The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
1772–1834

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is the premier poet-critic of modern English tradition, distinguished for the scope and influence of his thinking about literature as much as for his innovative verse. Active in the wake of the French Revolution as a dissenting pamphleteer and lay preacher, he inspired a brilliant generation of writers and attracted the patronage of progressive men of the rising middle class.
In his poem The Rime O The Ancient Mariner An ancient Mariner meeteth three gallants bidden to a wedding feast, and detaineth one. The Wedding-Guest is spell-bound by the eye of the old seafaring man, and constrained to hear his tale. The Mariner tells how the ship sailed southward with a good wind and fair weather, till it reached the Line. The Wedding-Guest hearth the bridal music; but the Mariner continued his tale.
The mariner's tale begins with his ship departing on its journey. Despite initial good fortune, the ship is driven south by a storm and eventually reaches Antarctica. An albatross appears and leads them out of the Antarctic, but even as the albatross is praised by the ship's crew, the mariner shoots the bird ("with my cross-bow / I shot the albatross"). The crew is angry with the mariner, believing the albatross brought the south wind that led them out of the Antarctic. However, the sailors change their minds when the weather becomes warmer and the mist disappears ("'Twas right, said they, such birds to slay / that bring the fog and mist"). However, they made a grave mistake in supporting this crime, as it arouses the wrath of spirits who then pursue the ship "from the land of mist and snow"; the south wind that had initially led them from the land of ice now sends the ship into uncharted waters, where it is becalmed.
And lo! the Albatross proved a bird of good omen, and followeth the ship as it returned northward through fog and floating ice. The ancient Mariner inhospitably killeth the pious bird of good omen. His shipmates cry out against the ancient Mariner for killing the bird of good luck. But when the fog cleared off, they justify the same, and thus make themselves accomplices in the crime. The fair breeze continues; the ship enters the Pacific Ocean, and sails northward, even till it reaches the Line. The ship hath been suddenly becalmed. And the Albatross begins to be avenged.
The sailors change their minds again and blame the mariner for the torment of their thirst. In anger, the crew forces the mariner to wear the dead albatross about his neck, perhaps to illustrate the burden he must suffer from killing it, or perhaps as a sign of regret ("Ah! Well a-day! What evil looks / Had I from old and young! / Instead of the cross, the albatross / About my neck was hung"). Eventually, the ship encounters a ghostly vessel. On board are Death (a skeleton) and the "Night-mare Life-in-Death" (a deathly-pale woman), who are playing dice for the souls of the crew. With a roll of the dice, Death wins the lives of the crew members and Life-in-Death the life of the mariner, a prize she considers more valuable. Her name is a clue to the mariner's fate: he will endure a fate worse than death as punishment for his killing of the albatross.
One by one, all of the crew members die, but the mariner lives on, seeing for seven days and nights the curse in the eyes of the crew's corpses, whose last expressions remain upon their faces. Eventually, this stage of the mariner's curse is lifted after he appreciates the sea creatures swimming in the water. Despite his cursing them as "slimy things" earlier in the poem ("Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs / upon the slimy sea"), he suddenly sees their true beauty and blesses them ("a spring of love gush'd from my heart and I bless'd them unaware"); suddenly, as he manages to pray, the albatross falls from his neck and his guilt is partially expiated. The bodies of the crew, possessed by good spirits, rise again and steer the ship back home, where it sinks in a whirlpool, leaving only the mariner behind. A hermit on the mainland had seen the approaching ship and had come to meet it with a pilot and the pilot's boy in a boat. When they pull him from the water, they think he is dead, but when he opens his mouth, the pilot has a fit. The hermit prays, and the mariner picks up the oars to row. The pilot's boy goes crazy and laughs, thinking the mariner is the devil, and says, "The Devil knows how to row." As penance for shooting the albatross, the mariner, driven by guilt, is forced to wander the earth, tell his story, and teach a lesson to those he meets
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
After relaying the story, the mariner leaves, and the wedding guest returns home, and wakes the next morning "a sadder and a wiser man".

Characteristic of The Poem

The Mariner's act of shooting the albatross (that had once brought good luck to his ship) is the mother of irrational, self-defeating acts. He never offers a good explanation for why he does it, and his crewmates get so upset that they hang the dead albatross around his neck as a burden, so he won't forget what he did. To have an albatross around your neck is to have a constant reminder of a big mistake you made. Instead of the gift that keeps on giving, it's the blunder that keeps on taking. As in, "I spent all my money on that motorcycle because I thought it would be cool, but now I can't sell it, and it's too expensive to maintain. That thing is just an albatross around my neck."
Through stages of penance, repentance, absolution and redemption, Coleridge is able to depict the idea of salvation in ‘The Rime of Ancient Mariner’.
The Rime of Ancient Mariner is one of the most famous three poems of S. T. Coleridge. The poem was planned by Wordsworth and Coleridge on the afternoon of the 20th November, 1797, when they were walking in the Quantocks.
The poem has given rise to a multitude of interpretations, stressing the existential, meaningless murder of the albatross in an incomprehensible world; the Christian pattern of sin, confession, and penance within a sacramental universe; the functioning of the symbolic or nightmare imagination as the Mariner’s fate unfolds; and the necessity, even the desperation, of narration. Coleridge himself after the first publication appended marginalia that recapitulated the poem in an effort to clarify, although what it actually did was to retell the plot at a slant and thereby distance the author, as well as the frame, from the poem’s peculiar and disturbing nature, relinquishing responsibility for interpretation to each reader.