The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

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.The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

- By Samuel Taylor Coleridge

At a glance

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (originally The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere) is the longest major poem by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, written in 1797–98 and published in 1798 in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. Some modern editions use a revised version printed in 1817 that featured a gloss. Along with other poems in Lyrical Ballads, it is often considered a signal shift to modern poetry and the beginning of British Romantic literature. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner relates the experiences of a sailor who has returned from a long sea voyage.

The title character detains one of three young men on their way to a wedding feast and mesmerizes him with the story of his youthful experience at sea—his slaughter of an albatross, the deaths of his fellow sailors, his suffering, and his eventual redemption.

On an icebound ship near the South Pole, the mariner and his crew are visited by an albatross, considered a favourable omen. The ship breaks free of the ice and sails north, followed by the giant bird. Then, inexplicably, the mariner shoots and kills it, bringing a curse upon the vessel. After some confusion, his shipmates vilify him and hang the bird carcass around his neck. The passing of a ghost ship (a bad omen) presages the deaths of all aboard ship except the narrator. Lost and alone, he marvels at a life-affirming vision in the moonlight, and his prayer of reverence causes the albatross to fall into the sea. Following his rescue, the mariner understands that his penance for his destructive act will be to wander the world recounting his awful story.

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Summary

Three guys are on the way to a wedding celebration when an old sailor (the Mariner) stops one of them at the door (the Wedding Guest). Using his hypnotic eyes to hold the attention of the Wedding Guest, he starts telling a story about a disastrous journey he took. The Wedding Guest really wants to go party, but he can't pry himself away from this grizzled old mariner. The Mariner begins his story. They left port, and the ship sailed down near Antarctica to get away from a bad storm, but then they get caught in a dangerous, foggy ice field. An albatross shows up to steer them through the fog and provide good winds, but then the Mariner decides to shoot it.

Pretty soon the sailors lose their wind, and it gets really hot. They run out of water, and everyone blames the Mariner. The ship seems to be haunted by a bad spirit, and weird stuff starts appearing, like slimy creatures that walk on the ocean. The Mariner's crewmates decide to hang the dead albatross around his neck to remind him of his error.

Everyone is literally dying of thirst. The Mariner sees another ship's sail at a distance. He wants to yell out, but his mouth is too dry, so he sucks some of his own blood to moisten his lips. He's like, "A ship! We're saved." Sadly, the ship is a ghost ship piloted by two spirits, Death and Life-in-Death, who have to be the last people you'd want to meet on a journey. Everyone on the Mariner's ship dies.

The wedding guest realizes, "Ah! You're a ghost!" But the Mariner says, "Well, actually, I was the only one who didn't die." He continues his story: he's on a boat with a lot of dead bodies, surrounded by an ocean full of slimy things. Worse, these slimy things are nasty water snakes. But the Mariner escapes his curse by unconsciously blessing the hideous snakes, and the albatross drops off his neck into the ocean.

The Mariner falls into a sweet sleep, and it finally rains when he wakes up. A storm strikes up in the distance, and all the dead sailors rise like zombies to pilot the ship. The sailors don't actually come back to life. Instead, angels fill their bodies, and another supernatural spirit under the ocean seems to push the boat. The Mariner faints and hears two voices talking about how he killed the albatross and still has more penance to do. These two mysterious voices explain how the ship is moving.

After a speedy journey, the ship ends up back in port again. The Mariner sees angels standing next to the bodies of all his crewmates. Then a rescue boat shows up to take him back to shore. The Mariner is happy that a guy called "the hermit" is on the rescue boat. The hermit is in a good mood. All of a sudden there's a loud noise, and the Mariner's ship sinks. The hermit's boat picks up the Mariner.

In fact, the Mariner says that he still has the same painful need to tell his story, which is why he stopped the Wedding Guest on this occasion. Wrapping up, the Mariner tells the Wedding Guest that he needs to learn how to say his prayers and love other people and things. Then the Mariner leaves, and the Wedding Guest no longer wants to enter the wedding. He goes home and wakes up the next day, as the famous last lines go, "a sadder and a wiser man."

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Setting of the poem

The poem has two different settings. The first setting is outside the wedding hall. There is no way to know in what year or even century the poem takes place, but it must have been after the Age of Exploration, because the Mariner describes a voyage all the way down to the Antarctic. As for the place, we know the Mariner and the Wedding Guest come from somewhere in the British Isles, but not exactly where. Judging by the use of the Scottish word ‘Kirk’, and the fact that ballads were popular in Scotland, this poem could be set in that region.

The wedding, quite frankly, sounds like a rockin' time. There's singing, dancing, drinking, and a whole lot of merry-making. But we only hear all this revelry behind closed doors. The Wedding Guest is sitting on a rock outside the feast, and maybe he catches a glimpse or two of the party when people enter or leave. But that's it. Otherwise he's just sitting in the darkness listening to a grizzled old man with magnetic eyes.

The setting of the Mariner's story, on the other hand, is full of spectacular scenery and supernatural elements. Special emphasis is put on the weather and on astrological phenomena like the sun, moon, and stars. These are obviously things of great concern for sailors. The story begins in the bay with the receding shoreline. The boat travels down to the equator and then to the Antarctic Ocean, where they run into trouble in an ice field. The ice is cracking and groaning all around them.

Then the albatross comes, accompanied by a strange mist, to lead them out of the ice. After the albatross is killed, the setting shifts in the direction of the supernatural. The wind disappears, and the ocean is eerily calm and glassy. The sails go slack. Meanwhile, the sun turns red, the water changes color, and strange slippery creatures and sea-snakes come out. At night, these creatures glow on the water with phosphorescent effects. This section of the poem is characterized by extreme dryness, which we see in the drying of the sails and the appearance of the skeleton-like Ghost Ship. The ocean is like a brackish swamp.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is set in a time when, once you crossed a certain point in your ship, you could expect not to see other people for a long, long time. As in many works of literature, like Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, the ocean represents the mysteries of the human soul and, if you want to get all Sigmund Freud about it, the unconscious. Just like the sea, an individual's personality is often like a flat, uniform surface that conceals a deepness filled with those bizarre and often unsightly creatures we call emotions or desires. So, when the Mariner pollutes his soul by killing the albatross, it's not a surprise to see that the ocean becomes polluted with slime and horrible creatures. Moreover, the imagery of the vast, vacant ocean, particularly once the rest of the crew has died, expresses a condition of spiritual solitude and loneliness. It's the kind of setting that makes you realize we're truly all alone in this world, with seemingly infinite depths above and below us.

After the Mariner breaks the curse against him, the strange colors on the ocean disappear, but then a bunch of angels turn the poem into a zombie movie, amid a crazy night-time light show with lightning and the Aurora, taking over the bodies of the sailors. They create their own strange colors and beautiful song-like sounds. The ship retraces its steps, moving back to the equator, and then, with the return of the wind, to the bay where the story started. At this point, the story-within-a-story ends, and we return to the scene of the wedding feast. Taken as a whole, the setting traces an arc from the wedding to Antarctica and back again.

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