Repetition, difference and liturgical participation in Coleridge's 'The ancient mariner'

Abstract

Theological interpretations of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ have sometimes been judged to do little more than to compound the problem of interpretation. This essay reflects on a contrasting response from the Welsh poet David Jones which challenges the ‘Rime’ for a theological incoherence in itself constituting a failure of imagination, and then considers the relation of language to liturgy in recent postmodern theology. What emerges from Coleridge’s poem is a divergence between the identical repetition of the tale itself and a ‘repetition with difference’ implied in the Mariner’s vision of a procession to the kirk. Coleridge’s ‘Gothic’ imagination can do little more than stage this difference of repetition on the margins of his poem, but there are implications for his later writing career, as he moves away from the predominance of imagination towards the counter-horizons of speculative theological prose