The Rime of the Ancient Mariner II: The Lessons From The Past

The Mariner's Mirror Podcast

This is the second episode dedicated to that maritime masterpiece of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

The first episode is a fabulous new reading of the poem with a specially-commissioned composition and soundscape designed to enthral the listener with the poem's weird, ethereal, supernatural glory.

This episode explores the text by crossing the boundaries between history and science, land and sea, past and present. Dr Sam Willis speaks with John Spicer, Professor of Marine Zoology at the School of Biological & Marine Sciences, at the University of Plymouth. John argues hat the poem could teach us a lesson or two about the way we treat our environment today.

In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner a sailor kills an albatross, which sets off a chain of events that fundamentally alter the sailor's world. Similarly, today we live in a world in which humankind is increasingly out of kilter withe natural world. The world is changing; it is transitioning. We are grieving for our climate. In particular there are numerous ways in which we have irrevocably altered the marine environment. The ocean's temperature is increasing and it is becoming more acidic. Through our activities that have impacted biodiversity we have set in motion what some scientists consider the greatest extinction of life in its history. Coleridge would not recognise the world in which we live after successive and relentless generations of technical and industrial revolutions, and yet his poem is oddly prophetic.

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