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Weather In The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner

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Mary Shelley references Samuel Mason Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner many times in her novel Frankenstein. Other than the obvious mentioning of Coleridge’s poem, Shelley also mirrors the characteristics and includes the weather as a foreboding symbol. Shelley also alludes to the story of Prometheus, showing how both Frankenstein and Prometheus brought something new to mankind. Shelley’s characters imitate Coleridge’s in that they have similar traits. The creature in Frankenstein was created without his consent and did not know how to function correctly in society, but was still blamed for his bending his “mind towards injury and death” (Shelley 137). Coleridge’s Albatross is also shown this way, by it minding it’s own business until it got shot down for no reason by the mariner. The bird’s ending was just like that of the creature’s beginning, it happened by someone else. The birth and death of these characters also reveal the similarities between Victor Frankenstein and the mariner. They both played God and because of that, there were consequences. For the mariner, his crew …show more content…

In Frankenstein, lightning was the inspiration Frankenstein had to create the monster “for the acquirement of knowledge” (Shelley 23). The Rime of the Ancient Mariner also had weather as a large impact on the poem. The change in weather was good at times, but it mostly brought bad news for the seamen. For example, after killing the albatross, the other crew members were almost willing to kill the mariner for bringing a bad omen on them and killing “the bird/That made the breeze to blow” (Coleridge 749). Soon after however, they rejoiced him for killing the bird because there was now no more fog. Later on in the poem, the weather signified the Mariner’s purgatory-like boat ride, since he spent a long period of time sitting in the ocean without

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