Samuel Taylor Coleridge

the rime of the Ancient Mariner

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on October 21, 1772 in Devonshire. Coleridge proved to be a brilliant student and was heavily influenced by the French revolution.

He developed a growing addiction to opium that he had to take to ease his bodily pains caused by chronic rheumatism.

In 1797 Coleridge began his famous friendship with William Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy. They settled in Somerset where an important collaboration started.

Their intellectual and artistic exchanges culminated in Lyrical Ballads - appeared anonymously in 1798 - in which The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was first published.

Coleridge published the second version of his masterpiece in 1817 in the volume Sibylline Leaves.

On the verge of suicide, owing to his pain and his strong opium addiction, he moved in with a doctor who managed his care for the last eighteen years of his life. While in the doctor's care, Coleridge published the unfinished poems Christabel (1816) and Kubla Khan (1816), which became icons of Romantic poetry. Samuel Taylor Coleridge died in 1834 at the age of 61.

Lyrical Ballads is a collection of poems produced by S.T. Coleridge and W. Wordsworth. It was first published in 1798 and a second edition in 1800, which also contained Wordsworth's famous Preface.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the first poem of the collection and became, along with Wordsworth's Preface, the Manifesto of English Romantic movement.

In this collection the two writers exemplified the examination of the mundane, natural, and intensely subjective. They agreed that Wordsworth would write on the beauty of nature and ordinary things with the aim of making them interesting; Coleridge, instead, should deal with visionary topics, the supernatural and mystery.

According to the objection to the 'poetic diction' contained in the Preface, many of the poems were written in everyday language, avoiding the ornamented styles of speech and elaborate rhyme schemes favoured by poets of earlier periods.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is one exception to this trend, as in it Coleridge used both a rhyme scheme and words derived from Middle English.

Unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge did not view nature as a moral guide or a source of happiness, because his strong Christian faith did not allow him to identify nature with the divine in that form of pantheism which Wordsworth adopted. Coleridge rather saw in the nature and in the material world the reflection of the perfect world of 'ideas'. He believed that natural images carried abstract meaning and he used them in his most visionary poems.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is Coleridge's masterpiece. It was first published in Lyrical Ballads (1798) and - after a restyle - a second edition was published in Sibylline Leaves

An Ancient Mariner stops a Wedding Guest and compels him to sit and listen to his woeful tale.

The Ancient Mariner set sail with two hundred other sailors, but suddenly a terrible storm hit and drove the ship southwards; they eventually reached Antarctica and were blocked in the ice.

An Albatross appeared out of the mist, no sooner than the sailors fed it did the ice break. As long as the Albatross flew alongside the ship and the sailors treated it kindly, a good wind carried them and a mist followed.

One day, however, the Ancient Mariner shot and killed the Albatross on impulse. Suddenly the wind and mist ceased, and the ship was stagnant on the ocean. The other sailors alternately blamed the Ancient Mariner for making the wind die. The sun became very hot, and there was no drinkable water. The sailors hung the Albatross around the Ancient Mariner's neck as a symbol of his sin.

After a painful while, a ship appeared on the horizon, it was a ghost ship manned by Death, in the form of a man, and Life-in-Death, in the form of a beautiful, naked woman. They were playing dice for the souls of the crew. Life-in-Death won the Ancient Mariner's soul, and the other sailors were left to Death. The sky went black immediately as the ghost ship sped away. Suddenly all of the sailors cursed the Ancient Mariner with their eyes and dropped dead on the deck.

The Ancient Mariner drifted on the ocean seeing the curse in the eyes of the crew's corpses, unable to pray. One night he noticed some beautiful water-snakes swimming in the water, he suddenly sees their true beauty and blesses them. When he was finally able to pray, the Albatross fell from his neck and his guilt is partially expiated.

Then the dead sailors arose and sailed the ship without speaking. Once the ship reached the equator again, the ship jolted, causing the Ancient Mariner to fall unconscious. He heard two voices discussing his fate. They said he would continue to be punished for killing the Albatross, who was loved by a spirit. Then the two voices and the dead sailors disappeared.

The wind picked up, bright angels appeared and guided the ship home, where it sank in a vortex. A Pilot, his boy, and a Hermit were rowing a small boat out to the ship. The rescuers were able to pull the Ancient Mariner from the water, but thought he was dead. When he abruptly came to and began to row the boat, the Pilot and Pilot's Boy lost their minds. The Hermit asked the Ancient Mariner what kind of man he was and he related his tale. It was then that the Ancient Mariner learned of his curse; he would be destined to tell his tale to others from beginning to end when an agonizing, physical urge struck him.

The Ancient Mariner tells the Wedding Guest that better than any merriment is the company of others in prayer. He says that the best way to become close with God is to respect all of His creatures, because He loves them all. The Wedding Guest walks home, stunned. We are told that he awakes the next day 'sadder and wiser' for having heard the Ancient Mariner's tale.

The poem is made up of seven parts and it is introduced by an 'Argument' containing a short summary of the whole poem:

"How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole ; and how from thence she made her course to the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancient Mariner came back to his own Country."

The poem consist of two narratives: one is made up of the captions to the right of the stanzas, which constitute the framework and introduce the protagonist and his listener; the other is the poem itself.

The first version of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner went against the emerging Romantic tradition of writing in contemporary, unrhymed language. In fact the poem contains many of the features associated with traditional ballads, that is: the combination of dialogue and narration; the four line stanza; the archaic language, rich in alliteration repetition and onomatopoeias; the theme of travel and wandering and supernatural elements.

In the second version Coleridge removed much of the original poem's deliberate archaism and added marginal glosses. These explanations not only amplify the allegorical feel of the poem, but work in place of the omitted archaisms to establish a nostalgic, fictitiously historical mood. They also express directly that spirits, and not just nature, are responsible for punishing the Ancient Mariner and his shipmates.

There are three remarkable stylistic tendencies that make The Rime of the Ancient Mariner a Romantic poem: the presence of a moral in the last part; the importance of the individual; the subjectivity of experience, the Romantics were some of the first poets to place a literary work's focus on the protagonist's empirical experience of the world.