Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is an epic gothic poem in the romantic period that emphasizes the importance of seeing the beauty in all of God’s creatures. The poem had some contributions by other writers at times, but Coleridge had the most influence on the poem as a whole. Coleridge’s mental illness and his inner struggles with guilt, depression, and “religious melancholy” come through as a constant theme throughout his poem. (White)
Coleridge’s writings were said to be proof that the writer suffered from medical disorders. He suffered with depression of “spirits” and brooding. He was also troubled by an overwhelming sense of guilt and religious melancholy, which was described as sadness without reason. He considered
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Though he struggled with depression Coleridge was a very religious man and believed in the spirit as a free moral agent. (White) Religion and the idea of the soul as separate from the body is a recurring factor in the poem. When the crew is suffering after the albatross is shot down the mariner tries to pray to heaven and says his “soul” is in agony. (Coleridge, 640) He uses religious imagery throughout the poem but we see Coleridge continue to go back to the importance of the religious soul of the mariner and how it is affected by what he has …show more content…
He wanders the world and the “agony returns” until he can tell his story. (Coleridge, 648) The story hangs as a burden on him as he travels alone through the world. This burden is like the burden of depression, the struggles of people dealing with it alone, and the need to tell others. Coleridge, along with his mariner, exhibits the feelings of “self-blame” that one with depression deals with along with a feeling that their problems are a form of “punishment for past misdeeds”. (White)
In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” the theme of mental illness is constant in the mariner’s struggle with guilt and penance after shooting down the albatross. The message he is trying to get across is the importance of seeing the beauty in all of God’s creatures but you can’t help but notice the dark and gothic style of this epic poem. Coleridge’s struggle with guilt and depression ultimately came through in the mariner as he deals with the burden of guilt in retelling his tale again and again, over time, to those who must hear
The reader might not understand how to interpret the stanza; they could interpret however they wanted to. Coleridge placed the glosses in so that the reader would understand the Mariner woke up and realized that he had done his penance. These...
As delineated in paragraph one, Coleridge’s poetic field is one rampant with erratic thought and ultimate change. The proposed subject of the poem, an eolian harp, is virtually abandoned and replaced with veneration of a God as well as a lover. One would think that such a fickle publication would be kept isolated by its author. Although, Coleridge may have staked importance in showing his adoration for God publicly. Hence,
Furthermore, Wordsworth’s assertion of feelings as the effects of an action or a situation, which means that actions should influence the emotions of the character and not the other way around, is dissimilar to The Raven’s character’s feeling of desperation in which he succumbed to his distress. However, the lesson derived from the bizarre workings of the human mind in preferring more devotion to the pain for the sake of “preserving the memory,” as “The Raven” illustrates, exposes to us how a particular person behaves towards grief. The statement thus proves in relation to Coleridge’s statement of the readers’ elicitation of the poem is more significant than the poem itself (in reference to his emphasis on the importance of the “Return”). Another variation between Wordsworth and Coleridge is that the former claims that the writer must bring the language near to the language of men, whilst the latter believes that the language of poetry should beautiful and elevated. “The Raven” in this case
John Keats’s illness caused him to write about his unfulfillment as a writer. In an analysis of Keats’s works, Cody Brotter states that Keats’s poems are “conscious of itself as the poem[s] of a poet.” The poems are written in the context of Keats tragically short and painful life. In his ...
Samuel Coleridge was an amazing poet. Many of his poems have a crazy, mystical feeling to them. This, for the most part, is because he was usually high on drugs when he wrote his poems. His poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, is the poem that brought about many popular, widely written-about topics. The movies, The Pirates of the Caribbean, come from this poem. The whole idea of people being dead, but still, somehow, able to function comes from this poem. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is one of the most influential poems of the English language. A sailor tells a story to a young wedding guest. Here is a brief summary: the sailor was on a ship which got caught in a current, and carried to the far south, becoming trapped in ice. After a long time, an albatross showed up, and mysteriously, the ice gave way for the ship to escape and sail north. The mariner made a big mistake. He says in his story, “With my crossbow, I shot the albatross.” When they got to the equator, they hit the doldrums, where there was no wind to push the ship any further. The superstitious sailors assumed that it was because the mariner had shot the albatross. A mysterious skeleton ship came along, and death took the whole crew, but the man who had shot the albatross. The dead bodies kept staring at him. After a while, when he was about to die of dehydration and starvation, the sailor started to appreciate and respect nature. The albatross, which had been hung around his neck, fell off into the sea. It started to rain. The winds picked up. The sailor would be free, finally. Except, he needed the crew to help work the ship. They woke up and helped move the sails and steer the ship back home. When he reached the harbor, the souls all le...
In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner is telling his story to a bypassing guest at the wedding, and he is describing the experience of being alone at sea surrounded by only water and his dead crewmates. Coleridge creates dramatic suspense and mystery in this passage through the uses of repetition, simile and imagery.
The main theme of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem is to learn from your mistakes. After telling his tale to the Wedding Guest, the Ancient Mariner realized that the murder of the Albatross was a mistake and lived a life of penance. The act of murder was an impulsive act because the Mariner felt threatened by the Albatross their actions. The deaths of both birds brought about memories from both the Ancient Mariner and Hagar which they shared with other people, the Wedding Guest and Murray F. Lees. These memories help them to realize the mistakes they made. Through their own personal recollections, the Ancient Mariner and Hagar both achieved a better understanding of their lives and in turn were able to die with a sense of contentment and relief.
Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” appears to deal with the sublime in a similar way to that of Burke. We see instances of sheer terror, and the devastating effects wrought by dread. How do experiences of terror and the realization of mortality solicit the sublime within these texts? Much like Frankenstein, as well as in “Mont
...ous allegory represents Christian ideals such as sin, forgiveness, and prayer. In addition, Coleridge’s use of language and form contribute to the message conveyed in the text. The form fluctuates throughout the text by use of different rhyme schemes, loose meter, and stanzas in length varying four to nine lines. The variety of form could be representative the array of interpretations of this text. Coleridge conveys profound religious meaning by using symbolic language with interpretive representations. Although his use of elevated language possibly narrowed the audience, that could have been his intentions due to the complexities of this philosophical poem. In the end, Coleridge’s depiction of the Mariner’s journey ultimately conveys the Christian ideal, which is to love and appreciate all creatures created by God, whether Albatross or snake.
The unknown authors portray the two themes through detail and emotion. "The Seafarer" creates a storyline of a man who is "lost" at sea. There is a major reference to the concept of the sea and how it "captures" the soul and leaves a lonely feeling. The character is set to know the consequences of the sea, but something keeps calling him back to it. "And yet my heart wanders away, My soul roams with sea, the whales' home, wandering to the widest corners of the world, returning ravenous with desire, Flying solitary, screaming, exciting me to the ocean, breaking oaths on the curve of a wave." (lines 58-64). This poem also grasps the concept of religion and how it plays a role in this work.
Moreover, these various fragments all combine to instill a sense of ambiguity throughout the poem. In a sense, as the poem progresses, the audience discovers further and more troublesome questions regarding its message and its implications. The audience, perhaps, even begins to wonder if there are indeed absolute answers or whether Coleridge consciously intended to create an unresolved poem. Amid this unsettling tumult of questions, one is left to dedicatedly follow Coleridge’s journey in a sequential manner in an attempt to consider and ponder these ambiguities as they arise. Inevitably, however, lingering questions will ...
As the ancient Mariner described his adventures at sea to the Wedding-Guest, the Guest became saddened because he identified his own selfish ways with those of the Mariner. The mariner told the Guest that he and his ship-mates were lucky because at the beginning of their voyage they had good weather. The mariner only saw what was on the surface -- he did not see the good weather as evidence that Someone was guiding them. Also, when he shot the Albatross, the Mariner did not have any reason for doing so. The Albatross did nothing wrong, yet the Mariner thought nothing of it and without thinking of the significance of the act, he killed the bird. At this, the Guest was reminded of how self-absorbed he, too, was, and the sinful nature of man. At the beginning of the poem he was very much intent on arriving at the wedding on time. He did not care at all about what it was that the Mariner had to tell him; he did not want to be detained even if the Mariner was in trouble. Instead, he spoke rudely to the mariner, calling him a "gray-beard loon", and tried to go on his own way.
However, in the two works by Coleridge, the imagination takes on different roles in each world. In the Ancient Mariner, the imagination is the substance that holds all life together, much like how the millio...
He has to feel a pain in his chest that becomes unbearable until he sees a certain soul that is the right one to tell. No matter what. In the long poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge has three lessons about human life: supernatural, pride, and suffering. In “Rime” by Sam Coleridge, the mariner goes through many supernatural events that scare him into submission. Coleridge does a great job of describing the scenery around the boat that the mariner resides in.
Through alliteration and imagery, Coleridge turns the words of the poem into a system of symbols that become unfixed to the reader. Coleridge uses alliteration throughout the poem, in which the reader “hovers” between imagination and reality. As the reader moves through the poem, they feel as if they are traveling along a river, “five miles meandering with a mazy motion” (25). The words become a symbol of a slow moving river and as the reader travels along the river, they are also traveling through each stanza. This creates a scene that the viewer can turn words into symbols while in reality they are just reading text. Coleridge is also able to illustrate a suspension of the mind through imagery; done so by producing images that are unfixed to the r...