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The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner Analysis

Decent Essays

The otherness can refer to many things, mystical extraordinary places and situations, strange people or objects that take on new meanings. Often the speaker of the poem is faced with something they can’t fully comprehend. If the encounter is between the speaker and an object that can’t reply or a place, the speaker learns something new about themselves and their relationship to the object or place. If the encounter is between two people, there’s a trend of the two not having the same level of understanding. Both interactions are explored in Lyrical Ballads, the joint work between William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, the Mariner encounters deviations within his own behavior and otherworldly experiences that change him. However, he can only describe the surreal events, not explain them. He's unable to explain why he chose to shoot the albatross, which till that point had been a good omen. This decision lead to the death of his crewmates and the curse being placed on him. Moreover, he’s unable to explain the appearance of the ghost ship, in which Death and Life-in-death play for the crewmen’s souls. When Life in death wins his soul, he doesn’t understand why she placed the curse on him. These unfound explanations for the events reflect on how nature doesn’t have to have an answer for its actions. His perceptions of underwater creatures change from being “slimy things… upon the slimy sea” to beautiful ones that he

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