Salt Water (by Andrew Motion) and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (by Samuel Coleridge)

Andrew Motion’s ‘Salt Water’ (SW) consists of two quite different story lines that are connected by the introduction to the poem that shortly tells the history of the village of Orford, five miles south of Aldeburgh on the Suffolk Coast. Orford survived for centuries as a fishing port and is separated from the sea by the river Alde and a piece of land known as the Ness. From World War II the Ness performed logistic, scientific and experimental functions, all related in a way to warfare (parachute testing, a firing and bombing range, a centre for experimental work on radar, a laboratory for testing the triggers for nuclear bombs).

The first story is that of a weird creature, a merman, being fished on a depressingly hot day and killed by the dreading fishers, who naturally relate the merman to the despondent weather. The second ‘story’ is rather a set of reflections on the ‘technical’ days on the Ness. The first story – happening some centuries ago – is set in a kind of ‘classical’ verse – about which more in a moment. The second story is set in various types of modern, unrhyming verse, invariably with some built-in repetitions that make it an apt companion to the classical verse.

And now the revelation, at least, that’s the way it felt to me. Andrew Motion’s classical verse is in fact an imitation of Coleridge’s verse in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (RAM).  Both share the same rhythm and verse structure (there are some minor variations in the amount of syllables in both of them, but not in the overall rhythm). Unsurprisingly, the stories are similar too. Both happen on the sea and are about a creature considered a scapegoat (an albatross, a merman) for the happenings considered evil at that moment. A shared quality of despondency and gloom permeates those verses.

I randomly pick a few verses. Just listen to this:

The Sun came up upon the left,
Out of the Sea came he!
And he shone bright, and on the right
Went down into the sea

(RAM, part I)

A mile offshore, before the shape
of home had slipped away,
they hushed, and cast their clever nets
like grain into the bay.

(SW, first section)

Coleridge allows himself more variation in the length of the verse:

With sloping masts and dipping prow,
As who pursued with yell and blow
still treads the shadow of his foe,
And forward bends his head,
The ship droe fast, loud roared the blast,
And southward aye we fled.

(RAM, part I).

Here we have six lines instead of four. Sometimes there are five lines. The fact that Coleridge exhibits more variation in verse length reveals that he feels like a fish in the water in that type of verse, more so than Motion does, who is consciously mimicking an old master. However, as a contemporary poet, Motion has a hatful of room for variation and combines Coleridge’s classical verse (used for the story of the merman) with modern, unrhyming verse (used for the events on the Ness since World War 2). Note the inbuilt repetitions in the modern verse (indicated here in black) that make them an apt companion to the classival verse:

For a million years one life simply turns into the next -
the spider hangs between driftwood and sea holly,
the sparrow hawk balances exactly over a shrew,
the hare sits bolt upright and urgent, all ears:
there is no reason why any of this should change

(SW, second section).

To create an explosion is the point of all this,
an explosion neither too soon nor too late,
an explosion precisely where it needs to be,
over the head of an enemy.

Not yet. 

(SW, section 4).

RAM and Motion’s merman story bathe in the same atmosphere of gloom and doom. They share a sense of foreboding. One could query what explains this. Is it characteristic for the type of verse that Coleridge uses, or is it merely because a classical doomladen story (RAM), uses this type of verse and emulating this automatically conveys that black sense to a poem. It is a bit of both. The type of verse definitely provokes a fluent but intense and frightful type of reading. Undeniably however, Coleridge’s example is no trivial precursor .

Coleridge paints the palette of evils that befall the shipmates of the ancient mariner much brighter than Motion does (they all die exhausted after the ancient mariner killed the albatross). Nothing outspokenly bad however happens to Motion’s fishermen after torturing the merman, although a vague sense of evil-yet-to-come lurks around them:

This made the fishermen afraid
once more; it made them see
that somehow they the torturers
had set their victim free

(SW, section 7)

In RAM, the killing of the albatross by the ancient mariner was an outright irrational act as he killed the bird of good omen ‘that made the breeze to blow!’ and necessitated a moral retribution. This is not so in SW however. The merman, being half-man half-fish, is a highly inarticulate creature and that in itself genuinely frightens the fishermen:

which slid between its salty lips
an eel-dance of a tongue,
a tongue which could not fix or shape
the words it splashed among.

This made the fishermen afraid;
it told them they had caught
a devil deaf to every law
their own religion taught,

(SW, section 3).

This inarticulatedness suggests the eventual decay of everything human into nature, and I believe that is the main theme of SW which links the classical and the modern storylines. Consider the following bits:

Then the radio masts die, their keen whispers
and high songs go, their delicate necks bow,
and voices fill up the air without being heard.

etc....

Then the gulls come to visit, shuffling noisily
into any old scrap-metal mess, settling on this for a nest,
and pinning their bright eyes on bare sky overhead.  

And in due season flocks of beautiful shy avocets -
they also come back, white wings scissored with black,
calling their wild call as though they felt human grief.

(SW, section 6).

One can learn a great deal about constructing a long poem from studying both works. RAM, being a story from beginning to end, is set in the event of the ancient mariner first clinging a wedding guest to whom he narrates everything. To that wedding guest happens the profoundest thing a writer can hope for: the story deeply alters his life;

He holds him with his glittering eye -
The Wedding-Guest stood still,
And listens like a three years' child:
The Mariner hath his will.

(RAM, Part I)

He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn:
a sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn.

(RAM, Part VII, final verse)

SW, much more modern, employs other means to uphold a long poem. The thread that binds both the story of the merman and the events at the Ness is the introduction to the poem, that in turn presents Orford and the Ness in a compact history. The story of the fishermen is set in classical Coleridge inspired verse, while the more recent events at the Ness are laid out in modern verse. And, though seemingly unrelated, both share the theme of the eventual sinking back of everything human into the natural.