Romantic poetry and the science of nostalgia Again, from this results inevitably, that the will, the reason, the judgment, and the understanding, instead of being the determining causes of association, must needs be represented as its creatures, and among its mechanical effects Conceive, for instance, a broad stream, winding through a mountainous country with an indefinite number of currents, varying and running into each other according as the gusts chance to blow from the opening of the mountains The temporary union of several currents into one, so as to form the main current of the moment, would present an accurate image of Hartley’s theory of the will (BL, vol i, p 110, emphasis original) Coleridge’s concerns about tautology and other forms of involuntary motion merge very precisely in the Biographia with his protest against the materialist bent of the eighteenth-century sciences of man Behind all of these lies the nightmare image of the body, buffeted by currents that come from indefinite sources, subjected to motions beyond its control Yet this is, in case after case, the defining scenario of so much of Coleridge’s poetry: from the tortured vision of life as a “becalmed bark, / Whose Helmsman on an ocean waste and wild / Sits mute and pale his mouldering helm beside,” in “Constancy to an Ideal Object,” and the longing desire for some distant “breeze that play’st on Albion’s shore” in “Homesick, Written in Germany,” to the dramatic enactment of both of these agonized lyric stances in Coleridge’s most famous contribution to the Lyrical Ballads, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” certainly a tale of nostalgia if not also of the scurvy For readers in search of that poem’s meaning, Coleridge was on the surface all too ready to oblige by multiplying easy answers, whether in the form of the culminating apothegm of its earliest version (“he prayeth best, who loveth best / All things both great and small”) or the later archaizing addition of prose narrative glosses Yet against the various readings the Rime has occasioned in its stages of reception, from a “cock and bull story” (Charles Burney), “a Dutch attempt at German sublimity” (Robert Southey), to an exploration of the consequences of “maritime expansion of the Europeans” (William Empson), we might simply pose its main plot action: the recurrence of objects alternately set and stopped in motion by forces that can be neither identified or controlled from within the poem I offer the following collage from the poem, with apologies for the pastiche but with remarkably little detriment to the story: “The ship was cheer’d, the Harbour clear’d, / Merrily did we drop”; “Day after day, day after day, / We stuck, ne breath ne motion; / As idle as a painted Ship / Upon a painted Ocean”; “A speck, a mist, a shape, I wist! / And still it ner’d and ner’d: / And, an it dodged a water-sprite, / It plung’d and tack’d and veer’d”; “But in a moment she ’gan stir, / With a short uneasy motion / Backwards and forwards half her length / With a short uneasy motion”; “Upon the whirl, where sank the Ship, / The boat 211 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008