In “The Sailor, Who Had Served in the Slave Trade” (1799), Robert Southey tells the story of a dissenting minister in Bristol who hears the confession of a sailor who has murdered an unnamed enslaved woman aboard a ship. The sequence of events that the poem narrates begins when the enslaved woman protests her subjugation by refusing her food. The captain of the ship orders the sailor to whip the woman in order to make her eat, but she continues to refuse food. The woman subsequently suffers torture so horrific that she dies from her wounds the following day. As the poem begins, the minister finds the sailor praying alone in a hovel. Although the sailor insists that the murder was unintentional, he registers his guilt in his descriptions of the way that the image of the dying woman follows him everywhere he goes. Finally, he begs the dissenting minister for help: “O give me comfort if you can— / Oh tell me where to fly / And bid me hope, if there be hope, / For one so lost as I” (lines 113–6).
In the earliest version of the poem, the minister responds by encouraging the sailor to flee the hovel and instead go to find a church in which to pray for his sins. In the later versions, Southey has the minister join the sailor in prayer in the hovel and enjoins others to do the same.
Implicit in this abolitionist narrative is a theory of how one individual's guilt might be converted into a public feeling, and how this, in turn, might inspire political action—alongside a series of ethical questions about what it means to use representations of the suffering of enslaved people in order to incite such feeling. Presumably, Southey believes that confronting people with this murder scene and its aftermath might convince them to adopt the abolitionist cause. Yet the ethics of Southey’s decision to use this story for abolitionist ends are deeply riven, since Southey himself, like the sailor, lacks empathy for the enslaved woman he represents. Not only does Southey refuse to grant her the dignity of a name; he also dehumanizes her when he instrumentalizes her pain for the benefit of his abolitionist audience. The abolitionist moral relies on the idea that forgiveness is still possible, not only for the sailor, but for British society as a whole—but this happens at the expense of the enslaved woman, who is not allowed any space to tell her own story. Marcus Wood has argued that “The Sailor” is a “truly woeful ballad in every sense of the word . . . in which the slave inevitably emerges not as a suffering human but as a catalyst for the sailor ’s suffering” (201–2). By choosing to speak from the perspective of the sailor, rather than from the point of view of his victim, Southey capitulates to the biases of his majority-white audience.
The complications surrounding Southey’s positionality in relation to this story multiply, however, when one realizes that this poem has been written in dialogue with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ballad, “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, in Seven Parts” (1798).
At first glance, Southey’s graphic narration of the murder of an enslaved woman appears to have very little in common with Coleridge’s poem: a supernatural tale that depicts a series of strange events leading on from the moment the mariner shoots an albatross. Yet the “Rime,” at its root, is another ballad about a lonely sailor who has committed sins at sea and thus becomes obsessed with his own guilt, even if his crime differs vastly in scale from that of Southey’s sailor. Both the sailor and the mariner ask for sympathy, even as they refuse to reflect on their responsibility for their actions. Focused on the past and unable to engage with the present, they each inhabit a different temporality from the people they encounter and are isolated by their compulsive storytelling. Just as the ancient mariner sees spirits aboard his Spectre-Bark, Southey’s sailor is haunted by “the wicked one” (line 106) everywhere he goes. Finally, while Southey’s sailor asks the dissenting minister for help, Coleridge depicts the mariner asking the hermit to shrieve him (“Oh shrieve me, shrieve me, holy man!” (line 607)); both the sailor and the mariner, (at least in the 1799 version of Southey’s poem), end up at church.
Southey directly echoes Coleridge’s diction several times, suggesting he was inviting his audience to hear echoes of the “Rime” in his poem. The mariner’s reflection on the moment he shoots the albatross, “And I had done a hellish thing” (line 89), clearly resounds in two of Southey’s sailor’s outbursts; “Oh I have done a wicked thing! / It haunts me night and day” (line 25), and “Oh I have done a cursed deed!” (line 53). The sailor stresses that the hovel he inhabits is “lonely” (line 26), just as the mariner stresses that he is “all alone” on the ship (line 224). Southey advertised his imitation of Coleridge much more boldly in 1815 than in 1799, when he changed his poem’s first line to read “It was a Christian Minister” (in order to directly echo the first line of Coleridge’s poem, “It was an Ancient Mariner”). Although these echoes are easy to catalogue, however, the question of what Southey might have meant to communicate in these echoes of the “Rime” is more difficult to answer. In what follows, I argue that the changes Southey makes to Coleridge’s poem in his imitation reveal a fundamental difference in his methodological stance toward the cultivation of public feeling. Although the ballad might intuitively be called a “public” form, each poet imagines the way that this form mediates the relationship between the characters in the ballad and their audiences very differently.
The question of whether Southey understood himself to be translating the subject matter of Coleridge’s poem to an entirely new context, or whether he aimed to bring its underlying abolitionist message to the fore is debatable, though by now, it is commonly (though not universally) accepted that Coleridge’s poem can already be read as an abolitionist allegory in itself.
Coleridge’s mariner’s overwhelming sense of guilt, as several critics have noted, seems disproportionate to his crime of shooting the albatross and so might be best explained by his repressed confession of involvement in the triangular trade.
Southey’s imitation means that he was in effect the first critic to note this. His ability to see the allegory at work in the “Rime” was likely informed by his friendship with Coleridge during the time they had both spent living in Bristol in the mid-1790s. In 1795, Southey had witnessed Coleridge give his “On the Slave Trade” lecture in Bristol and was also making plans with him to emigrate to America to build a new Pantisocratic community. Their plans for their utopian society unraveled over time, partly because Southey wanted to take servants to the banks of the Susquehanna. This paved the way for further poetic disagreements. By October 1798, Southey’s review of the “Rime” in the Critical Review publicly accused Coleridge of being too obscure (“We do not sufficiently understand the story to analyze it . . . ”). This negative review is one of the things that Southey became best known for in the twentieth century, as Lynda Pratt has observed, and has therefore had a disproportionate influence on how his own poem has been read
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Because Coleridge’s poem is much longer and more complex than Southey’s—with its supernatural themes, mythic elements, and confusing symbolism—discussions of Southey’s imitation of Coleridge have tended to argue that he simplified his source text. Southey has often been characterized as a more “public” poet than Coleridge.
As Mary Jacobus puts it, in an influential 1971 article on “Southey’s Debt to the Lyrical Ballads” : ‘What is idiosyncratic or disturbing in the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge is replaced by a topical or humanitarian interest of a quite straightforward kind: the poems become not simply shallower, but more public… A generalized, symbolic study of guilt and alienation [in “The Rime” ] becomes an anti-slave-trade poem, its theme given immediate topical resonance and its underlying moral emphasis made explicit. Gothic accretions and psychological depth are stripped away to leave horror of an entirely straightforward kind. (30)’ Jacobus also stresses that Southey’s style is defined by his magazine audience—“In some cases, poems from Lyrical Ballads are returned firmly to the level of the magazine poetry from which they had been raised, stripped of their new thematic depth and sophistication” (24)—and notes that Southey might also have been offering his poem as a corrective to the complexity of the “Rime.” “One has to concede that his… borrowings represent a deliberate attempt to put right what he had criticized in his review” (24), Jacobus concludes. This argument has been very influential in readings of the poem. For instance, Patrick Keane concurs that his ballad is a “straightforward” version of Coleridge’s poem (158). Christopher Smith sees the poem as “an answer to Coleridge” (par. 3), arguing that “Southey converts the disturbing open-endedness of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s work to sententious, clear-cut, rapidly-moving stories, or emblems of suffering” (par. 8). Chris Rubenstein argues that “Either Southey in his poem tells us . . . what Coleridge ought to have written in the ‘Rime;’ or he writes—and I prefer this alternative—what he is reasonably certain Coleridge had in mind” (24). More recently, David Chandler has aimed to correct this consensus by offering Southey’s poem “The Old Woman of Berkeley” as a more persuasive “answer” to Coleridge’s poem, arguing ‘There is no reason to question Southey’s assertion that his ballad was inspired by a real story (Poems 105), however, and if that story was, in the telling, fertilized with ideas from “The Ancient Mariner,” it does not mean that Southey conceived of it as an “answer” to the problems he found in Coleridge’s poem. As he fully accepted and happily contributed to the genre of the supernatural ballad, he must have realized that a political, “natural” ballad like “The Sailor” was generically too distinct from “The Ancient Mariner” to challenge plausibly Coleridge’s experiment. (par. 5)’
A tendency to criticize the simplistic nature of Southey’s didactic poem is balanced with a generalized sense of admiration for Coleridge’s psychologically subtle approach to the representation of guilt in the critical conversation about the possibility of an abolitionist allegory in the “Rime.” Coleridge has been lauded for his success at cultivating a disturbing feeling of identification with the mariner’s guilt in his audience, precisely because he avoids describing why the mariner shoots the albatross, or what this action might signify.
This argument has a different logic when read in conversation with criticism of Southey’s poem, however, than when read in relation to Coleridge’s poem alone. The juxtaposition reveals a strange paradox, whereby “The Rime” has not only been called a more successful poem than “The Sailor,” but has also subtly been framed as a more successful abolitionist poem—despite never directly mentioning the topic of slavery. Considering how many people have read and discussed the “Rime” without referencing the context of Atlantic slavery, however, questions remain about how useful the generalized sense of guilt that Coleridge summons was to the project of abolition.
The critical consensus that Southey’s poem is simplistic also requires reconsideration, since Southey complicates the status of Coleridge’s poem as abolitionist allegory while simplifying its underlying plot. For instance, he often seems to read Coleridge’s poem psychoanalytically, suggesting that Coleridge’s use of supernatural imagery might be read as a sign of the way that mention of the Atlantic trade has been repressed in the poem. In “The Rime,” a “million million slimy things” haunt the ancient mariner’s field of vision after the mass death of the ship’s crew (lines 227–35); this image resurfaces in Southey’s description of the way that the enslaved woman’s dead body seems to refuse to sink after she has been thrown overboard. This perhaps implies that Coleridge was himself repressing a reference to the murdered bodies of enslaved people in his description of the “rotting sea” (line 232). Southey further excavates the unconscious of Coleridge’s poem by drawing a connection between the way the sailor describes his torture of the enslaved woman and the vision of his crime that later haunts him. Southey uses the verb “twist” twice; first to describe the enslaved woman’s pain— “She twisted from the blows” (line 81), and then later to describe how the sailor sees his victim’s dead body “twisting everywhere” in the water, long after the sea has closed “over her” (line 101). He thereby suggests there is a connection between the symbolic vehicle the sailor’s guilt takes on and the reason for the guilt itself and invites readers to think about whether this might also be true in the case of Coleridge’s poem. When he examines the unplumbed abolitionist depths of some of Coleridge’s supernatural symbolism, Southey draws attention to the way in which Coleridge allows some readers to disregard the context of slavery, in a way he will not himself allow.
Beyond Southey’s decision to make his poem obviously abolitionist, and to translate supernatural references into descriptions of how the unconscious works, his decision to preface his version of the poem with a headnote that addresses the poem's "public" audience also offers a subtle commentary of Coleridge's methodology. He makes several further alterations to the setting and plot of Coleridge’s poem, when he decides to set the poem in a hovel, to convert the character of the wedding guest into the character of the dissenting minister, to add the character of a captain, and to introduce the question of whether the poem should end in prayer. None of these changes are merely incidental; each of them subject the mechanisms of Coleridge’s allegory to scrutiny, and many of them complicate, rather than simplify, Coleridge’s text. In what follows, I examine the effects of each of these revisions to Coleridge’s poem in detail, putting special emphasis on how they work to cultivate public, as well as private, feeling. In doing so, I do not mean to recuperate Southey’s poem, so much as offer a case study of the way in which abolitionist poetry's overt public purpose has changed the way it has been read.
