The Ancient Mariner

- the narrator (function of the narrator/role)

o  the ancient mariner, explicit narrator, + 2 voices, + poet

- the poet (rolle, relations)

o Italics  comments, try to explain what’s happening => message drawn parallels to
the romanticism. (shows his attitude to the natural world)
- themes :
1) nature – from the romanticism point of view “nature is hole” => makes it possible to
reach a higher” divine level”, the spirits represent something in nature.
2) Religion – supernational elements (second voices, frist voices, albatross  the omen).
3) justice – crime => punishment => justice
- when he blesses the sea snakes => refine harmony (love nature involuntary)

- the structure
o sometimes it follows a special pattern, it’s symmetrical  chiasm (used for
elegance), also with alliterations, stanza  often 4 verses, rhyme  a-b-c-b, metre
 ballad-metre (very supernational), pacing, “home-abroad-home”,
o frame story: the wedding (beginning of a new life  religious ceremony of union)
o main story: a development – carries on the mood of religious initiation.

- The language
o Uses archaic (old-fashioned) spellings of standard words, eks. Thou, thy, stopp’st,
hath etc.

The Romantic Poets

The first important expression of Romanticism in England was in the Lyrical Ballads (1798) of
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, young men who were aroused to creative
activity by the French Revolution; later they became disillusioned with what followed it. The poems
of Wordsworth in this volume treat ordinary subjects with a new freshness that imparts a certain
radiance to them. On the other hand, Coleridge's main contribution, “The Rime of the Ancient

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Mariner”, masterfully creates an illusion of reality in relating strange, exotic, or obviously unreal
events. These two directions characterize most of the later works of the two poets.

Supernatural Poems
The opening poem of the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, is,
in a precise historical sense, the only true ballad in the book. Conforming to the genre’s traditional
rules of metre, it is a kind of pastiche: an attempt to construct a historical artefact in the way that
aristocrats of the period were enhancing their parks and gardens with picturesque ruins. The diction
of the poem is scattered with archaisms such as “unhand me, grey-beard loon! “ The 1798 edition
had used the mock-medieval spelling “Ancyent Marinere”. Later, Coleridge added prose glosses in
the style of a 17th-century scholar.
The poem is essentially a narrative one, and describes a meeting between the title character and a
guest at a wedding. The Wedding Guest expects to hear an amusing anecdote from the Mariner, but
finds himself listening to the story of a horrific supernatural ordeal. The Mariner tells how his rash
act of killing an albatross brings ghostly retribution upon the crew of his ship. The dead bird is hung
around his neck to indicate his cursed status. The ship is adrift in a stagnant sea alive with “slimy
things”. Dying of thirst, the men are visited by a spectre, the “Night-mare Life-in-Death”. Adrift on
a ship of dead men, the Mariner is released when, looking at the slimy “water-snakes”, he blesses
them for their strange beauty. The albatross falls from his neck, but for his crime he is condemned
to wander the Earth, preaching reverence for all creatures.
The poem achieves the stated aims of Lyrical Ballads with its strong, simple rhythms and
repetitions, creating the impression that it is a product of oral rather than written culture:
The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound.
As well as emphasizing its balladic features, the insistent rhymes allude to the irresistible
supernatural powers that take control of the ship, and give urgency to the Mariner’s narration. This
urgency is a cursed one: “I pass, like night, from land to land”, he declares, compelled to relate his
story with his “strange power of speech”. There is much strangeness in the poem that is hard to
interpret consistently. Centrally, the momentous killing of the albatross seems a totally motiveless
act.

Themes of the poem

Examine the ideas of crime and punishment in the poem, and the poet's attitude to the natural world.
The albatross is a “pious bird of good omen”; the mariner kills it for no reason (most readers in
1798, like people in some other countries today, would see nothing wrong in a man's killing of a
bird); at first his fellow sailors blame him, then when the fog goes they approve of his action (and
so share his guilt); when they are becalmed they change their minds again and blame him, hanging
the dead bird around his neck; Death and Life-in-Death dice for the crew and the latter wins the
mariner; when he returns to land, he finds he has to tell his tale; he ends his narrative by reminding
the wedding guest of the need to love “man and bird and beast”; in the poem, the Polar Spirit is said
to love the albatross, and two other spirits discuss the mariner's fate. To understand the poem's
attitude to the natural world, you should look at the way the albatross is presented in the poem and
the changing attitude of the mariner to the water snakes.

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The supernatural
The poem is full of strange, macabre, uncanny or “Gothic” elements. Gothic horror fiction was very
popular at the time it was written. Discuss how these elements appear in the poem. You should
consider

the strange weather;

the albatross as a bird of “good omen”;
Death and Life-in-death;
the spirit from “the land of mist and snow”, and the two spirits the mariner hears in his trance;
the angelic spirits which move the bodies of the dead men;
the madness of the pilot and his boy;
the mariner's “strange power of speech”,
and anything else of interest.
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Imagery
This poem is very vivid, as the poet describes some spectacular scenes. These are often memorable
in themselves but also stand for (symbolize) other things, for the people in the poem as much as the
reader, sometimes. Elsewhere comparisons are made to describe things, as when the becalmed
vessel is said to be “As idle as a painted ship/Upon a painted ocean”. Find some of the more striking
or memorable images (there are lots of them!) and discuss the use the poet makes of them.

Sound effects
The poet uses effects of rhyme, alliteration (same initial consonant) and pacing (as in the line "For
the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky" which suggests the slow passing of time and the
mariner's weariness) and other effects of sound. Discuss how these are used by Coleridge to re-
inforce ideas in the poem.

Language study
Coleridge uses many dialect (regional non-standard) words, and archaic (old-fashioned) spellings of
standard words. Why does he do this? Discuss particular examples of unusual words or spellings.

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