Ambiguity and Ecopoeisis in Coleridge and Baudelaire’s Albatross

The albatross is a bird whose linguistic origin is deeply intertwined with literature. The antarctic bird’s genus name ‘Diomedea’ is derived from the Greek warrior Diomedes, whose companions, according to myth, were metamorphosised into large-sea birds by Aphrodite. Furthermore, within the poetic tradition itself, two seminal poems from the nineteenth-century write on the albatross: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1834) and Charles Baudelaire’s ‘L’Albatros’ (1861). Although the former poem is emblematic of the Romantic ethos and the latter symptomatic of modernity, both texts can be seen as to manifest what Rigby denotes to be ‘ecopoiesis,’ in other words, a ‘literary text [which] saves the earth by disclosing the nonequation of word and thing, poem and place.’ However, the texts seem to do so without conforming to Rigby’s notion of ‘negative ecopoetics’ in which the poem is required to include ‘explicit disavowals of sayability [… and] the formal qualities […] that declare them to be artefacts, carefully crafted works of poietic techne rather than spontaneous self-disclosures of phusis.’ Coleridge and Baudelaire do not use this trope of ‘self-canceling’ in order to ‘acknowled[e] in some way [the poem’s] inevitable failure to adequately mediate the voice of nature’ and subsequently ‘point us to that which lies beyond its own enframing;’ (437) but instead, use the figure of ambiguity to simply express an ‘intraction’ between the human and more-than-human world.

In ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ ambiguity is seen in the failed attempts of both the persona and the sailors at interpreting the Albatross’ motive and therefore resonates in the dissonant readings of scholars on its possible symbolism. It is noteworthy that during the persona’s speculations, the unnerving ‘silence of the sea’ is observed on each occasion. Nature, or as Rigby denotes ‘phusis,’  does not confide nor reveal the truth behind the albatross’ meaning nor appearance — here inscription is resisted. Furthermore, in pursuit of salvation, the persona recounts how ‘Instead of the cross, the Albatross/About my neck was hung.’ For Chase Pielak, this substitution of the crucifix for the Albatross does not, in Rigby’s terms, ‘enframe’ the animal, but rather ‘empowers the creature and renders it as a substitute for what is human.’  The substitution, evades self-disclosure. Coleridge’s albatross does not decipher itself. It is rather situated with an undisclosed agency.

For eco-critics, the problem of writing as a form of representation of the more-than-human world, is in its anthropomorphism which, as a ramification is anthropocentric. This is evident in the writings of Coleridge’s contemporaries, Keats and Shelley who in their odes to a ‘Nightingale’ and to the ‘Skylark’ express poetic desire through the laudation of the bird’s song. Baudelaire’s albatross is not ‘enframed’ in such an anthropocentric manner and therefore provides a countersignature to the Romantic analogy between the poet and the bird. Whereas Shelley and Keats regard the Skylark as the paragon of the poet, a master of poetry, Baudelaire’s allegory of the poet as the Albatross is strange. Unlike the melodic sounds of the aforementioned birds, an albatross’ sound is described by ornithologists as an amalgam of ‘whining, squeaking, grunting, and moaning.’ Baudelaire moves away from the anthropomorphised notion of song, equated with poiesis to instead rationale:
 

The poet resembles this prince of cloud and sky
Who frequents the tempest and laughs at the bowman;
When exiled on the earth, the butt of hoots and jeers,
His giant wings prevent him from walking.
 

For the persona, earth, the locus of the ‘anthropocence’—  is considered a place of exile, of ‘hoots and jeers,’ slurs of misinterpretation, and ridicule which articulates an othering. For Susan Blood, ‘L’Albatros’ exemplifies Baudelaire’s theory of correspondences in which there is an intraction between the physical and spiritual world through symbols of nature. Blood explains:

The moral of “L’Albatros” teaches the reader that all mimetic representation is partial, that the portrait of a bird in flight of necessity excludes the portrait of a bird on foot. In order to get a complete picture, we are compelled to an activity of metaphorical totalization that is essentially nonmimetic, nonrepresentational, because it brings together two perspectives that cannot be perceived simultaneously. The mimetic crisis of “L’Albatros,” far from conflicting with the possibility of metaphor, actually cries out for metaphorical interpretation. We might even say that the possibility of metaphor is a consequence of the mimetic crisis: the inability of the natural world to find completion within itself leaves a door open, so to speak, to metaphor. (10-11) 

While for Blood this gives way into a critique of nature revealing its deficiency which must be satisfied by the aesthetic impulse, an eco-critical approach would instead suggest that perhaps this ‘mimetic crisis’ is an opening up for the possibility of ‘ecodiegesis’ within literature. The need for a metaphor in response to incompleteness conforms to Rigby’s notion of ecopoiesis in which this failure is able to ‘point us to that which lies beyond its own enframing.’ The ambiguity which arises in consequence is a reflection of the inability of mimesis to provide an accurate representation of the more-than-human world. Metaphor does not signify aesthetic genius, as the Romantic notion and Blood would argue, but rather substitutes the need for a ‘explicit disavowals of sayability’ — the metaphor brings to the foreground the crisis of mimesis, rendering linguistic denotation as inadequate. Ecopoiesis, therefore, simply acts as a humble attempt to grapple with that inadequacy. And the Albatross, 'the prince of cloud' continues to evade our Romantic sensibilities. 

~ Vedika Rampal

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Cited Texts:

Baudelaire, Charles. “L’Albatros,” in Fleurs du Mal, trans. William Aggeler, (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954). https://fleursdumal.org/poem/200

Blood, Susan. "Mimesis and Grotesque in 'LAlbatros.'" Understanding "LesFleurs du Mai." Ed. William J. Thompson. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1997. 1-15. https://archive.org/details/understandingles0000unse/page/n7/mode/2up

Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Diomedes." Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Diomedes-Greek-mythology.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” in Poetry Foundation, 1834. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43997/the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-text-of-1834

Cornell Lab of Ornithology. All About Birds. Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. 2019.  https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Laysan_Albatross/sounds#

Keats, John. "Ode to a Nightingale." Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44479/ode-to-a-nightingale

Pielak, Chase. “Dead(ly) Beats: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Wandering Cemetery,”  Memorializing Animals during the Romantic Period, (Farnham: Taylor & Francis Group, 2015) 73-102.

Rigby, Kate. "Earth, World, Text: On the (Im)possibility of Ecopoiesis." New Literary History 35, (no. 3, 2004): 427-42.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "To a Skylark." Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45146/to-a-skylark