I heard an interesting global reading of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. From this contrasted with the pandemic lockdown came:
Sailing An Impersonal Apocalypse
by Michael Doyle
As is the way of many a hero's journey
Enduring the successive trials of history
The protagonist endures unwanted trials
Until transformed by traversing many miles
Set adrift, disorientated on the sea
Threatened by the storms of yester-be
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner shares a message
Pertinent to the time and space of our present passage
There is an epic sense of case history
As we voyage through the pandemic's mystery
It is a Jungian voyage into our modernity
Someone cues the nightmare of this compelling story
People, people everywhere, but not a one to hug
In a lockdown response with its ungentle tug
We have become atomized into our condition
Hanging on every word of morning, noon and evening edition
Beach combing for verses through a digital mist
Dreaming of vibrant lips you've never even kissed
We've become a ship of fools somehow bound together
Senseless as it is for the worse or for the better
A bottomless symbol caught in the eye of desolation
Spurned in this moment of near global isolation
Your words spoken in the idle meanness of corrosive pleasure
Become an unleashed prophecy of harrowing measure
We walk in that troublesome zone between certain ruin
Inexplicably had without our probable doing
Between an old world and a reach for the coming new one
The deathfires of the old speak of man nearly undone
As outsiders on the edge of so many important things
We are all now bit players in what tomorrow brings
It's a terrible idea in a masterpiece splitting up
And certainly not the clear path to the winner's cup
In the end, we will all become sadly, wiser
With too many unmeant words spouted like a geyser
Ours has become loneliness examined in an existential sense
When we find at last that all of our bravado was only pretense
(c) May 14, 2020 Michael Doyle
All Rights Reserved
If the reader would like to begin listen to this major literary project in our digital age, please begin here:
https://www.ancientmarinerbigread.com/reading/1
