual, helplessly uncomprehending audience to the tale that speaks itself through him" (288).

287:

• Summarize Eilenberg's argument about the use of quotation marks in the poem (see also 291).

288:

• In what way, according to Eilenberg, are the Mariner and the Wedding Guest alike?

290:

• To whom does Eilenberg refer as other "victim[s] of the tale's compulsive repetitions" (290)?

292:

• What relationship does Eilenberg identify among the gloss, the spirits and tale, on the one hand, and the poem, the crew, and the explicators on the other?

293-96:

• Summarize Eilenberg's claims about Coleridge's attempts at archaism.

297:

• Explain: "The 'Rime' was the result of two separate collaborative failures" (297).

298-99:

• What connections does Eilenberg identify between the Ancient Mariner and the "Wanderings of Cain"?

300-1:

• What connections does Eilenberg identify between the Ancient Mariner and Wordsworth's Salisbury Plain poem(s)?

303:

• Explain:“A summary of the ‘Rime,’ a transcription of a recital of a repeatedly ventriloquized tale, might go”:  “ ‘ “ ‘I’ can’t stop talking” ’ ” (303).

304:

• Explain what Eilenberg refers to as the "inverse analogy between the Mariner's journey and the wedding that his tale prevents the Wedding Guest from celebrating" (304).

305:

• Explain: "Their metonymy exercises a metaphoric, even metamorphic effect" (305).

306:

• Explain: "Passing through the neighborhood of a simile or even a submerged metaphor puts you (even, perhaps, you the reader) at risk" (306).

307:

• Explain: "Chronology does not really apply to the events of the poem: its temporality is rhetorical" (307).

308:

• Explain "the close relationship" Eilenberg identifies "among naming, violence, and death" (308).

309:

• How, according to Eilenberg, is killing of the albatross what "may have been what provided [the Ancient Mariner] with a self to refer to" (309).

310:

• Explain: "Natural wind exists as a constant moving away from itself" (310).

311:

• How, according to Eilenberg, is wind in the poem "allied with language and with spirit, but in uncomfortable ways" (311)?
• Explain: "The 'Rime,' like the Mariner, is obsessed with its need to talk about itself and its relation to speech" (311).

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