Reflecting on The Rime of the Modern Mariner by Nick Hayes

Elemental forces seldom play the towering role in our lives that they did for the people of antiquity. Nature looms less large in a hi-tech society where people relate more to information than to space. We think more in terms of data than geography now. After all, ideas traverse the globe more swiftly than weather or disease does. Identity theft is a catastrophe more likely to be visited upon us than an earthquake, tornado, or fire.

The Rime of the Modern Mariner makes clear the peril we are in by living so estranged from nature. Like love, we may take it for granted while it slowly ebbs away and leaves behind a gaping canyon within us. As the mariner seeks to drag the effete divorcee from his perch of complacency, so it seems does Nick Hayes grapple with readers to haul us back to our senses.

The confrontation of note, though, is not between the mariner and the divorcee, but rather between the mariner and death. Death redeems him. Death descends in the form of the innocent albatross slaughtered on a whim, the swirling seafaring garbage piles, and the sticky sheets of poisonous petroleum goo. It visits upon him not a ghastly vision of what could be, but the horrible truth of what is. It suffocates him in guilt as men have strangled Mother Nature. But unlike the sleep of death, the mariner wakes from the slumber that comes upon him. And such is the hope of the author for the reader I think. There is a note of hope in the image of life that emerges that humans allied with nature can undo what humans have wrought against it.

Alas, to live estranged from nature is to live estranged from our human nature. When we live apart from the natural world, we tear ourselves apart. As vividly as Nick Hayes has depicted the wrenching of the old mariner’s soul, so do we rend the sinews that knit our bones when we decouple from our link to the whole of creation. We will heal with nature or we will burn with it. We will rehabilitate the environment we inhabit or we will perish in its ashes.