The Tale Goes On and On

To commemorate UNESCO's World Poetry Day last Wednesday, I organised a reading group based around two newspaper articles which had appeared in the preceding week, the idea being to discuss the rather nebulous topic of contemporary problems with teaching poetry. The two articles, one from the Guardian, the other from the Telegraph, agree that 'old' poetry is in some way irrelevant to modern society; the Guardian reports on Italian human rights organisation Gherush92's claim that Dante's Divine Comedy is "offensive and discriminatory," whilst the Telegraph questions why, in the year of Dickens's much-publicised bicentenary, Robert Browning's has been forgotten. It concludes, with somewhat lacklustre conviction, that Browning deserves to be read despite the off-putting obscurity of many of his poems. An academic reading group is perhaps an unfair place to objectively assess the apparent overall message of these articles; we weren't exactly sympathetic, for example, to an ignorance of Browning's sources being a legitimate excuse to not reading his poetry. But then, that's to be expected. The whole group consisted of researchers at different stages in their education and careers, and with different levels of knowledge about the modern state of poetry (although it was interesting that the music student in attendance felt that very similar slights were levelled against his subject). We have all, essentially, publicly acknowledged that we like the obscure stuff - so much so, that we're willing to base our professional lives around proposing ways to decode it. Naturally, then, we sprung to an animated defence of Dante's now-outmoded religious and social views, and disdained the Guardian writer's apparently Wikapedia-derived knowledge of Browning's works.

But we did agree that we are not entirely representative of the modern reader. Both newspaper articles engage with poets long-forgotten in popular culture; discussing them at all will, in all likelihood, result in at least a handful of new readers. But what happens when future generations, those reared with TV as the place to go for all knowledge and entertainment, grow up? Our reading group could already share tales of despair; we all knew of students who had actively avoided modules purely because they contained poetry in the reading lists. Telegraph and Guardian readers are, at least, exactly that: readers. The Telegraph wondered why Dickens's memory has survived so much more robustly than Browning's; I suggested (in, I admit, a comment spurred by a moment of defensive fury on Browning's behalf) that it was because Browning's poetry cannot be translated into a film or TV series. More objectively now, I stand by that theory; we have less and less readers, and more and more 'viewers.' So how will poetry fare in an increasingly multimedia age?

Naturally, my first concern was for my own research. How would Coleridge survive this death of the reader? (By now my worry had reached apocalyptic proportions, resulting in terrifying visions of a bookless world, where the occasional reader, ostracised by society, remained alone in the remnants of a library, remembering their glory days.) I did the only sensible thing. I searched for him on YouTube.

I was pleased to see that a search for 'Samuel Taylor Coleridge' returned nearly 900 results, many of which were readings of his poetry. Undoubtedly, these 900 videos will provide me with hours of 'productive' procrastination over the next couple of years; there's all sorts to be said about reader engagement through video. The first page, however, threw up a result which I found particularly exciting: an Iron Maiden song entitled 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,' released on the album Powerslave in 1984.

The song, although still a mammoth thirteen minutes long, essentially summarises the tale of the Mariner, although it does include several stanzas, unaltered, from Coleridge's poem. Being a complete novice regarding anything musical, the only thing I can say about the musical qualities of this song are that it sounds, to me, like most Iron Maiden songs - but that the consistent beat does subtly mimic the original rhyme scheme, and that the quotations from the poem are 'marked' by elaborate musical parentheses. (If anyone can say anything more about the reflection of the poem in the music itself, I'd be delighted - it's an interesting angle, I think.) From our current perspective - the modern state of reading poetry - there is one aspect of the song which is particularly relevant. Coleridge's 'Rime' has a complex narrative structure, but most of the poem is told in first person from the point of view of the old sailor. Iron Maiden's lyrics, on the other hand, are written almost entirely from a third-person perspective. There is one exception: after the mariner has killed the albatross, bringing a curse to all the crew, that curse extends beyond the boundaries of the song: "The curse goes on and on and on at sea / The thirst goes on and on and on for them and me," Dickinson wails, the higher note at the end of the line implying the first-person desperation. 'Me' - the singer, and by extension the singing listener - is absorbed into the song, and so the poem. The 1980s listener was drawn into the eighteenth-century poem, and the 'Rime' is drawn into twentieth century popular culture.

At the end of Coleridge's poem, the Mariner describes how he must tell his "ghastly tale" over and over again, teaching others the moral of his story. The wedding guest becomes 'a sadder and a wiser man' thanks to the Mariner's tale. That is not the end of Iron Maiden's rendition: the tale, they say, "goes on and on and on." Which brings us back to the Telegraph, the Guardian and the future generations of readers. The tale of poetry continues to go "on and on," a process that events like World Poetry Day encourage. But the reader's tale goes on and on too, and as the Telegraph and Guardian go some way towards recognising, perhaps the only way to engage new students with poetry is to approach it from a twenty-first century perspective. Better ask Justin Bieber what he thinks of Browning, then...