10 Years After

Coleridge's retort to Mrs Barbauld's criticisms of The Ancient Mariner as recorded in Coleridge's Table Talk (31 May 1830):

Mrs Barbauld once told me that she admired The Ancient Mariner very much, but that there were two faults in it -- it was improbable, and had no moral. As for the probability, I owned that that might admit some question; but as to the want of a moral, I told her that in my own judgement the poem had too much; and that the only, or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of such pure imagination. It ought to have had no more moral than the Arabian Nights' tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up, and says he must kill the aforesaid merchant, because one of the date shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son. (TT, p. 106)<sup>1

1</sup>Henry Nelson Coleridge, the editor of his uncle's Table Talk (1835), first reported this anecdote a year earlier in the Quarterly Review, 52 (Aug. 1834) 28: "Mrs. Barbauld, meaning to be complimentary, told our poet, that she thought the 'Ancient Mariner' very beautiful, but that it had the fault of containing no moral. 'Nay, madam,' replied the poet, 'if I may be permitted to say so, the only fault in the poem is that there is too much! In a work of such pure imagination I ought not to have stopped to give reasons for things, or inculcate humanity to beasts. The Arabian Nights might have taught me better.' They might -- the tale of the merchant's son who puts out the eyes of a genie by flinging his date-shells down a well, and is therefore ordered to prepare for death -- might have taught this law of imagination . . ." -- quoted in T.M. Raysor, "Coleridge's Comment on the Moral of The Ancient Mariner", PQ, 31 (1952) 88. *