Essay on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Analysis

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

Unlike the wandering narrator, the seafaring narrator focuses his descriptions of the community that is present in nature. The seafarer the utterly rejects the notion that a “sheltering family / could bring consolation for his desolate soul” (25-26). This “sheltering family” (25) that the seafaring narrator alludes to in this line is the exact form of close-knit family that the narrator in “The Wanderer” laments for desperately. While the seafaring narrator offers striking similar descriptions of the landscape being “bound by ice” (9), he does not focus on these descriptions to dwell on the loss of an earthly community. Instead, the narrator in “The Seafarer” finds the landscape that he inhabits wonderfully abundant with natural — even spiritual — elements that are commonly associated with an earthly community. In the barren landscape, the seafaring narrator discovers “the wild swan’s song / sometimes served for music” (19-20) and “the curlew’s cry for the laugher of men” (20-21). These vibrant and vivid descriptions of the natural world that the narrator discovers in the harsh,

As the ancient Mariner described his adventures at sea to the Wedding-Guest, the Guest became saddened because he identified his own selfish ways with those of the Mariner. The mariner told the Guest that he and his ship-mates

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

In the poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge uses the method of storytelling to acknowledge and implement the reader into the situations that the Mariner faces. Coleridge does this by implementing vivid imagery into his poem to create a tale that we the readers can easily follow such as the tales we tell one another today to learn or understand different concepts in modern day life.

Like the wedding guest, the mariner is presented with the “sad wisdom” or the truth of God, which he does not want to acknowledge (Buchan 103). In contrast, Coleridge presents the character of a hermit who accepts the truth of God and wanders around telling his tale “voluntarily, finding his peace in it”, as he has never done anything to be punished for (Purser 255). To the wedding guest, the mariner gives the advice of “He prayeth best who loveth best/ All things both great and small” (Coleridge 612-13). Coleridge presents this advice in a way satirically to poke fun at this advice, as it is presented in a very hypocritical way and comes from the gullible mariner. This advice is presented as nothing more than a stereotypical message preached

First, the reader can see obvious similarities between the mariner and the Biblical character Adam. According to Christian belief, Adam committed the original sin that caused mankind to suffer as a whole (Harent 3). In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the original sin is the mariner’s killing of the God-sent albatross. Even though the crew, like humanity, did not commit the original sin, they ultimately inherit the repercussions of the sin.

The Seafarer by Burton Raffel was written during the Anglo-Saxon period where the Anglo-Saxon warriors lived to defend their King, like in the story Sir Gawain and The Green Knight. One of the warriors speaks about his challenges and begins saying that his story is not at all joyful. It is a story full of pain and suffering. The story paints a picture of what it means to be “dislocated”, “set out”, all by oneself and how badly it feels. “My feet were cast in icy bands, bound with frost,with frozen chains, and hardship groaned around my heart. Hunger tore at my sea-weary soul. No man sheltered on the quiet fairness of earth can feel how wretched I was”.(Raffel 1) The powerful imagery in this stanza sets the tone that the narrator is trying to

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:

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.

In the poem Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge begins at a wedding and an old man grabs the groom from the wedding to tell him his tragedy. The Mariner does this to punish himself for his deeds. Coleridge could have written the poem this way to point out how some men believe that by doing some arbitrary challenging task that they could absolve themselves of their previous actions, even though nothing can change what did happen. By starting the poem this way, he informs the reader that the Mariner regrets what is to come.

In “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” by Samuel Coleridge, the Marinere attains a change of mindset about the sea snakes he encounters on his journey. This moment is more than a shift from the disliking to affinity of an animal; the juncture echoes a larger change within the Marinere. When one views the incident in conjunction with the concept of seeing from Carlos Castaneda’s novel, A Separate Reality, one can discover that the Marinere completes the act of seeing. This triumph shows that sentimentality is a dominate trait in the Marinere’s personality. Something one could overlook because of his deed of shooting the Albatross. The Marinere’s ability to see creates a shift in perspective regarding the sea snakes, which reflects the larger change of the Marinere’s view, which is that all beings in the world are equal and beautiful.

The Rime of an Ancient Mariner is a literal depiction of humans and their feelings towards animals, indicating the time period’s carelessness with shooting animals; thereby, resulting in chaos. Unsurprisingly, the mariner’s voyage is not successful, for his ship ends in the icy waters of Antarctica. An albatross familiarizes itself with the ship and coincidentally, the winds begin to blow the ship in a positive direction. The crew is joyous because they believe this mystical bird is creating the wind; however, the mariner is not as merry. He draws his crossbow and mindlessly shoots the albatross, resulting in an angry crew and a series of traumatic events. Dense fog is lifted; thereby, leading the crew to believe the albatross did not generate the good weather, rather the albatross brought the fog. Unfortunately, the crew unknowingly condemns themselves to death by congratulating the mariner for