Esemplastic

A Most Beautiful Coalition

Esemplastic—a term coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge himself—gives meaning to the imagination’s unique ability to draw ideas and images from a medley of domains and forge them into a single, unified work.

Coleridge’s extended poem “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is—for the most part—a glittery-eyed mariner’s account of his travels upon the tempestuous seas, imparting stories of damnation and deliverance at the hands of death and nature’s spirits. The poem is as turbulent as the tale it recounts, with its mercurial plot and varied interruptions, and yet radiates a sense a curious sense of oneness. Coleridge’s piece breathes what he expressed as “the esemplastic power of imagination”.

“And it grew wondrous cold: / And ice, mast-high, came floating by,/As green as emerald.” (52-54) As the ship, adrift, reaches the land of mist and snow, the sailors are in awe of their unearthly surroundings. In the poem Coleridge indiscriminately includes elements of the supernatural, whether through subtle imagery or outright descriptions of magic. He draws elements from the real and mystical worlds to form one ethereal piece.

Coleridge’s unification of seemingly divergent elements into one is also apparently in his variety of narrative techniques.  Throughout the poem, the long-winded mariner is sporadically interrupted by his fretful audience-of-one. “'God save thee, ancient Mariner! / From the fiends, that plague thee thus! — / Why look'st thou so?'” (79-81) The poem espouses a variety of techniques, including frame narrative and lens-shift (moving back and forth across “strata” of the poem—e.g. from the mariner’s account to the Wedding Guest’s response), creating an oddly unified piece that fashions union from disunion.

These are only a few examples of Coleridge’s esemplastic creativity at work in “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. Ultimately, he is a poet that pays no respect to the conventionalism of “compatible and incompatible”. Samuel Taylor Coleridge fearlessly marries realism and enchantment, tethering interruptions and long-windedness to shape a single, unified text.