The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner Essay

Samuel Taylor Coleridge?s ?Rime of the Ancient Mariner? is a piece known to many in some vague way or another. An elderly sailor, a ghostly ship, and the killing of an albatross are all present in many people?s minds, although they may not entirely know the whole tale. Although well-known today, the most activity ?Rime? has seen was in its beginnings. It has its fair share of praise and criticism, praise given posthumously and criticism given while Coleridge was alive. Other than criticisms on the actual text, many people claim that Coleridge borrowed the ideas of others and used them.

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

Throughout the poem, the albatross serves as a symbol for both good fortune and sin. While the albatross was still alive, it represented good luck that caused a breeze to blow the ship from the icy South Pole towards the Equator. However, in its death by the hands of the Mariner, the albatross is a testament of the Mariner’s sin, and by hanging around the Mariner’s neck, it symbolizes a hovering curse.

By killing the albatross, the Mariner sets in motion Christianity’s idea that all except Jesus are sinners, but through repentance one can seek forgiveness and ultimately salvation. However, Coleridge poses a dichotomy regarding the transparency of forgiveness in this ballad. After the Mariner blesses the snakes, the reader presumes the curse was lifted and forgiveness was granted. Although the “Albatross fell off, and sank Like lead into the sea” (288-91), the Mariner was compelled to serve a long-term penance of continually repeating his tale, also serving as a constant reminder of his sin. Where as Christianity teaches that by repenting one achieves forgiveness, Coleridge enacts the idea of retribution in order for the Mariner to ultimately attain God’s forgiveness. For example, one of nature’s punishments taunts the Mariner with extreme thirst, causing him to cry out:

He happened upon a family in a cottage, and their kindness and love toward one another created the yearning of this for himself. Because of the abnormality of his appearance, he is rejected harshly by the cottagers, losing his sense of self from a person that deserves love, to that to a wretch, doomed forever to suffer at the rejection of man kind. In the Rime of the Ancient Mariner the loss of self identity is presented as the hanging of the albatross corpse around the Ancient Mariner’s neck, giving allusion to a cross to be carried, that represents the guilt of his actions: “ Instead of the cross, the albatross/ About my neck was hung .”(Coleridge) Instead of his identity being an honorable mariner, sailing the world on his journey’s, he is haunted by his one cruel act and forced to carry it with

In the recording of part four of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” the reader uses a wide range of tone to emulate the emotions described by the Mariner. Her strategic pronunciations, and shifts in volume and tone emphasized the visual imagery that Coleridge uses to describe the setting. The audio recording was also able to highlight for me exactly where the Mariner comes to his realization that all life is sacred. Coleridge uses visual imagery to describe the disgusting remains of the ship and the bodies on a seemingly lifeless sea.

The supernatural is seen heavily throughout “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, first starting out with the albatross seen in the first three parts. The bird brings the crew luck, as they see it, and they adore the bird for not just the luck it appears to bring them, but for the whimsical and nearly supernatural feel to the bird. Once the Mariner kills the bird, their luck takes a turn for the worst. The wind is not favorable, the sun either beats down on them or there is storm after storm, and the crew

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 following stanza from part four of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner occurs just after the Mariners entire crew dropped to the ground dead. The mariner could do nothing but watch as his dead crew lie on the deck and remember the cold, evil look they left with him. The Mariner goes then experiences a period of suffering of his own; for he feels responsible for the death of his crew. The stanza above shows the colossal guilt the mariner suffers with and the retribution that he goes through for his sinful act of killing the Albatross.

The next symbolic theme in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is that of retribution. In lines 143-146 Coleridge illustrates a time of draught for the sailors on the voyage. Without any water to drink they are suffering. This symbolizes the spiritual draught that humans face in Christianity. Without the love for Christ humans are thirsting for spiritual enlightenment and forgiveness--without which they suffer.

The drop of the shipmates, the cracking of ice, and the roaring of the wind all appeal to the sense of hearing, while the Mariner rants his tale. As the ancient Mariner’s crew a;; die, he fails to hear a groan as they drop one by one; however, the sailor hears the thump of the bodies as, separately, they collide with the deck of the ship. The ice cracks, growls, roars, and howls as the crew travel through it; Coleridge writes that the ice is “like noises in a swound.” ”And soon I hear a roaring wind,” states the Mariner during his tale; Coleridge also writes that “the upper air burst into life,” which causes the crew to hear a strong breeze. Using the sense of feeling, Coleridge writes about the drop of the shipmates, the cracking of the ice, and the roaring of the wind.

For reasons not specifically mentioned in the text, the mariner kills the albatross, which can be easily related to a couple of infamous Christian sins.

The lines that follow deal with death and punishment.  Part 3, describes how the sailors' "throats unslaked, with black lips baked, We could nor laugh nor wail; Through utter drought all dumb we stood!  I bit my arm, I sucked the blood, And cried, A sail! A sail! "  Then all the shipmates die "Four times fifty living men, (And I heard nor sigh nor groan) With heavy thump, a lifeless lump, They dropped down one by one."  And so the ancient mariner was "Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea!  A never a saint took pity on My soul in agony."  He sat

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, as a product of its culturally inscribed author, presents a confused Unitarian world view consistent with that of the Romantic Movement of its time. It attempts to exemplify this view within an unpredictable and often mysterious universe, and by rebuking the hegemonic ideologies held by the text’s cultural antagonists, seeks to grant the awareness of an often unreasonable world populated by its reader’s passionate persona.

Four varying viewpoints exist concerning what or who the mariner represents, the first being the superficial idea that he is simply the wise old man who imparts wisdom to the younger generations (Williams 1116). Going beyond the literal connotation, the most common and supported argument it that the mariner represents the Christian sinner. The diction chosen by Coleridge often alludes to Christianity, examples include “Christian soul”, ”God’s name”, “[i]nstead of the cross…about my neck was hung”, and “Dear Lord in Heaven” (Coleridge 1616-1632). Howard Creed believes that the mariner is symbolically a poet, due to the fact that he learns “the great truth about the world they live in” and then attempts to communicate it to others through the art of a story (221). The final possibility is that the mariner represents a mother. Repeated connection to conventionally female things like the sea, motherhood, spontaneity/irrationality, and nature begins to support this conclusion. The role of instructing the young, in this case the wedding guest whom “listens like a three years’ child” is also traditionally female, further developing the argument (Coleridge 1616). Overall, the poem is an exemplar at employing Coleridge’s idea of symbol to use the ordinary to show the transcendent, especially Christianity, yielding that the second option is the preeminent choice.