MERVYN
PEAKE’S ILLUSTRATIONS FOR
‘THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER’
Antje Klesse
(The Coleridge Bulletin Conference Issue, [unnumbered] July 1996, pp 25-49)
Mervyn Laurence Peake (1911-1968), artist and writer, made eight black-and-white drawings for ‘Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. They were published in 1943, almost 150 years after the poem first appeared in Lyrical Ballads (1798). Peake’s illustrations are perhaps the most successful graphic interpretations of the Ancient Mariner [1] since Doré’s opulent designs of 1875. Like Doré’s they have been reprinted over and over again. However, this essay is not concerned with the history of their reception and their success, but with Peake’s response to Coleridge’s poem as one possible approach to how an artist can deal with the poem graphically; it explores the relationship between illustrations and illustrated text, between Peake’s designs and Coleridge’s poem: Which aspects of the text did he transfer into images? How does his personal artistic idiom and concern relate to that of Coleridge?
The first edition of the Ancient Mariner containing Mervyn Peake’s illustrations was a pocket-sized hardcover edition published by Chatto & Windus. Due to the heavy restrictions imposed on British publishing in World War II, it was printed on poor quality paper and a rather modest outfit altogether. Nevertheless, and even though reduced in size, the designs stand out effectively from the page, undisturbed, if unsupported, by a simple typeface and layout. The book of 1943 contained, scattered unevenly throughout the text, only seven out of the eight drawings that Peake completed. Chatto declined to print his illustration of ‘Life-in-Death’, an intensely ‘gothic’ image, because it had seemed unsuitable for the book. Years later Peake remembered: “The publishers thought that it would be unfair to the general public to have them buy the book and then come across a picture like that when turning the pages. It had to come out.” [2] In 1944 the
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complete sequence of drawings was published in ‘Poetry’ (London), edited by Tambimutu, “an enterprising Ceylonese who had suddenly appeared in Chelsea with a scheme for producing a book of representative poetry.[...] Tambimutu managed to track down Mervyn Peake during one of his visits to London and persuaded him to allow the drawings of the Ancient Mariner to be reproduced.” [3] The 1964 reprint of the first edition by Chatto & Windus again contained only seven illustrations and only as late as 1978, all eight drawings, this time attractively enlarged, appeared for the first time in a book edition of the Ancient Mariner. [4]
When Chatto & Windus approached Peake to illustrate the
poem in 1942 he was serving in the army. Military service had proved to be
extremely distressing for Peake, to the extent that, after a nervous breakdown,
he was in late 1942 sent home on indefinite sick leave and finally, in 1943,
demobilized. The genesis of the Ancient
Mariner drawings as well as that of Titus
Groan, the first of the three novels about the fantastic
Although Peake had done some illustrations before the war, such as the children’s book Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor (1939) and illustrations to Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark (1941), he had been mainly a painter. Only from 1940 — and for more than fifteen years to come—did the illustrative work, of his own writings and other authors, replace painting as a major occupation:
All my life I have been painting and making drawings but I only started illustrating books when I was conscripted
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in 1940. I was a poor soldier and was constantly on the move from unit to unit — and from regiment to regiment. The Royal Artillery and the Royal Engineers claimed me twice apiece and appeared to vie with each other as to which could get rid of me the quicker. This constant moving about gave me little scope for painting, and I found myself continually packing my kit-bag and away again with yet another canvas too wet to travel. [6]
The last illustrations Peake did were for his own poem, The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb, a ballad on human kindness amidst the terrors of war. Published in 1962, a few years before his death, they sadly testify to their author’s terrible debilitation caused by Parkinson disease, their blurred lines and fleeting shapes reflecting seismographically the shaking of his hand. [7]
The army seems to have made Peake a traveller, just as lost and plagued a soul as Coleridge’s Mariner. Watney assumes that, apart from this coincidence, the Ancient Mariner also was “a task that admirably suited Peake’s talents, for his visual conception of Coleridge’s poem was clear and definite, and the strange half-world of the mariner and his shipmates was one that he could understand immediately.” [8] What was it that made Peake so congenial to the Ancient Mariner ? For one thing, he had always been fascinated with the subject of illustration and vividly remembered illustrated books from his childhood, particularly those of bizarre and fantastic subjects. He studied his famous predecessors with enthusiasm, finding the secret of their greatness in their ability to empathize and identify with the author.
[I] saw what work I could of the great illustrators — Rowlandson, Cruikshank, Hogarth, Blake, and the Frenchman Doré, the German Dürer, and Goya, the
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Spaniard. I began to realise that these men had more than a good eye, a good hand, a good brain. These qualities were not enough. Nor was their power as designers, as draughtsmen. Even passion was not enough. Nor was compassion. Nor irony. All this they must have, but above all things there must be the power to slide into another man’s soul. [9]
Considering this attitude towards illustration, Peake’s remarkably humble attitude towards an author whose text he illustrated, it is not surprising that his illustrations are best where he interpreted texts he loved. The Ancient Mariner was one such old friend from literature; Peake was familiar with the poem long before he came to illustrate it, and even after this he liked it well enough to put the Mariner illustrations up on his living-room walls. In the advanced stages of his illness, when he was unable to read himself, his wife would read the poem out to him. [10] Sebastian Peake recalls his father’s acute visual memory, that he was able to identify paintings and painters just from being shown the corner of a reproduction; that he could quote whole passages from books he liked:
My father could quote from books verbatim,could recite complete poems if given only the first line from the works of Shelley or Wordsworth, de la Mare or Byron, but wouldn’t know the latin name of a species of common tree. On the other hand, he could, just by my showing a square inch of paint from one of my parents’ large collection of art books, tell me the painter. [11]
One feels reminded of Coleridge who also stunned his contemporaries by his amazing memory, already as a boy in Christ’s Hospital, or as a student at Cambridge where he would keep his friends informed about the latest political events quoting from pamphlets “viva voce gloriously”. [12]
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It does not seem improbable that Peake knew the Ancient Mariner by heart. Being a soldier in the army, he might not have had a copy of the poem at hand, and could have worked straight from memory, transferring onto paper the ‘visions’ he had in his mind from reading the poem or listening to it. Peake’s general approach and attitude to making art supports this assumption. Art for Peake had to be ‘intuitive’ and spring from excitement without much planning; “For art is ultimately sorcery”. And every pencil line, a ‘mark made on paper’, ought to be based on the artist’s ‘vision’: “The vision may be weak, confused, or obtuse, but it must be vision.” In his work, however, he is often at odds with his theory (just as the eccentric Peake was at odds with society). Regardless of his conviction that art should be ‘intuitive’ and spring from ‘excitement’, his writing for instance is highly literary and artificial. Particularly these contradictions as well as his search for expression in different forms and genres, make Peake a truly romantic artist, a “master of all styles” like Coleridge and Wordsworth. The terms ‘classic’ and ‘romantic’ seem to have meant nothing to him and “have little meaning when the finest examples of any master’s work are contemplated, for the first thing one finds is that they have that most magisterial of qualities,’equipoise’. ,They are compelling because they are not ‘classic’ and because they are not ‘romantic’. They are both and they are neither.” (13 )[13]
The story of his childhood forms a fitting backdrop to Peake’s
romanticism: Born in Kuling, Southern China, the son of an English missionary
doctor, he spent the first part of his childhood in
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and then eating it into the shapes
of tables and chairs - hunger and fancy!’
[15] In 1922 the family moved back to
But how precisely did Peake’s romantic imagination work? What sort of ‘visions’ does he render in his illustrative art? He may be called a ‘visual’ person, endowed with an acute perceptiveness aided by a brilliant memory. His writing, friends’ and relatives’ comments and his art work, reflect to what great extent he lived through his eyes. His own poem ‘Coloured Money’ of 1940 suggests that Peake was literally haunted by his visual sensitivity. The theme of visually taking in the appearances of the world is here presented in the image of attaining wealth. But like money, the things seen give the perceiver delight as well as pain, a ‘sharp delight’. The wealth of eye and ‘mind becomes a very ambivalent treasure; not being able to withdraw from seeing, the individual despairs:
I am too rich already, for my eyes
Mind gold, while my heart cries
‘O cease!
Is there no rest from richness, and no peace
For me again?’
For gold is pain,
And the edged coins can smart,
And beauty’s metal weighs upon the heart. [18]
His novels reflect the unusual intensity of his perception in
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their “tightly packed, highly concentrated accumulations of visual detail. If people grow at all psychologically or physically, the growing is long, and unconvincing. Weak in portraying psychological development, he is strong in the description of a single moment. His detailed studies of human beings (using that term in a loose sense) rely for their effect on his relish for the absurd and preposterous.” [19]
There seems, indeed, to be hardly any progression in his stories, little action and movement. Even when fast physical movement is involved, as in the case of the violent knife duel between Rantel and Barigon from Titus Groan, the narrative is marked by a peculiar inertia. Events seem to be suspended in a sphere of timelessness and stillness, and every action is already marked by impending exhaustion. Highly dramatic movement, like that of the two opponents fiercely circling and attacking each other in the following passage, takes on a dream-like quality in Peake’s presentation:
About them the stillness of the pale night was complete. The moonlight lay like rime along the ridges of the distant castle. The reedy marshlands far to the east lay inert - a region of gauze. Their bodies were raddled now with the blood from many wounds. The merciless light gleamed on the wet, warm streams that slid ceaselessly over their tired flesh. A haze of ghostly weakness was filling their nakedness and they were fighting like characters in a dream. [20]
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner itself left marks in Peake’s writing. Among the ‘magical paintings’ of ‘plastic beauty’ [21] in Peake’s novels there are even some that almost quote from the poem. Coleridge’s description of the “charmed water” beyond the ship that “burnt alway/A still and awful red” is brought to mind by Peake’s “strings of water” that “burned blue, beyond the glass, burned crimson, burned green...” [22] in Gormenghast.
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But more importantly, Peake. the artist, informed Peake, the writer, who depended, to some extent, on visual aids even where he was shaping his imagination in words. For instance, in order to know how his novel characters would move and speak, he sketched them in the margins of his manuscript (without any intention of using them as illustrations later). And Manlove, apart from that, detects certain structural aspects in his novels that are based on visual perception:
[...]the most frequent vision in his art seems to be of struggling against a dense and crushing medium - precisely the vision that we are . to be given of Gormenghast (both the castle and the people). Consider, for instance, how Peake plays the horizontality of the sea, or the thickness of the atmosphere or darkness (or even ‘ downwards’ verticality, in the case of the hanging rags of the ship’s sails) against the tiny upright figure of the sailor in The Ancient Mariner, or the pressure of the sky on Jim on the island in Treasure Island; or the use of right-angles in the posture of the figures in The Hunting of the Snark. It is to Peake the artist and draughts-man that much of the manner of the ‘Titus’ trilogy - the descriptions, precise to the point of pedantry, the recurrent use of chiaroscuro, the sheer sense of space and the slowness of the narrative - can be attributed. [23]
The example from Peake’s Ancient Mariner mentioned here is the sixth illustration in the book. It focuses, indeed, mainly on the ragged, hanging sails; but its steep perspective and plasticity makes it a most interesting design. The viewer feels high up in the rigging of the ship, looking down on the distant figure of the Mariner who stands looking across the sea.
Bearing in mind what has been said so far on Peake in
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general, it is time perhaps to have a closer look at his Mariner illustrations. a list of their subjects reads like this:
1 the Mariner, seen frontally, gesticulating and talking with urgency;
2 the albatross, big and white, pierced by the arrow in mid-air;
3 the Mariner kneeling on deck, his hands clasped as if in prayer, with the dead bird tied to his neck;
4 the Nightmare ‘Life-in-Death’, depicted as a hybrid creature, half skeleton, half beautiful woman;
5 the parched figures of the sailors on board the ship
looking across the sea;
6 the hanging sails and the Mariner far below, a tiny figure standing on deck;
7 the Mariner leaning against the mast of the ship facing a bizarre assembly of standing figures, the dead sailors staring at him;
8 the old Mariner walking off into a vague background, after finishing his tale.
Apparently, Peake did not attribute certain lines or passages from the poem to each of his designs. At least they are not accompanied by captions in book editions. Their consecutive order even varies slightly from edition to edition. As a matter of fact, they are effective as single images, looming up here and there upon browsing through the book, rather than in terms of a narrative sequence. Peake does not retell the story in pictures, but adds local highlights.
The drawings, executed in pencil and black ink (some of the original drawings are very faintly shaded in coloured pencil), are marked by an overall sense of darkness and gloom. They seem to be set in eternal night, or some unreal twilight. The celestial bodies, the sun, and the moon, that are so vivid in Coleridge’s poetic presentation, are not depicted anywhere by Peake. Where light effects are rendered one
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feels reminded of theatre, or film, where lighting is a means of directing, or ‘mise en scene’. The most striking example in this respect is the third design where the Mariner, with the albatross tied to his neck, is hit by a beam of white light— is it moon light? — from the left, as if trapped in it, reminiscent of a criminal caught in his pursuer’s flashlight. The white light in this composition is counterbalanced by deep, pitch-black shadows. Throughout the various illustrations, bodies, faces and hands, or the central motive. the albatross or the sails, are often highlighted white or almost white, but set in dark surroundings. Peake used hardly any outlines. Objects and figures depicted in the drawings are set off against each other and moulded in their shape by different forms of generally dense hatching, ranging from cross-hatching, over parallel hatching and irregular patterns to fine stippling. Apparently, Peake in places also scraped out already dark areas in the drawings, like in the instance of ‘the long view of the Ancient Mariner’ (illustration 6) which he drew “on very thick rag paper — Kent or some such— and scraped away the texture of the sails with a penknife in order to give the impression of decay.” [24] Their darkness, density and ‘heaviness’ distinguish the Mariner illustrations from other illustrative work by Peake which, as in the case of Treasure Island or The Hunting of the Snark, is much lighter in line and relies in its effect on a vivid outline and an abbreviated, caricaturistic conception of the figures represented.
It is, again, by means of hatching and chiaroscuro effects that an impression of plasticity and the illusion of Space is created. But at the same time this illusion is made threadbare to the viewer’s eye. The compositions have a poster-like simplicity and flatness. Three-dimensionality remains largely restricted to the main subject of the drawing. the backgrounds are foils of hatching without much spatial depth, calling to mind modern stage backdrops. Is that Peake’s affinity to the theatre— he wrote plays, too, like The Wittoo Woo (1957)—already announcing itself here? Or, is Peake responding here,
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even though he is generally said to have followed no particular school and remained rather independent in his art, to contemporary tendencies in painting, to the idea of the primacy of the picture surface? The hatching in his illustrations retains a strong decorative value as it is perceived materially, as surface texturing, quite separate from the object it denotes. The vast spaces from the fictional world of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge’s ‘wide, wide sea’, or sky and time, are indicated, by the line of the horizon for example, or by employing a bird’s eye perspective, but in effect, Peake’s images communicate just the opposite, densely atmospheric enclosed spaces that move in on the viewer oppressively. In a manner of speaking, the Mariner’s ‘horror vacui’ is graphically rendered to the effect of claustrophobia. It has been assumed that Parkinson disease, which brings about a distorted perception of space and time in the patient, might have affected Peake’s imagination and art years before it actually broke out. The fact, for instance, that Gormenghast castle in Titus Groan and Gormenghast from the 1940s, is described as a confusing maze of twisted staircases and corridors and hidden chambers might point in that direction. Peake’s judgement of space and time could already have been slightly ‘pushed out of shape’ around 1940. [25] Against this background, characteristic features of the Mariner illustrations, such as ‘verticality’ and the impression of oppressive, enclosed spaces, could be regarded as bred by an imagination that was already turning Parkinsonian.
When I began this essay on the Ancient Mariner I found myself asking three questions that Peake, considering his intuitive approach to making art, might well have asked himself when confronted with the task of illustrating the poem. How does an illustrator represent Coleridge’s protagonist, the mariner ? Secondly, how does he deal with scenes which are crucial to the story, namely the shooting of the albatross, the appearance of the spectre-bark or the blessing of the water-snakes? And thirdly, how does he cope
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graphically with the supernatural and gothic aspects of the poem? A closer analysis of some of the illustrations might yield answers.
The first of Peake’s designs is a frontal view of the Mariner, clad in rags, gesticulating with his long arms, and staring with wide open eyes that almost, but not quite, meet those of the viewer. Peake here sticks quite closely to the information that the poem provides: he is “long, and lank, and brown,/ As is the ribbed sea-sand” (lines 225-226), has a long flowing beard and eyes that well deserve the description ‘bright’ and ‘glittering’; and his old tale teller’s hands certainly deserve to be called ‘ skinny’. According to C.S.Lewis Peake’s depiction of the Mariner is a peculiar alliance of nightmarishness on the one hand and charming gracefulness on the other:
The Mariner himself [...] has just the triple character have sometimes met in nightmares—that disquieting blend of the venerable, the pitiable, and the frightful. But at the same time—thanks I suppose mainly to the position of the arms—the horrid representation is a graceful thing [...] The very lines which make the Mariner a hideous and rigid man simultaneously make him a shape as charming as a beech-tree. [26]
The drawing has its counterpart in the eighth and last design, where the same figure, but this time seen from behind, is walking off into a cloud-like background. Employing one and the same motive from the narrative frame (‘Mariner and Wedding-Guest in the street’) in the first and last design, Peake does make a difference in depicting the old Mariner telling the tale, as opposed to the young Mariner of the voyage. The Mariner kneeling on deck with the dead albatross tied to his neck for instance (illustration 3), is clearly a much younger man. Supposedly, Coleridge would have approved of this sort of accuracy. In David Scott’s
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illustrations of 1831-2, the only set of illustrations for the Ancient Mariner that Coleridge saw with his own eyes, it was the fact that Scott depicted the Mariner as an ‘old decrepit man’ throughout his sequence which the poet criticized and called an ‘enormous blunder’. [27]
It seems worth noting that Peake himself looked a bit like
his representation of Coleridge’s protagonist. At about the time when he was
working on the illustrations, he was described by Quentin Crisp as “tall and
thin. Sometimes he looked gaunt, just like his drawings, but he never looked
ill. He had tremendous vitality.” [28] John Wood, a former pupil, describes him
as he appeared in class at college: “Tall, dressed in a sports jacket and
coloured shirt, with grey flannel trousers and black, polished shoes; with
large hands and a shock of greying hair, deep-set, ‘haunted’ eyes and a
sensitive, ascetic and masculine face...” [29] But there are other possible influences,
El Greco’s lean figures, Goya, Rembrandt [30] ; Sebastian Peake points out Doré’s representation of Cervantes’ anti-hero
Don Quixote as a possible source, a book of which his father owned a copy. [31] But Peake must have been just as well
acquainted with Doré’s Ancient Mariner illustrations, so
obvious is their influence elsewhere in his work, most blatantly perhaps in his
illustrations for Stevenson’s
The second drawing takes us to the end of Part I where the albatross is killed by the Mariner. It shows, in the upper part’, the bird, rendered as a large light shape already pierced by the arrow, but still flying high above the sea; the wings are disproportionally elongated, and span the composition rectangularly, one of them being cut off at its edge; the shape of the body has a graceful, wave-like swing to it; the beak is open, as if releasing a cry. Below it an extremely deep-set horizon limits a black sea whose mirrorlike surface
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is only interrupted by an abstractly shaped iceberg and, in the lower left corner, some tiny shapes and things, identifiable as the ship and the sailors, looking up to the bird. The centrifugal organisation of the background hatching that gets lighter towards a centre which is close to the centre of the whole composition slightly counterbalances the dominance of the big white shape in the upper part.
Quite undeniably, the killing of the albatross is the most crucial event in the poem, triggering all events to come, the Mariner’s odyssey, damnation, suffering, repentance, and redemption. One would think no illustrator could get around it. The question is what pictorial potential it has. The episode offers a number of possible subjects for illustration: the Mariner just aiming at the flying albatross, just shooting, the arrow whizzing through the air, the bird pierced by the arrow, falling, lying dead on board the ship, the sailors’ reaction to the deed. Additionally, it offers a range of different perspectives of representation: who should be taken into view, the Mariner or the albatross, and from what angle: from aboard the ship or from the air? Or, should the illustrator rather show us the Mariner and the Wedding-Guest on the level of the narrative frame?
There might, in fact, be good reasons to go for the last option. Coleridge in the poem is not only rather brief about the shooting of the albatross considering its significant impact, but does not even describe the event itself. He shifts in his presentation from the interior story back to the narrative frame, to the Wedding-Guest listening and the Mariner relating the story.
God save the, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus!—
Why look’st thou so? — With my cross-bow
I shot the ALBATROSS.
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The emotional outbreak of the Wedding-Guest, who is scared to death by the old man’s expression ends the long-drawn rhythmic description of the albatross following the ship for several days, his being ‘hailed’ and fed by the mariners, while the ship is driven forward by ‘a good south wind’. The poet’s trick of changing to the level of the narrative frame suddenly breaks up a smoothly flowing narrative, and thus, through shock, alerts the reader to the impending disaster. The reader is forced by Coleridge into the frightened Wedding-Guest’s situation, and suddenly finds himself facing that terrible narrator. The poet has him literally look into the ancient man’s eyes, whom he brings palpably close. Like the Wedding-Guest, the reader cannot help but listen to the Mariner’s confession as it drops from his lips, so it seems, with excruciating slowness. By isolating the crucial sentence in the last line Coleridge emphasizes it in its every single syllable. Does not one almost feel one’s mouth go dry as the confessor’s? In between the Wedding-Guest’s question and the Mariner’s response there is a terrible vast silence, ‘the horror, the horror’.... And afterwards there follows silence, too, because here ends Part I. Part II then takes us back into the long-past story and shows us how the crew reacted to the Mariner’s deed.
Why did not Peake, taking into account his predilection for expressiveness of body, posture, and gesture, draw the Mariner and the Wedding-Guest instead of the albatross? One answer may be that he had already devoted two drawings, the first and the last, to the narrative frame. Repeating the same here would have disturbed his concept of imitating the double-level structure of Coleridge’s poem. But the real reason is certainly the importance of the motif of the bird as such — the albatross just has to be depicted somewhere — and its wealth of mythical associations. Peake, one could say, transferred the torrent that is raging in the Mariner’s soul into the figure of the bird, whose open beak seems to release a cry of pain and whose wide wings seem
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to be just flagging, weakening, dropping, his whole body bending downwards, anticipating the fall. His bigness is for his majesty, his whiteness for his innocence. Peake anthropomorphizes and ennobles the albatross, thus enhancing the atrocity of the crime which is rendered not anymore as the killing of a bird ‘of good omen’, but as the treacherous murder of a king. Did the artist, possibly, have in mind Herman Melville’s formidable description?
A regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness... at intervals it arched forth its vast archangel’s wings, as if to embrace some holy ark Wondrous flutterings and throbbings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some king’s ghost in supernatural distress. through its inexpressible strange eyes, me—thought I peeped to secrets not below the heavens... the white thing was so white, its wings so wide and in those forever exiled waters, I had lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of towns. [33]
Another illustration to which I would like to devote special attention is the one which was missing in the early editions. It refers to Part III and the encounter of the Mariner with Death and the Nightmare ‘Life-in-Death’, the second crucial turning point in the story. Again, in a different way from the ‘shooting scene’, Peake does not represent what is actually happening in the poem, as, for instance, the spectre-bark eerily approaching, or the fatal dicing game. First a ‘speck’, then a ‘mist’, the spectre-bark grows into a ‘shape’ and finally turns out to be the skeleton of a ship, that the sun looks through ‘as if through a dungeon-grate’. Then it all goes so quickly that the Mariner can hardly grasp what he sees—Coleridge presents the scene through the Mariner’s eyes, as his visual perceptions:
Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud)
How fast she nears and nears!
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Are those her sails that glance in the Sun,
Like restless gossameres?
Are those her ribs through which the Sun
Did peer, as through a grate?
And is that Woman all her crew?
Is that a DEATH? and are there two?
Is DEATH that woman’s mate?
Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she,
Who thicks man’s blood with cold.
Before the Mariner has time to think, the ‘game is done’ and the ship has ‘shot off’ again:
The naked hulk alongside came,
And the twain were casting dice;
‘The game is done! I’ve won! I’ve won!’
Quoth she, and whistles thrice.
The Sun’s rim dips; the stars rush out:
At one stride comes the dark;
With far-heard whisper, o’er the sea,
Off shot the spectre bark.
What image from this episode offers itself for illustration? Peake decided to bring the viewer face to face with a horribly hybrid figure that fills the frame of the composition completely, a creepy mixture of beautiful woman - with huge black eyes, full lips and long flowing hair -on the one hand, and a skeleton of skull and bare bones on the other. Coleridge’s male Death and the female Nightmare ‘Life-in-Death’ are thus distilled into one single image of horror. Its ‘gothic’ character suggests that Peake might have known the
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first version of the poem of 1798 which dwells elaborately on the ghastly, ‘gothic’, aspects of the apparition, like the bones of ‘Death’ which are ‘jet-black’ and “bare, save where with rust/ Of mouldy damps and charnel crust/ They’re patch’d with purple and green” and the wind blowing spookily “Thro’ the holes of his eyes and the hole of his mouth”. ‘Life-in-Death’ in 1798 is described as “far liker Death than he;/ Her flesh makes the still air cold.” However, when asked about the design of ‘Life-in-Death’ in 1955, Peake is said to have spontaneously remembered — and “quoted in a whisper, smiling” [34] — the less ‘gothic’, later, version of the poem as used for the Mariner editions containing Peake’s illustrations.
Peake’s static image of horror, apt to burn itself into the viewer’s mind with lasting effect, corresponds to a structural feature of the poem noticed by Murray Krieger according to whom the Ancient Mariner is marked by “the opposition between stillness and motion”. [35] ‘Still’ images (in the sense of unmoved, tableau-like, or silent) alternate with dramatic movement (like progression, turmoil, storm).The ship for instance moves on smoothly first, then it is stuck in ice, then moved onwards by a good wind, then stuck again because the wind drops, and so on. On closer inspection, the supernatural episode centred around the spectre-bark, turns out to be similarly structured, if on the level of the supernatural. Death and Nightmare ‘Life-in-Death’, in this view, appear as a motionless, dreamlike, ‘tableau’, as perceived by the disturbed and disbelieving Mariner: ‘Is that a DEATH? Is DEATH that woman’s mate?’; a ‘tableau’ embedded in the —supernatural— movement of the spectre-bark: its nearing and its disappearing.
But Peake’s image of ‘Life-in-Death’ is not exclusively ‘gothic’ in expression. It has a curiously human touch: those black eyes of his ‘Life-in-Death’ have nothing terrible. They seem to speak of pain and suffering rather than representing
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the frightening craze of Coleridge’s
ghostly gamblers culminating in ‘Life-in-Death’s’ triumphal scream: ‘I’ve won!
I’ve won!’ But where did Peake get those expressive eyes from? There is a
drawing that he did on a visit in 1945 to the liberated concentration camp
There is one more illustration that refers to the episode of the spectre-bark. It shows an assembly of haggard figures on board the ship, the parched sailors, perhaps looking out for the ghostly ship either as it is approaching, or else as it is disappearing again. The figures are clustered around the mast or leaning over the rail of the ship as if in utter exhaustion, looking to the left across the sea, in the direction of a lighter area towards the lefthand edge of the composition. [38] Peake here puts emphasis on the features and body language of the figures creating grotesque caricatures rather than a ‘gothic’ image of horror. Another ‘gothic’ image is the seventh
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illustration referring to a section in Part VI where the dead sailors rise and stand staring at the surviving Mariner with ‘stony eyes’, who is shown leaning against the mast and confronting a dense group of standing figures on the right hand side of the composition. The Mariner’s terror is expressed in his body gesture of shrinking back from a frightening, but at the same time magnetic, sight: the tall, lean figure seems pressed forcefully against the mast, his neck and head touch it, continuing the straight line of his spine. The image might bring to mind Christ nailed to the cross. Allusions to the cross and the crucified are even clearer elsewhere in the sequence of illustrations, as in the wide wings of the albatross in illustrations 2 and 3. Doré had made extensive use of religious imagery, focusing on the Mariner as a Christ figure depicting him high up in the crow’s nest of the ship, clinging to the mast, and guided by bands of seraphs. Given Peake’s familiarity with Doré’s illustrations, his own use of the cross as an image could be considered another pictorial quote from the admired predecessor. But, on the other hand, in Peake’s Mariner it is made an integral part of the artist’s personal graphic vocabulary and thus gains a symbolic dimension fundamentally different from Doré’s flowery 19th-century spiritualism. It is employed to mark the individual in pain and distress, the bird pierced by the arrow, or the Mariner plagued by his conscience.
A close analysis has revealed how Peake stresses certain aspects of Coleridge’s poem, like the ‘gothic’ and nightmarish, the troubled and suffering individual. He does not represent any relatively brighter moments from the story, as for instance the blessing of the water snakes, a scene generally considered a crucial turning point in the story as it signifies the beginning of the Mariner’s redemption. Also, Peake’s talent for grotesque and humorous caricature so predominant in much of his other illustrative work is only inconspicuously employed in the faces of the parched sailors.
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Peake sets aside, as we have seen, the narrative aspects of event and action in favour of the emotionally expressive image; his graphic devices, like the concentration on one central subject, the exaggeration of shapes, or verticality, aim at enhancing the physical expressiveness of his figures: the wide-winged albatross, the haggard Mariner, gesticulating with his long arms and bony hands. Peake seems to be fascinated with hands. They keep recurring throughout the sequence of illustrations and could almost stand representative for his style on their own. The Mariner’s hands seem to be actually miming the story their owner is telling. The haggard sailors bending over the rail of the ship let their hands dangle overboard, expressive of their weakened state and desolation. Even the bird’s wings resemble arms and hands that embrace the air...
As mentioned earlier on, the Mariner kneeling on the deck, lit strongly from the left (illustration 3) also resembles a criminal trapped in his pursuers’ flashlight. It is a scene familiar from film and cinema. Fritz Lang’s expressionistic film ‘M’ —Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder (1931) for instance has such a scene. A mentally deranged serial killer is chased and ,finally tracked down, but he faces his pursuers with the most pitiful expression of profound existential fear. Strong contrasts of light and shadow enhance the expressiveness of his face, just as Peake dramatizes that of the Mariner using chiaroscuro effects. Not incidentally, a summary of elements of expressionism in film reads very much like a list of Peake’s graphic devices as employed in his Ancient Mariner drawings: ‘stylization and subjective distortion of objects and spaces, strong artificiality and thus a sign-character of stage decoration and props, effective employment of light and shadow, exaggerated gestures, reduction of the acting characters to their essential features and an absence of interest in the consistent, natural world in favour of theatrical-allegorical abstractions’. [39]
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But Peake applied expressionist devices within a romantic concept. Like the young Coleridge he had a propensity for the dark side of romanticism. Similar to Coleridge he was a visionary artist whose vivid imagination yielded the essentials for his art. And like Coleridge and other romantics he experimented with working in different genres and media, in painting, illustration, poetry and novel. Illustrating the Ancient Mariner, and sliding into Coleridge’s soul he discovered and highlighted those of its multifarious facets that were facets of his own soul, too. The drawings have at least as much of Peake as of Coleridge. As works of art they do not entirely depend on the poem in their appeal, speaking their own idiosyncratic and consistent language, conveying a contemporary message of existential crisis in the individual.