The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Research Paper Example

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner The Romantic era, roughly considered to have taken place between the years 1820-1910, was characterized by a return to nature as artists and poets began to celebrate the individual, emotional expression and appreciation of beauty and imagination. Within this realm of exploration were included concepts of the spiritual world and man’s role within it. In this new freedom, writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge felt able to explore new methods and forms of expression in their work, such as Coleridge’s so-called conversation poems which broke the traditional boundaries of poetry into a more colloquial realm or his imaginative poems such as the story of the ancient mariner. This type of poetry is characterized by a friendly, easy manner that seems at once spontaneous and also personal. Coleridge’s poem entitled “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was not well-received at the time he first introduced this poetic form, but has since become very popular, perhaps one of his best-known works. Written sometime around 1798 to be included in a collection published that year by Coleridge and his friend William Wordsworth, the poem explores man’s journey to redemption. According to the events, both natural and supernatural, of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, this journey to redemption is characterized by doubt which leads to the commission of sin which must be punished before the individual can begin the process of renewal and finally discover redemption. Within the story of the ancient mariner, the character of the ancient mariner describes presumably his first trip on the ocean. This is assumed because of the strong doubt he experiences as the ship is shadowed by an albatross. As he describes a sea filled with icebergs, the mariner introduces the entrance of the albatross as a saving spirit. When he tells about the first appearance of the bird, he says, “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!” as if the bird was the reason for the separating of the ice and the freeing of the ship. But then the bird “In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud, / It perched for vespers nine; / Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white” the ship sat as motionless as the bird. In the next stanza, the mariner shoots the bird down using his cross-bow after first seeming to experience a fit of madness under its constant stare. Reading through this passage in the first section of the poem makes it clear that the mariner was never fully clear on what his moral stance should be and that this doubt is what led to his making such a dreadful mistake as to shoot the bird. Alluding to the overall message of the poem, Jean Piaget (1971) points out that “the mind of the mariner struggles to make sense of his experience of the world with the moral concepts available to him” (40), yet he remains unable to fully articulate the meaning of his story even as he sits relating it to the wedding guest. This is after presumably years of passing along his story, spending time in prayers and receiving personal instruction from the miser who comes out to save him. If the learning he has achieved in the intervening years has not yet served to vanquish the doubts in the old man’s heart, these doubts of moral and ethical behavior in the young sailor must have been as profound as the crime he commits. Operating from a position of extreme doubt and fear, without a clear sense of morals or ethical behavior, the old mariner commits the grievous sin of killing the albatross that has done him no harm. Other than the doubt and fear that must be inferred into the character, there is no reason provided for why the mariner chose to take this action. The reaction of the wedding guest at the end of the first part of the poem suggests that the mariner’s face took on a terrible expression before the mariner announces simply and with no equivocation, “With my cross-bow / I shot the albatross.” However, this act is not immediately or fully recognized as sin as the other sailors first condemn the mariner, “all averred, I had killed the bird / That made the breeze to blow,” and then approve of his reasoning, “Then all averred, I had killed the bird / That brought the fog and mist.” Only later, when the ship became becalmed in an unpopulated sea, did the rest of the sailors realize the sin and hung the albatross around the mariner’s neck. Thus, the entire living world of the ship is implicated in the original sin of just one man. “In support of his Christian view of the poem, Robert Penn Warren saw the motiveless crime of the Mariner as symbolic of the Fall, and congruent with Coleridge's adherence to the doctrine of original Sin. The will of man is fundamentally corrupt, and in the Mariner’s act we watch this corruption” (Harding, 1974: 59). As the perpetrator of the sin, the mariner is singled out for a different form of punishment than that exacted upon the rest of the crew, but there is no mistaking that the killing of the bird was sin as the next phase of the redemption journey is undertaken. This next phase of the process is the punishment phase and each character in the ship is given his due share. The men on the ship that had condoned the mariner’s killing of the albatross in spite of their own knowledge all died of thirst and their spirits were permitted to move on to their rightful ends, “The souls did from their bodies fly – / They fled to bliss or woe,” but the mariner was left alone on the ship of corpses with only the echoes of “the whiz of my cross-bow.” One of the foundational concepts of the Romantic movement was the concept that mankind and nature were interlinked in such a way that nature would reflect the state of the man’s soul and this idea is carefully interwoven here. The men were nearly dry of moral values and thus were punished with an emptiness of the vital fluid they needed on the physical level. The mariner, on the other hand, seems never to have had this element to start with. As a result, his punishment is established so as to begin his development in this area. “It sometimes happens … that we are punished for our faults by incidents, in the causation of which these faults had no share: and this I have always felt the severest punishment” (Coleridge cited in Piaget, 1971). In general, what the transference of the mathematical considerations of Structuralism to Romanticism suggests is that our punishments are naturally to be in keeping with the nature of our crimes in terms of nature of punishment and severity. However, “no such consolation is available in The Ancient Mariner. The Mariner's sufferings are greatly out of proportion in comparison with what seems a relatively trivial crime; the death of the rest of the crew is even more so. In the universe envisioned in the poem, man is at the mercy of arbitrary and unpredictable forces (Bostetter, 1967: 77). However, adopting the perspective that the mariner’s action is the action of a man completely without morals and as representative of the fall of man, the punishment meted out seems appropriate as a means of forcing development of aspects of his character he otherwise deemed unimportant. From the dreadful punishment experienced by the mariner, realizing his culpability for the deaths of his shipmates and for his own present misery, the next step on the road to redemption for the mariner is found in his chance at renewal. From the vast emptiness of his inner soul, “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,” this renewal is first discovered as he begins to recognize and appreciate the beauty of the world around him in a more intimate way. After seven days and seven nights of floating in the rotting ship with the unrotted corpses, the mariner finally took the time to appreciate the beautiful greens, blues, golds and blacks that were traced in the water by the phosphorescence activated by the water snakes. At this point, “A spring of love gushed from my heart, / And I blessed them unaware,” signaling his readiness to seek out goodness and beauty in the other areas of his life. Finally, the spirits that were punishing him began to relent as the albatross falls from his neck and the ship begins its silent journey home. “Such signs of favor in the Mariner’s eyes – that he is the object of special attention – are analogous to the sense of providence felt by some of Lifton’s survivors, although such grace or virtue in having been singled out for survival is a precarious feeling” (Brisman, 1982: 125) and are usually considered a signal that life has been restored but is now given a greater purpose of some kind. Although he is sure he has been redeemed for a reason, the mariner is equally sure that this redemption is not free and his penance has not yet been fulfilled. While he remains confused about this purpose, the poem moves on to indicate the final stage of the journey to redemption and that is the redemption itself. As he tells his story, the mariner seems to be telling the wedding guest about his own path to redemption as if it were entirely clear to the mariner but that fails to transmit fully to the listener. Although it is recognized that he did a bad thing, was punished for it and paid his penance, the listener becomes aware that the mariner continues to pay this penance even as an old man since he is doomed to wander from place to place and feels a pain at various times that will not ease until he has told his story to someone in need of hearing it. However, again looking at the story from the mariner’s perspective, it is recognized that his telling of the story is limited by the language he must use to make himself understandable to his listener. In her analysis of the story, Raimonda Modiano points out that the mariner tells his story by borrowing his terms of description from the Wedding Guest’s world. “Thus he explains the sounds of the spirits that re-animated the sailors in terms of skylarks, and the sails in terms of a brook in a woods, a series of comparisons far removed from the reality of an experience on an ocean devoid of birds or woodlands” (cited in Dyck, 1973: 603). Although the mariner seems to have a much deeper sense of the meaning of his story than the story would seem to convey, his limitations in speech, the distractions of the wedding that continue to pull his listener’s attention away and his awkward attempt to couch the story in the moralistic terms of the Christian knowledge base all serve to stunt his language. While he may seem to be living a life of exile and punishment, a perspective that allows the mariner to understand the import of his story despite an inability to fully communicate it also allows that the mariner may live his life of exile voluntarily, never wanting to inflict his poor judgment upon another living thing, and his punishment as a mission to help other people younger than him from living with the same kind of weight around his neck. Although the mariner has not yet fully achieved redemption by the end of his tale, he is much more confident of the path he must follow to get there. The doubts of his youth have been stripped away making him that much less likely to fall into the errors of sin that caused his early tragedy. While some may argue that his shipmates did not deserve their punishment, it is clear that these scholars are neglecting the way that these sailors implicated themselves in the crime by not consistently holding the mariner to admit his wrong against the innocent bird. The mariner himself required the long punishment he received on the ship to finally bring him around to the realization that his rash action was wrong and that it was his responsibility to love and respect the world around him. Only after he has found it possible to bless this world around him and appreciate its beauty despite his own conditions is he given the opportunity to seek renewal as the albatross falls from around his neck and the ship begins its journey homeward. The journey is a ghastly one, made possible by the reanimation of the corpses as they became filled by spirits that worked the lines and took the helm, but eventually he is brought into his own home port and the lights are shown to signal a need for the pilot boat before the ship sinks like lead into the sea. From here, the mariner takes a more confident step toward redemption by studying with the old miser, offering up his prayers as often as he can and wandering the land trying to save other young men from making the mistakes he made. Works Cited Bostetter, Edward E. “The Nightmare World of The Ancient Mariner.” Coleridge: A Collection of Critical Essays. K. Coburn (Ed.). New York: Prentice Hall, 1967. Brisman, Leslie. “Coleridge and the Supernatural.” Studies in Romanticism. Vol. 21, Summer 1982. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Dyck, Sara. “Perspective in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Studies in English Literature. Vol. 13, Autumn 1973. Harding, D. W. “The Theme of The Ancient Mariner.” Experience into Words Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974. Piaget, Jean. “Mariner: Moral Categories Inadequate.” Structuralism. Chaninah Maschler (Trans.). London: Routledge. Read More