The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

1. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

2. Author biography Coleridge was born on October 21,1772 in Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire. His father, who was the vicar of Ottery and the headmaster of its grammar school, died when he was yet a boy, in 1781. Thereafter, to continue his education, Coleridge was enrolled at Christ's Hospital in London an institution famously described in an essay by Charles Lamb. After ten years there he matriculated in Jesus College, Cambridge, where he was known for his wide reading and impressive eloquence. Financial problems, however, drove him from Cambridge, and in his third year he interrupted his education and traveled to London to enlist in the 15th Dragoons, using the pseudonym Silas Tomkyn Comberbache. His friends, recognizing how ill-suited he was for military life, were able to buy him out of this improbable misconception of his destiny and persuaded him to return to Cambridge.

3. Historical background 1750 - Slavery is legal everywhere 1755 - First History of Art – Johann Winckelmann1769 - James Watt,  Steam engine and first Iron railroads1770 - Beethoven is born1773 - Boston tea party 1775 - War with Americas1776 - Declaration of American Independence. Bill of rights. 1780 - Call for voting reforms, with street riots1781 - Slave ships crossing Atlantic.            With insurance, for lost slaves, judge rules for the shipping companies. 1830 - Steamship to America.1844 - Oppression of female needle workers is exposed. 1847 - Political and economic oppression of Irish and other indigenous peoples around civilized world.  1847 - Labor reform? 10 hrs for women and children.1848 - Marx, the Communist Manifesto1851 - Photographic process 1875 - Band of Hope- organization for welfare of working class children.1885 - Age of consent raised to 13 years to counter child slavery.

4. Summary of the poem Three guys are on the way to a wedding celebration when an old sailor (the Mariner) stops one of them at the door (we'll call him 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.

5. Analysis of the poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was the opening poem of the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads 1798, published anonymously with William Wordsworth, as a joint volume of poetry. The construction of the Ancient Mariner is that of a narrative-based medieval ballad, conforming to the genre's traditional rules of metro, of fairly regular quatrains, with a 8 syllable tetrameter structure, creating the impression that it is a product of oral tradition rather than a written culture. The use of short sentence structure and internal rhyme, as in, 'The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared', the use of simile, 'And listens like a three years child:' and repetition as in, below the Kirk, below the hill, below the lighthouse top', reported speech, "By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?, and punctuation to create emphasis, 'I shot the ALBATROSS.', 'And now the STORM BLAST came.' and contracted verbs, 'May'st', enjambment, alliteration and half rhyme. All these techniques assist Coleridge in setting the mood and the genre of this poem and the varying of it's pace.

6. The subject-matter is the encounter of a wedding guest with what appears to be an Ancient Mariner. 'It is an ancient Mariner.' In this opening line, Coleridge uses the impersonal, 'It,' to describe this entity which may or may not be of this world. The wedding guest is there to attend his next of kin's wedding. However, the Ancient Mariner alludes later in the poem, to the fact that they were drawn to this meeting, as in, 'I pass, like night, from land to land; I have strange power of speech; that moment his face I see, I know the man that must hear me; to him my tale I teach.‘ Some of the recurrent themes he has used throughout include references to, nature, both in it's beauty and horror, '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!‘Others have been water and clouds, mist, sky and the Sun and Moon and the stars, and snow, his use of light and dark, good and bad, partially symbolized by the woman. He has used references to human activities, music, 'the merry din', 'for he heard the loud bassoon,' whistling and voices, flutes, angels song and birdsong, and also addresses the loss of faith, 'I looked to heaven and tried to pray: but or ever a prayer had gusht, a wicked whisper came, and made my heart as dry as dust.'

7. Coleridge's description of the state of the ship and it's sorry crew, is in such a way to almost drain the reader into feeling weary, 'the weary time, a weary to find', like a load on my weary eye'. I fear thee ancient Mariner, and the look from the eyes of his dead ship mates, the wedding guest's fear of his skinny hand, and the penalties for the curse, build the feelings of dread and foreboding in the reader. Coleridge, however, despite the nature of the rhyme, subtly crafted humor into the beginning. The reported speech of the wedding guest, contains a sense of rhythm and timing which is almost comical. "By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp'st thou me? "The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide, And I am next of kin; The guests are met, the feast is set: May'st hear the merry din." Almost Dad's Army.

8. The Ancient Mariner commences with his tale, the mood of which starts optimistic, 'the ship was cheered, the harbour cleared, merrily did we drop below the Kirk, below the hill, below the lighthouse top', 'The Sun came up upon the left, Out of the sea came he! And he shone bright, and on the right Went down into the sea.‘ This quatrain is the poet's first use of personification, giving the sun masculine qualities this work to the romantic genre. It also gives direction to the ship, rising from the left, from the east, helps orientate the reader, to the fact that the ship is heading south. The poet has given further references to the rising and setting of the Sun and its position over the ship's mast through out. In the quatrain following, the wedding guest momentarily loses his patience, 'The wedding guests here beat his breast, for he heard the loud bassoon', and the humor of the poem returns, and also reinforces to the reader, that this is a tale being recounted, bringing us back to the space and time in which this tale is being told. It appears that the central role of this poem is the tale itself, which needs to be both told and heard. Coleridge then uses repetition and internal rhyme to bring the attention of the reader from the Wedding Guest and back to the Ancient Mariner, 'The wedding guest he beat his breast, Yet he cannot chose but hear; and thus spike on that ancient man, the bright eyed Mariner'. Here Coleridge is giving us a picture of a man torn between a call of his family to the celebration, and the spell cast by this strange old being.

9. Coleridge has also built into the poem a sense of tension and excitement with the description of the ships race with the storm. 'And now the STORM BLAST came, and he Was tyrannous and strong: He struck with his overtaking wings, And chased south along. With sloping masts and dipping prow, As who pursued with yell and blow Still treads the shadow of his foe And forward bends his head, The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast, And southward aye we fled', and he goes on to give us a vivid picture of the environment which the Mariners now encountered, 'And now there came both mist and snow, And it grew wondrous cold: And ice, mast-high, came floating by, as green as emerald‘. In this quatrain Coleridge gives us a sense of scale and dimension, the mist and snow, cutting off the ship from the outside world, the ice as tall as the ship's mast. 'And through the drifts the snowy clefts Did send a dismal sheen: Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken-The ice was all between,' the ship, at risk from being crushed by the ice, the terrifying noises as the ice moved upon the surface of the sea. '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!', Coleridge adds further tension to the poem.

10. 'At length did cross an Albatross:,' the first living creature they had encountered, 'Thorough the fog it came; As if it had been a Christian soul, We hailed it in God's name'. 'It ate the food it ne'er had eat, And round and round it flew. The ice did split with a thunder-fit; The helmsman steered us through!' Such was the joy of the Mariners at the sight of the albatross, a sign of life in this lifeless environment, a symbol of hope and renewal to the sailors, happy for it to take their food and responding to their calls without fear of man, they took it as a good omen for their journey, and blessed it in the Name of God. Here Coleridge provides a break from the early tension created in the poem. After the albatross is killed, the changes in the fortunes of the sailors, for good or ill, are laid at the feet of the Ancient Mariner, culminating in the act of replacing a religious icon, the cross, with the body of the bird. 'Ah! well a-day! what evil looks Had I from old and young! Instead of the cross, the Albatross About my neck was hung.' The predicament that Coleridge placed the Ancient Mariner in, by including into the poem, an unthinking act of indifference, places the Ancient Mariner's spirituality under threat, and the trials and struggles needed to be redeemed.

11. Coleridge changes the sailors relationship with nature here, as the ship becomes becalmed, this is a dramatic and fundamental change. The meaning of the Sun changed from a symbol of optimism to a symbol of fear and dread. 'All in a hot and copper sky, The bloody Sun, at noon, Right up above the mast did stand, No bigger than the Moon.' It's heat, drying-out the ship and the bodies of men, who were too parched to speak. He continues these feelings of being becalmed in the third part of the poem too, 'There passed a weary time': keeping the sense of the urgent, but slow passing of time, and time weighing heavy upon the crew by his use of punctuation and repetition, 'A weary time! a weary time! How glazed each weary eye', of a thirst that robs them of the ability to laugh or wail, 'Each throat Was parched, and glazed each eye.' The a-spying of the ship, which at first would have seemed a blessing, giving the reader it also seems, a symbol for the release of tension, 'When looking westward,' 'the west' is a symbol in many cultures as the land of the dead, however, 'I beheld A something in the sky.'

12. And the poem goes on to use another powerful symbol, the blood sacrifice, 'I bit my arm, I sucked the blood, And cried, A sail! a sail!', but as the ghost ship draws alongside, all are thrown into despair, 'Are those her ribs through which the Sun Did peer, as through a grate? And is that Woman all her crew? Is that a DEATH? and are there two? Is DEATH that woman's mate?'. 'The Night-Mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she, Who thick man's blood with cold.' Then Coleridge brings about the awful fate of the crew, looking their last upon the Ancient Mariner, they fall dead, a fearful image is created by the poet in this series of quatrains. 'The souls did from their bodies fly,-They fled to bliss or woe! And every sole, it passed me by, Like the whizz of my CROSS-BOW!' In this quatrain, Coleridge gives an indication to a belief in the Judgment and reward of man after death, 'they fled to bliss or woe!' and again, this gives another reference to the poet's religious knowledge and to the themes common to the Romantic period.

13. After the crew had perished, the poet brings us back to the present and provides some relief from the tension created, by the use of reported speech by the wedding guest, "I fear thee, ancient Mariner! I fear thy skinny hand! And thou art long, and lank, and brown, As is the ribbed sea-sand. "I fear thee and thy glittering eye, And thy skinny hand, so brown."-and in this quatrain, he uses simile by comparing the physical aspects of the Ancient Mariner to the ribbed sea-sand. The poet repeats this technique several times throughout the poem. In the following quatrain Coleridge again used repetition to convey how utterly alone and without faith the Ancient Mariner had now become, 'alone all, all alone, Alone on a wide sea!' and Coleridge gives further emphasis to how unworthy the Ancient Mariner felt about himself, wishing he could die, and looking upon nature with revulsion. ''The many men, so beautiful! And they all dead did lie: And a thousand slimy things Lived on; and so did I.‘ This theme continues for the seven days and nights he spent looking into the eyes of his dead shipmates, 'Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse, And yet I could not die'. and neither could the things that the Ancient Mariner feared, 'Within the shadow of the ship I watched their rich attire: Blue, glossy green, and velvet black, They coiled and swam; and every track Was a flash of golden fire'. Yet out of this hell and purgatory which Coleridge has placed this poor fellow, to help resolve this tension, he throws his principle character a life line, an unconscious blessing comes from the Ancient Mariner, 'O happy living things! no tongue Their beauty might declare: A spring of love gushed from my heart And I blessed them unaware: Sure my kind saint took pity on me, And I blessed them unaware.' on the things he had loathed lay the key to his salvation, and salvation is brought in an instant, 'The self same moment I could pray; And from my neck so free The Albatross fell off, and sank Like lead into the sea.' The crew become animated once more, by good spirits, manning the ship and getting under way, and Coleridge concludes the fourth part of the poem with again a reference to the wedding guest.

14. After heavenly inspired sleep, the Mariner awakens to find his thirst is quenched, and there are heavenly voices and bird song in the air. These are devices typical to the Romantic poets, symbols of healing and forgiveness, and Coleridge's knowledge of their hidden meanings is apparent. The Mariner also discovers the crew are all gathered and are looking at him, so giving the impression of some tension remaining within the poem's tale. The Mariner turns and discovers that he is off the coast of his own country. The Mariner turns again to find the crew are guiding, with lights, the pilot to the vessel. The Ancient Mariner turns again and sees the hermit good. Coleridge again gives his principal character another medium of salvation. 'He'll shrive my soul, he'll wash away The Albatross's blood.‘ Coleridge then gives us back ground on the hermit, where he lives, and what he does, his devotions, and conversations with other Mariner's. Then the poem switches back to the Ancient Mariner, of the conversations between the pilot and the hermit, which the Ancient Mariner is able to a overhear, the reservations of the pilots and the cheerfulness of the hermit. Suddenly the ship goes down, and the Mariner finds himself in the pilot's boat, which is being pulled into a maelstrom. And with a combination of the hermits devoutness and the last of the ancient Mariners strength, the pilots ship is able to pull free of the whirlpool and they reach dry land. Here the Mariner beseeches the hermit to save him from his curse. And the Mariner finds that to tell the hermit his tale, gave him relief and eased his troubled mind. However the Mariner has to recant his tail again, hence why he cannot remain in one place for any length of time, that he wanders from land to land to teach his tale.

15. And thus is Coleridge's rather lengthy tale reaches it's conclusion, the Ancient Mariner bids goodbye to the wedding guest, 'Farewell, farewell! but this I tell To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!' and gives him what advice he can, 'He prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast.' 'He prayed best, who loved best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loved us He made and loved all.' and the effect of his tale is shown by the manner of the wedding guest, 'The Mariner, whose eye is bright, Whose beard with age is hoar, Is gone: and now the Wedding-Guest Turned from the bridegroom's door.' 'He went like one that hath been stunned, And is of sense forlorn: A sadder and a wiser man, He rose the morrow morn.‘ The poem opens with the Wedding Guest and the Mariner, and resolves itself by showing the Mariner has been successful in his mission, the tale has been heard by the Wedding Guest, the build-up of tension is released by this and resolves the tale. Having progressed from ignorance to despair to knowledge and wisdom. It is a tale within a tale, a moral story of fear, guilt, blame and salvation. Is this the process which Coleridge sees himself going through? It is also a very lengthy composition, the references to nature and spirituality and man's relationship to them, demonstrates the poem's romantic origins.