Lead-in Activities In The Visual And Performing Arts Projects

By Author: emaly su
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Before the projects can begin, we spend one class period looking at the conventions and themes of traditional and literary ballads—rhyme, mercer, and stanza.

Narratives marked by the presence of supernatural forces, secrets, temptation, and violence, dialogues with questions that create mystery and a sense of ill-omen. That night, the students write a five-minute stream-of-consciousness piece that starts with the word guilt, and then they free write for 3CMlO minutes on their associations with the word, the physical and emotional and spiritual experience of guilt, images it calls up, ways it arises, recurs, and is sometimes resolved.

Some of these pieces turn out to be quite personal and private, so I ask students to keep the writing in their notebooks to revisit while reading the poem and creating the project. Next day we read Coleridge's account of ...
... his nightmares, "The Pains of Sleep," written perhaps five years after "Mariner," in which he describes three nights of praying aloud "in anguish and in agony / Up starting from the fiendish crowd / Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me". In nightmare he experiences a sense of wrong, a need for revenge, a powerless will, "desire with loathing strangely mixed / on wild or hateful objects fixed," and an inexplicable shame and guilt over "Deeds to be hid which were not hid, / Which all confused I could not know / Whether I suffered, or I did".

I tell the class a little about Coleridge's sufferings from opium addiction and the nightmares that accompanied his efforts at withdrawal, as well as his statement in Biographia Literaria that in collaborating on the Lyrical Ballads with Wordsworth, where "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" appeared, "it was agreed, that my endeavors should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith" (Coleridge 264).

We spend two nights reading the poem itself, starting it aloud together. I ask them to keep a list of key events of the Mariner's journey, including shifts in weather and light, images of tension and release, and supernatural appearances. They've learned to mark their favorite lines, images, sounds, and to try reading passages aloud. In class half the group outlines the sections of the poem on mural paper on one wall while the other half covers the opposite mural with favorite lines and phrases.

As we read and discuss both murals, questions arise: So why does the Mariner choose this one Wedding Guest of the three to hear his story? What's this guy done? What's so terrible about shooting the bird and why so much penance? Why does Life-in-Death win the Mariner and Death win the crew? Why the mix of Christian saints and nature spirits?

Is "He prayeth best, who loveth best / all things both great and small" really enough "meaning" for a poem like this? We keep a list of questions. Too much discussion, too many "answers," and the projects can feel anticlimactic—and perhaps the poem will speak to us in other ways, if we let it. To paraphrase Lucille Clifton, poems are about questions, not answers.