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COLERIDGE The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (SUPERNATURAL ELEMENTS (The…
COLERIDGE
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
The opening poem in the
Lyrical Ballads
The story of a crime and its punishment
told by the protagonist himself, an old mariner condemned to expiate his crime, to travel for ever from land to land telling his story and teaching, by his example,
love and reverence for all God’s creatures
.
THE RIME
is a psychological study of
guilt, suffering and expiation
.
MAIN
THEMES
:
The killing of albatross
- artistic reading:
the mariner as an artist
in search for truth and knowledge. He is saved by
the power of imagination
.
The killing of albatross
- religious reading:
the crime is against the sacred law which links all living things in an ideal brotherhood.
Its killing is like a sacrilege:
a sin against nature and therefore against God
.
Dramatic atmosphere of
medieval ballads
Mystery and supernatural
Exotic lands
Musicality
: He makes use of alliteration, repetition, assonance, onomatopoeia, internal rhyme - quatrains with rhyme scheme ABCB - the metrical unit is the iambus
SYMBOLS
Blessing of water snakes
(part IV): the mariner re-establishes the pact of love with the natural world
Rain
(part V): it represents a natural baptism, the re-birth of the Mariner’s soul
SUPERNATURAL ELEMENTS
The Mariner
: his “glittering eyes” endowed with a hypnotic power
The Albatross
: it is a sacred bird
The medieval
Dans Macabre
represented by the spectre ship carrying two ghosts on board, Death and Life -in-Death
Unnatural creatures
: sea monsters, spirits, angels
Unnatural events
: the ship moves without wind and noise – a crew of dead people
INTERPRETATIONS
Allegory of life
: the crew represents mankind – the albatross the pact of love that unites all God’s creatures – the evil deed of a single person has repercussions on others
Moral parable of man
: from the original sin (killing of the albatross) through punishment (Mariner’s isolation), repentance (the blessing of the water snakes) penitence (the obsessive repetition of the story) and the final redemption.