The Ancient Mariner Essay

The Christian belief is that no matter what you do wrong or to what extent, you are always able to be forgiven. As long as you are able to realize and admit to what you've done wrong and are willing to pay for your sins and repent, you will always be forgiven in the eyes of God. In "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the mariner is willing to repent. After committing his sins against nature, he comes to realize that it is not to be taken for granted. By realizing and expressing the beauty that nature is, the mariner is granted his forgiveness in return for penance; his telling of this story.

As stated above, another archetype presented here is Jonah. Under this archetype, the crime and the punishment of the ancient mariner will show different meanings. The connection between Jonah and the mariner not only lies on their common crime as sacrilege, but also on the punishment of enduring physical and mental suffer. And through dissecting Coleridge’s Christian and philosophical thoughts, the theme in this poem will be much clearer.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, it was written in the late 1700s. The poem’s setting starts during a wedding, an old mariner stops one of the wedding guests from going into the party to tell him a story. The mariner’s story takes place in a ship where he killed an albatross and everything started to go wrong for him and his crew. When the mariner’s story is ending he says that he has a pain to tell people about his story, this is why he stopped the wedding guest to tell him his story. The wedding guest decides not to go to the party because he became upset, he is now a “sadder” but “wiser” man. Coleridge uses many literary elements to make the story come together such as similes, personification, symbolism

The poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge is a truly imaginative work utilizing the familiar yet timeless themes of good fortune, the power of Mother Nature, and adventurous voyages over the sea. The Mariner relates the bone-chilling tale of his adventure to a guest at a wedding in his native country. Although the guest succumbs to the Mariner’s tale, he is eager to get to the wedding, which is about to start. Coleridge chose this occasion for the poem as a form of irony, by providing a stark contrast between the two atmospheres and situations in his poem. The moods of weddings are usually joyful and jubilant, emphasizing love and the union between

A significant theme in Samuel Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," is Christianity, which is portrayed through the Mariner’s epic journey. This text is set between the physical world and the metaphysical (spiritual world), similar to religious teachings found in the Bible. With the use of vivid descriptions and strong language in this ballad, moral lessons appear that connect both man and God in order to discover an innate bond and understanding. Though this tale is overwhelmingly bizarre and dark, the moral lessons taught are in line with central aspects of both the romantic period and the Christian religion. In Coleridge's ballad, "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," many Christian ideals are represented throughout the treacherous

Indeed, Shelley’s several allusions to Coleridge’s poem and the parallel plots that Frankenstein’s tragedy shares with the mariner’s tale are intentional references meant to expose her warning purpose. The mariner’s tale is a mirror image of Frankenstein’s—identical yet backwards. The mariner is punished for killing a Christ figure, Frankenstein is punished for vitalizing a demon—both offenses concern the illegitimate use of a godly prerogative and a disregard for the sanctity of life. Captain Walton—the warned—of course, is also a mariner; however, he sails north and the Ancient Mariner—the warner—sailed south. Walton himself is the first to allude directly to the rime saying that he goes “to the land of mist and snow,” yet he swears that he shall “kill no albatross” nor, says he, shall he return “as worn and woeful as the ‘Ancient Mariner’” (33). His vows are ironic, however, because he is saved from that ancient fate only by listening to Frankenstein’s tale which warns him against his hubristic quest for knowledge. Toward the end of the book, Captain Walton weighs his chance for discovery and glory against the lives of his men noting, “It is terrible to reflect that the lives of all these men are endangered through me. If we are lost, my mad schemes are the cause” (181). Happily, Frankenstein’s mariner-like caution proves effective for the captain who heeds the warning and turns back. The second-person

At the end of chapter 20 in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, Coleridge describes his own experience with poetry and its effect on others’ imagination from an outsiders point of view:

Samuel Taylor Coleridge 's “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is a very influential poem in the English language. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is well known for its extensive use of vivid imagery and sound. The language used throughout the poem is beautiful, and it portrays the Romanticism of the time. The use of simile, metaphor, and personification in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” enhances the images a reader gains through this dramatic poem.

It’s easy to tell that the ocean is a mysterious and isolating place from all of the tragic tales we hear from sailors both real and fictional. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and an anonymous author’s “The Seafarer” are quite similar in that they both revolve around said tragic tales told by sailors. However, there seem to be more commonalities between their themes, tones, and messages rather than their seaward-bound settings. But before we can discuss these similar settings and deeper themes, we have to tackle their origins.

The ancient mariner and the albatross are common references in our language, and so are lines like "Water, water, everywhere, / Nor any drop to drink" (Taylor,1800). Coleridge's long, classic poem, first published nearly 200 years ago, still holds us with its "glittering eye," its story of the sailor locked in a living nightmare after he shoots an innocent albatross and watches his shipmates die all around him. Like Dore's famous nineteenth-century engravings for the poem, Young's illustrations in this large-size volume capture the mystery, the sense of the tiny ship in a huge space of ocean "Alone, alone, all, all alone, / Alone on a wide, wide sea"(…..). Unlike Dore, Young doesn't make the mistake of giving

In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Coleridge writes of a sailor bringing a tale to life as he speaks to a wedding guest. An ancient Mariner tells of his brutal journey through the Pacific Ocean to the South Pole. Coleridge suffers from loneliness, because of his lifelong need for love and livelihood; similarly, during the Mariner’s tale, his loneliness shows when he becomes alone at sea, because of the loss of his crew. Having a disastrous dependence to opium and laudanum, Coleridge, in partnership with Wordsworth, writes this complicated, difficult to understand, yet appealing poem, which becomes the first poem in the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads. The Mariner’s frame of mind flip-flops throughout the literary ballad, a

The poem begins with the line “I can sing a true song of myself,” (1) which tells the reader that this story is specifically about the speaker. The speaker is a seafaring man, and most of his hardships have to do with his difficult life at sea in the winter. The speaker’s voyage is a tumultuous one, filled with winter storms that he cannot find shelter from. Throughout the first half of the poem, there is diction invoking the cold. “Pinched with cold were my feet, bound by frost in cold fetters,” (8-10) and “hung with icicles while hail flew in showers.” (17) It is notable that his voyage takes place in the winter, because winter has historically been a time when people lacked the things they needed and worried for their survival. The Seafarer, too, lacks things he needs. He lacks shelter from the cold, because “the anxious night-watch often held [him] at the ship’s stem,” (6-7) as he looked ahead for obstacles in the ship’s path. This can be seen as a metaphor for anxiety about the future, which is a struggle not only for the speaker himself, but for many people at the time of this poem’s creation. English speakers in this time lived among the ruins of Rome; they understood that things fall apart over time. The seafarer himself later says “The days are lost, and all the pomp of this earthly kingdom,” (81-82) referring to the fall of Rome and the loss of those days of plenty.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a poem by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge and his friend, William Wordsworth, put together a collection of their work called Lyrical Ballads. It contained Coleridge’s famous poem Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This collection is widely recognized as the initiation of the shift towards modern poetry and British Romantic literature. Although the poem’s deliberate use of antiquated language differed from romantic poetry’s use of modern language of the time, it is still considered influential within the romanticism movement (Green). The poem’s influence in British Romanticism affected later authors and other works, including Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley.

Coleridge’s poetry in regards to the romantic imagination can be perceived in a multitude of ways. This reasoning is due to the reader’s own interpretation of the topic, which understandably varies from person to person.

Again this piece by Coleridge is a demonstration of this principle. The lyrics flow up to a moment of clear recollection of the scenery, leaving the poem incomplete so that the faculty of imagination would not be diluted. Coleridge in the 3 stanzas which he relived captured the sublime, and the striking feature of this poem is in its deconstructed syntax which eagerly captured the scenery. “But oh! That deep romantic chasm which slanted/ Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! / A savage place!”. This is a scene that Coleridge experienced in a dream, and its recollection in reality must express the resplendence of what he felt. We can see that grammatical requirements were not fulfilled since they would merely limit the true