The Fall of Man. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Marriage of Heaven and Hell - Essay Example

Instruction: The fall of man There are different poets who have addressed different religious topics. One of the most common points of discussion for the poets is the issue of the fall of man. According to the different religious text available, man was created at the beginning of the world, and was placed in a beautiful garden in which everything was provided. There was however a fallout between God who is the supreme creator and some of his angels after which the angels were expelled from heaven. It is these fallen angels that come to tempt man to disobey the instructions that he had been given on what he can and what he cannot do in the garden. The fallen angels tempt him to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge that he had been forbidden from eating. Their disobedience to God led to what is referred to as the fall of man, and the privileges that they earlier had were withdrawn from them, and man was punished for this act. The different poets however take different perspectives on the story of the fall of man. One of the poets that have talked on the fall of man is William Blake in his poem Marriage of Heaven and Hell. His poem is unique on the revolutionary perspective that it takes regarding the fall of man. The poem was composed in the years between 1790 and 1793. According to Blake, there is a depolarized and unified cosmic world, and that physical desire and the material world should be viewed as part of the divine order. This is why according to him; there exists a marriage between heaven and hell. Blake presents heaven not as a place where people go to be punished for their sins but as a place that is a source of unrepressed and Dionysian energy that is unlike heaven which is regulated and authoritarian. Heaven is therefore stable while hell is energized. The fall of man according to Blake is a fall from unity to disunity of mind and action, and a division of the unified mind to different faculties that include emotion, intuition, reason, and sense. According to the poem, the fall of man led to chaos. It also led to a situation in which the natural order of world has been disrupted. He therefore presents a situation in which it is fools and hypocrites who preach law and order. They however end up creating chaos. Those who are preaching the oppressive laws are therefore evil themselves. His representation of heaven and hell is different in that he presents the devils as being witty and having interesting and creative things to say while the angels are dull and boring. This is the effect of the fall of man. The poet therefore challenges what is good and what is evil. The redemption of man according to the poem is based on the ability of the person to seek God not from religion or from the altars or from the different churches, but from within themselves. It is therefore important that the human being is able to look within as it is the only way he will find redemption. The redemption of man will bring about a man who is rational and creative at the same time, and who partakes in his divinity through his creativity. His view of good and evil encourages the person to make a distinction between sin and the sinner. This means that it is the sin that will be thrown to hell according to him as opposed to the sinner. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a poem by Samuel Taylor. The poem is one of the most famous poems that discuss the fall of man. While there are many interpretations that are given for the poem, the poem is interpreted to have a Christian meaning in that it is symbolic of the story of the sin, fall and eventual redemption of man. The poem can be seen to tell the story of the path that man takes from his position of grace to sin, and the love of God that eventually redeems him from his fall. The killing in the poem is equivalent to the sin and the fall of man in the bible. The act of eating the forbidden fruit in the bible is replaced by the killing of a bird. In the poem however, the act of killing the bird introduces evil into nature. Man separates himself from nature and therefore from the goodness of God. The mariner represents the man’s view of himself as being superior to nature. The other mariners at first protest the killing of the Albatross, but they later agree and praise him for the killing. This makes them incur the guilt by extension. In part 4 of the poem, the Mariner is able to achieve his salvation when he blesses the water snakes. This is when he is able to see the snakes as objects of beauty and he is thus able to pray. In the poem, it is therefore seen that the fall from grace for man is caused when he separates himself from nature. The poem says: He prayeth best, who loveth best                                     All things both great and small;                                     For the dear God who loveth us,                                     He made and loveth all (11. 612-617). His reunification with nature through blessing the snakes is what leads to his restoration. Unlike in the bible where man eats the fruit as a result of disobedience, the Mariner in the poem simply acts, not from disobedience but because he is compelled to. In Intimations of Immortality present the world in its natural beauty in which innocence is symbolized to the children who are presented as being close to the divinity as opposed to the adults. According to the poem, there is an inherent goodness in man that is present in human beings at birth. The poem says, Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting The soul that rises with us, our life's star Hath had elsewhere its setting In his interpretation, God is the divine being and the reunification of God and man is the ultimate restoration of man. He says : But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God who is our home. The fall of man in the story is presented as the loss of innocence that man goes through. As man continues to grow and mature, he is corrupted by the experiences that he goes through. The loss of innocence causes man to be disconnected from nature, and it only when man reconnects with God who is the divine being that he will be able to be restored to the happiness and innocence that he had enjoyed through his childhood days. The poem Intimations of Immortality can be seen to have some similarities with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in that they present the fall of man as being brought about by the separation that man goes through from nature and from God. The reunification of man and nature leads to the reunification of man and the divine force that is God. The fall of man as presented to by the three poets leads to a situation in which man must seek for his restoration. There are however differences in how the poets present the process of restoration. The poem Intimations of Immortality and the poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner present the process of reunification as one that must be happen when man looks outside of himself and into nature. William Blake in his poem Marriage of Heaven and Hell presents the process of restoration as one that will only happen when man is able to look within himself. The poets however agree that the fall leads to a state of disunity within the person, and that restoration of man leads to unity within the human being. They also present God as a divine and loving being. Blake also differs from the two poets in that he presents evil as being necessary to the existence of man. Works cited Blake, William. Marriage of heaven and hell. Retrieved from http://www.archive.org/stream/marriageofheaven00blak/marriageofheaven00blak_djvu.t xt Taylor, Samuel. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner retrieved from www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173253 Wordsworth, William. Intimations of Immortality. Retrieved from www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/1592 Read More