Melville alludes in very direct ways to Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in chapters 42 and 52 of Moby-Dick. In an effort to better understand Melville and to understand poetry more broadly, I asked Stephen Pimentel and Byronic Heroine if they would help me understand this mysterious, beautiful, and terrifying poem.

The outcome was pretty extraordinary, if I can say so without being too self-aggrandizing. I say this because I learned more from this conversation than just about any of the other ones that I have recorded. I went in with a poor grasp of the poem—despite a lot of effort to do otherwise—and came out having a much stronger sense of the stakes and different threads and questions that unite the poem.

Each of us offered 10 - 15 minute prepared presentations at the start. I offered something like the moral interpretation or what the soul of the listener in the frame is like, Byronic brought to light an extraordinary number of Homeric connections and the difference between the Homeric and Christian worlds, and Stephen offered a provocative interpretation showing how unsettling the poem is. After that, we followed up the questions raised by each interpretation to try to move closer to finding the real nerve of the argument of the poem.

Enjoy!

Other work on trying to understand Melville:

Why Scholars Should Never “Correct” Great Thinkers (this is one of my favorites)

Reading Fast and Reading Slow

The Virgin Visits

Why You Should Love Cetology

Moby-Dick: Tragedy, Philosophy, and Encyclopedism (with Byronic and Alejandro)

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