The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by English Bard Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Essay Example

? PART A Option 2 Introduction "Ah! You're a ghost!" exclaim the Wedding Guest to the Mariner.The Mariner had stopped them to narrate to them his experience in the sea front, and tried to defend himself by saying he was the only survivor. The ship is faced with one misfortune after another and it is all blamed on the Mariner. He narrates how he got his entire crew killed and nearly got him killed because he acted like a jerk while on voyage. This essay analyses the events that unfold and justify reasons why the Mariner is ‘cursed’ using strange images and unanswered questions in this ghost story. On leaving the port, the ship escapes a bad storm but in the process gets caught in risky, misty ice field. When an albatross comes to their rescue by providing good winds and steer them through the fog, the Mariner shoots it down. He does not offer a good explanation for such an act and his crew gets so offended that they decide to hang the dead albatross round the Mariner’s neck as a yoke, to remind him of his mistake. Soon the sailors lose the wind, and it becomes very hot. The Mariner is blamed for this bad luck. The ship seemed to be haunted by an evil spirit as bizarre stuff emerges, slimy creatures that walk on the ocean can be seen. As time goes, the crew starts dying of thirst. At a distance, the Mariner spots a ship and wishes to yell out; unfortunately his mouth is excessively dry and he cannot. He decides to suck of his own blood so as to dampen his lips. Unfortunately, that ship is a ghost ship steered by two spirits, Life-in-Death and Death, the last one people can ever want to meet in a journey. Everybody on the Mariner's ship passes on except him. Still on board with heaps of dead bodies and nasty slimy water snakes, the Mariner escapes his curse by instinctively blessing the ugly snakes, and eventually the albatross falls off his neck and into the ocean. The entire lifeless sailors rise like zombies to steer the ship from the bad storm which is at a distance, the Mariner is however fast asleep. The dead sailors don't in reality resurrect, in their place, angels fill up their remains, and another ghostlike spirit beneath the ocean look like its pushing the boat. On hearing their voices of the dead crew members talking on how he killed the albatross is still has additional self-punishment to do, the Mariner collapses. These two mystifying tone of voices give details how the ship is stirring. The ship ends up back in port yet again following a quick journey. His crewmen are all surrounded with angels. Luckily for the Mariner, a rescue boat turns up to get him back to the shoreline. A man in a good mood called "the hermit" is on board the rescue boat. Hardly has the Mariner been saved from his wrecked ship than a loud noise is heard. His ship sinks. On reaching the seashore the Mariner is very anxious to share his story with the hermit. So anxious is he that he decides to stop the guests at the wedding to narrate to them his story. The Mariner finally tells the Wedding Guest that he wants to be trained how to love others and say his prayers. He leaves for his residence and gets up the following day, "a sadder and a wiser man." This poem is a lyrical ballad which joins two dissimilar genres: intense expressions of emotional and subjective experience (a lyric) and narrative (a ballad). The Rime of the Ancient Mariner contains numerous characteristic that would afterwards turn out to be connected with Romanticism: formal testing, a deep sense of history, elements of the ghostlike, lots of dramatic descriptions of nature, and an interest in relaxed language. This poem is among a collection that fundamentally initiated the lobby group known as British Romanticism. Conclusion The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by English bard Samuel Taylor Coleridge, on the surface investigates infringement of nature and its ensuing mental impacts on the Mariner, who understands the destiny of his team to be a result of him shooting down an albatross. PART B Option 1 Introduction Romantic hero is a fictional model referring to a character that discards conventional norms in the society and is self-centered on his own life. He is frequently the protagonist and main character any fictional story. Primary focus is on the character's views rather than his actions. The Romantic hero originally started emerging in literature during the romantic period. Percy Shelley, Byron and Goethe were the first authors to have romantic heroes in their work. The tale of Don Juan initially emerges in an aged Spanish legend about an attractive but corrupt man who seduces daughter of a commander of Seville and when confronted, murders her father in a fight. He was a stylish romantic stature who made the bloomers of more women fall off more than all the Romantic heros of his days joint. Past Romantic heroes are looked at by contemporary Poets, the manner in which the heroes wore inflated shirts and became sweet dangerous of what would or would never be. Lord Byron, who was the daydream vision of hopeless young spinsters and love hungry women with a liking for animistic liberation, glanced to the ancient times to produce his contemporary description of a good hero. That male protagonist would be imperfect since an essential element of Romantic poetry, certainly all type of Romantic texts, was that it was not just that the heroes of the past were dead; bravery itself is a notion for the heroes of agony. Lord Byron's draws the picture of a hero as a fantastical lover of everything, especially women. It was an odd option on Byron's part since Don Juan without doubt does not wear the apparel of a hero as generally thought to exist. Most of Lord Byron's epic writings cast Don Juan main character (MCGANN, 2002). Don Juan's best claim to the accomplishment of the leading actor is his skill to slip in bed with almost any woman he wishes. Anyone can only guess that Don Juan is maybe a bit of the mirror image of his maker in this sense. One of the ideal characters in heroic writing for all of the Romantics was Prometheus, the one who stole fire from the deity. Certainly, Prometheus is a male protagonist presently, as well as of the past. Contrasting to Prometheus, Don Juan leaves a parenthetical gap in the beginning of Lord Byron’s literary work that cannot be sufficiently blocked. Both Mary and Percy gazed to the thief of fire in their literary works; Byron selected a character that did not have the heroism essential to rescue the beautiful Julia from her vocation as a nun. The most important reason for Lord Byron's choosing Don Juan as his Promethean link to the heroism of the old age is the exceptional fact that Don Juan is somewhat not a success in all things epic. Poems written by Lord Byron penetrate to the very heart of heroism, which aims to argue that heroes are rather made but not born (MCGANN, 2002). Well, in Byron's world, there is no true heroism apart from that which is forced upon a character. What builds a hero is how they are able to respond to the character is given that role. When Byron chooses Don Juan as a lead character, he is trying to examine the strength of heroism. Byron authored Don Juan at a period when the Poet Laureate of England was the most influential writer. With Don Juan, it is completely likely and even feasible that Byron was merely creating a statement that heroism as was recognized in the conventional era was not merely in the tormented hold of death, but was completely and wholly missing in a human relationship to the world. Conclusion In conclusion, heroism either a cruel joke or dead, Lord Byron's preference of the absolutely a non heroic Don Juan to be his Prometheus is a noisy call to the literary world to acknowledge that all factual heroes actually are departed and buried and not to be brought back to life. Reference: MCGANN, J. J. (2002). Byron and romanticism. Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press. Read More