Essay on Ancient mariner
Essay on Ancient marinerThe Rime of the Ancient Mariner
There is no explanation at all given of why the Mariner chooses the person that he does to hear his story. In fact, the poem is full of actions and events that are left unexplained; indeed, one can say that a principal theme in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is the ambiguity and ultimate mysteriousness of motive. The central crime of the poem, the Mariner’s killing of the Albatross, is a crime capriciously committed.
What kind of poem is “ The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” from the point of view of structure and style? To what extent is the Mariner believable as a character? Does he have the authenticity of identity that a reader would desire? What symbolic purpose does the Albatross serve in the poem?
The poem is written as a ballad, in the general form of the traditional ballad or early Elizabeth times. Coleridge uses the ballad stanza, a four-line stanza, rhyming a b c b, but he varies it considerably, with some stanzas extending up to nine lines. He is able to achieve a richer, more sweeping sense of the supernatural through these expansions; he is able to move beyond the more domesticated kind of supernaturalism of the homey four-line stanza.
He starts with the usual ballad stanza in the first of the poem, in order to make the reader acquainted with the verse form and with the poetic ethos of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” These early stanzas seem to anchor the reader’s mind. But in the twelfth stanza, the pattern changes to a a a b c b. By this time the reader has become at home in the poem. Interestingly, the change occurs, certainly by Coleridge’s deliberate intent, at the point in the poem when the Wedding-Guest makes his last major protest to the Mariner. The action of the voyage is about to begin. One example of the variation of the ballad form is that Coleridge throughout the poem will occasionally insert a line that does nothing to further the story ( see stanza three, Part 2) but that enriches the emotional texture of the poem.
Coleridge’s attraction to the ballad form was probably owing in great measure to the liberation it afforded him from the confines of modern life, a freedom it gave him to move spaciously within the unbounded areas of imaginative creation.
To what extent is the Mariner believable as a character? Does he have the authenticity of identity that a reader would desire?
There is certainly behind the character of the Mariner in the poem the traditional story of the Wandering Jew, a figure that had considerable influence on Romantic literature, used by P.B. Shelly, for example, in the accounts of Ahasuerus in Queen Mab and the Revolt of Islam. The story has a Jewish tradesman refusing Jesus a moment of rest as He carried His cross to Golgotha; the Jew receives consequently condemnation to life-in death. He is condemned to wandering from place to place, where he must tell of his sin until the Second Coming of Christ. Coleridge used the story again in “The Wandering of Cain.”
William Wordsworth was among the first to say that the Mariner has no character. But Charles Lamb, another contemporary of Coleridge, said the ancient Mariner as a character with feelings, faced with such happening as the poem tells about, “ dragged [him] along like Tom Piper’s magic whistle.” John Livingston Lowes in more recent times spoke if the real protagonist in the poem as the element Earth, Air, Fire, and Water
Irving Babbit echoed Wordsworth’s criticism in saying that the Mariner does not really act, but is acted upon only, and that the Mariner is an incarnation of the Romantic concern with the solitary. George Herbert Clarke has interpreted the ancient Mariner to be at one and the same time himself as a real character in the poem, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and all men; the Mariner is Representative Man, sinning, being punished, being redeemed.
One possibility, perhaps the best one, is to consider the Mariner as poet more than character in the sense in which we associate “personality” with characters in literature. As a poet who speaks (“I have strange power of speech….”), he does not have the obligation of a character to act. The poem should not be read really with the expectation with which one reads a novel. The Mariner is not what he is because he is involved with other human beings-but because he is alone.
What symbolic purpose does the Albatross serve in the poem?
This is a much-debated question. One critic, Mr. George Whalley, has discussed the Albatross as a symbol of the creative imagination, and he makes this interpretation by way of associating the Albatross with the wind, because the Mariner “killed the bird / That made the breeze to blow.” (Whalley’s italics.) Whalley notes that the bird is often in literature associated with imagination or inspiration. Professor Kathleen Coburn in her editing of Coleridge’s notebooks comments on the frequency with which Coleridge uses bird images for himself. There is certainly much cause for taking Whalley seriously. The Albatross is undoubtedly more than a piece of stage property.
John Livingston Lowes has spoken of the function of the Albatross as a unifying agent in the poem, binding together the voyage, the supernatural happenings, and the process of punishment that the Mariner must undergo; these, he says, are the principal structural elements in the work.
G.W. Knight in The Starlit Dome stresses that the Albatross is greeted as “ a Christian soul,” and that the bird can suggest a force of redemption in creation such as Christ is confessed to be, The Albatross like Christ could be interpreted as leading man from him primitive origins to moral and spiritual improvement. The fact that the Albatross is hung around the Mariners neck (rather than a cross) may suggest the death of Christ.
Robert Penn Warren directs attention to the way the killing of the Albatross in the poem is the compromising of the sacred values of hostility; the Mariner “inhospitably killeth the pious bird of good omen.” The killing of the Albatross becomes then symbolically a murder, for the bird loved the man who killed it. Because the crime has no motive, it has, Mr. Warren decides, symbolic connections with the original Fall of man. He points out a cluster of associations with the wind (creative force), the Albatross (friend and companion), and Mariner (imagination). The killing of the Albatross has gravity far beyond cruelty to animals – it is original sin.
Humphry House says that the prose gloss when added to the appearance, the character, and the power of the bird in the poem makes the killing of the Albatross as great as the murder of a human being. He calls attention to all the human acts in which the bird is associated in the poem: the Christian greeting; the friendly, trusting response of the Albatross; the sharing of food; the play between bird and crew. The Mariner’s crime is a crime against the most precious qualities of humanity.