Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Humans naturally feel strongly about ones own personal religion, imagination, and individualism. Today freedom to think and speak for oneself is a common notion. In Europe during the end of the 18th century, freedom of thought was not as easy for the people. Artists express feelings and emotions through their art and for Samuel Taylor Coleridge, his poems illustrate what some people of his time period were afraid to say. During the Romantic era when imagination and nature was stressed, Samuel Coleridge used his poem Rime of the Ancient Mariner to reflect his ideas based on religion through symbols and poetry.
The importance of religion during the Romantic period was massive. The people of this time period often turned to religion when faced with unexplainable events. In an academic journal reviewing Coleridge’s poem, Christopher Stokes says, “(The poem) Focuses on the irrational moral order presented in the poem and its foundation in the Christian doctrine of original sin” (Stokes 1). Coleridge’s work is essentially a large prayer by having the Mariner learn through experience within his journey. At the beginning of part III the Mariner could not speak because he was so thirsty. The inability to speak comes from the punishment the Mariner received for his actions or in the Christian view, sins. In addition to speaking the Mariner also was cursed with the loss of ability to pray. The Mariner had to deal with the lack of water in the poem. The Mariner was forced to find a way out of the drought when he said, “With throats unslaked, with black lips baked,/ We could nor laugh nor wail;/ Through utter drought all dumb we stood!/ I bit my arm, I sucked the blood,/ And cried, A sail! a sail!” (Co...
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Al-Rashid, Amer H. M. "Between Flux And Fixity: Negotiations Of Space In Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner." Cross-Cultural Communication 7.3 (2011): 59-71. Academic Search Premier. Web. 21 Apr. 2014.
Greenblatt, Stephen, gen. ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 9th ed. Vol.
A. New York: Norton, 2012. Print.
Rudolf, Matthias. "Unspeakable Discovery: Romanticism And The “Rime Of The Ancient Mariner”." European Romantic Review 24.2 (2013): 185-210. Academic Search Premier. Web. 21 Apr. 2014.
Smith, C U. "Coleridge's "Theory Of Life." Journal Of The History Of Biology 32.1 (1999): 31-50. MEDLINE. Web. 21 Apr. 2014.
Stokes, Christopher. "My Soul In Agony": Irrationality And Christianity In The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner." Studies In Romanticism 50.1 (2011): 3-28. Academic Search Premier. Web. 21 Apr. 2014.
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.
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...
In many poems and other literary works, an animal or object is used to represent an emotion or foreshadow an omen. This use of symbolism gives the reader something to connect to and also make you think harder about the underlying message. For example, in the poem Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an Albatross bird is present in the story and makes a huge impact on the outcome. Also, in Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven, a black Raven bothers the main character the whole poem for various reasons and means different things too. These two instances of the use of a mysterious symbolic bird in Rime of the Ancient Mariner and The Raven can be compared based on appearance, actions, and influence.
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,
Texts of the Romanticism era aim to emancipate the ideological values of the enlightenment in revolt to the products of the Age of Reason and exalted the limitless boundaries of creativity through the immeasurable capability of the imagination. The Romantic artist indulges in the gratification they can derive from the supreme faculty of the mind, allowing engagement of social and moral issues through what Coleridge saw as the ‘esemplastic power’ of the imagination. Coleridge’s Beliefs, as one of the earliest romantic poets, heavily influenced the idealized perception of subsequent Romantics artists. Coleridge’s greatest contribution to the construction of these values was manifested in the autobiographic discourse of Biographia Literature,
Coleridge uses religious and natural symbolism, which correspond with one another and play the most important roles in this poem. Although there are many different interpretations of this poem, one idea that has remained common throughout the poem is that of the religious symbolism present. Especially that of Christ and his ability to save, which was present throughout this poem. The symbolism is that of the albatross. The albatross saves the Mariner for bad weather and keeps the sailors in
In Samuel Coleridge’s conversation poems “The Eolian Harp” and “Frost at Midnight,” he reveals and communicates his situation in terms of religious feelings, where both his poems can speak to the audience in a quiet and personal voice revealing truth in terms of everyday experiences. Both poems use certain devices such as internal conflict, external conflict, symbolism, structure, and the theme of the association between God and nature to communicate the situation of the poet in terms of religious feelings. Both poems emphasize the importance of the natural world by presenting imagery and descriptions of the natural setting, and stating that nature itself is very closely tied with God and religion. Although Samuel Coleridge uses different plots, devices, and methods in both “The Eolian Harp” and “Frost at Midnight,” he manages to represent his religious views, the importance of nature, and the spiritual, religious, and mystical themes in both poems.
The key ingredient in this structure is that it is centered on the role of the human, for even though Romantic poetry is abundantly rich with descriptions of the natural world, Romantics are "humanists above all," describing the outer physical world only as it relates to man's self-reflective condition (202). This accounts for Wordsworth's fear that an all-consuming observation of the material world would "tyrannize over the mind and imagination" (202). But to fully explicate his definition of the greater Romantic lyric, Abrams turns not to Wordsworth but to Coleridge as the main focal point, for Coleridge is its chief author and innovator, having brought forth the Romantic lyric in "The Eolian Harp" in 1796, a full two years before Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" (204).
In Chapter 8, Taylor defines and outlines the change from pre-modern to modern societies. Previously, our world was ordered independently of us. Individuals looked for their identities by means of their social standing or religion. However, “modern freedom and autonomy center us on ourselves, and the ideal of authenticity requires that we discover and articulate our own identity” (Taylor 81). This change goes back to the end of the 18th century and is evident in art and poetry. In modern society, our feelings are coming from within. Our human feelings are our nature, which is deeply personal. Yet, Taylor reminds his readers that in modern poetry there is an
He starts the story immediately with a lot of detail creating the setting of where the mariner is going and to whom the mariner is going to tell his tale. He chooses three men on their way to a wedding and one in particular we know as the “wedding guest.” When we think of a wedding we think of a happy event where two people are united under the grace of god. The mariner stops him from going in this event though and tells him the story, at the end of which he tells him that he doesn't need anything but god to be happy. The detail and emphasis of the wedding symbolizes temporary happiness on earth. The mariner explains that loving god and having him in your life is “Oh sweeter than the marriage feast, 'Tis sweeter far to me” (Coleridge, lines 86-87). Here the mariner is saying that the temporary happiness on earth that one may get from a marriage celebration is nice but it is nowhere near as good as the love of god you get from making a religious transformation. Coleridge explains all of the sing and drinking and happiness going on in the wedding as the mariner is telling the story but in the end the mariner tells the guest that none of that is as good as the love of god. And we can see that wedding guest actually learns something from the story because he decides to not go into the wedding but rather “and now the wedding-guest. Turned from the bridegroom's door. He went ...
Throughout the beginning of the poem there are religious undertones Coleridge uses words like bended knee and reverential to highlight a religious belief and perhaps a plea to God to cure the “Pains of Sleep” this is interesting as he seems to feel “humbled” by the spirit presence. He mentions being weak but realises he is blest by this power. The religious undertone suggests to me a feeling of utter helplessness.
Coleridge is another poet who had a vast amount of success in the Romantic Period due to his individualism and depiction of nature. Coleridge wrote most of his poetry with his use of imagination. He had a whole chapter, Chapter 13, in his Biographia Literaria. In his poetry, Coleridge includes many examples of solitude. In his poem The Rime of The Ancient Mariner, and Frost at Midnight, both characters are experience solitude. Coleridge had a lasting impression on literary criticism. Coleridge 's writing addressed questions about “the relation between literary language and ordinary language, or between poetry and philosophy, or between perception and imagination”(9th, 439) Through use of imagination and solitude, Coleridge established his individualism.
Samuel Coleridge, a romantic poet, wrote many poems that used the sense of imagination. According to Coleridge, “Imagination is the primary imagination that a person holds to as the living power of all human perceptions, and as a repetition
In two works by Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, both works regard the imagination as vitally important. In the Ancient Mariner, the imagination (or rather, the lack of it) condemns the Mariner to a kind of hell, with the fiends of sterility, solitude, and loneliness: “’God save thee, Ancient Mariner, from the fiends that plague thee thus! Why look’st thou so?’ ‘With my crossbow I shot the Albatross’”. In Kubla Khan, the imagination of an external being, the narrator that Coleridge created, the ideal critic, can create a masterpiece that far outstrips the meager piece of work that even the emperor of a huge, rich civilization can produce: “I would build that dome in air, a sunny dome! Those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, and all should cry, Beware! Beware!” In Kubla Khan, the imagination can even make people fear an otherwise inconsequential event, sequence, or organism.
A significant theme in Samuel Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," is Christianity, which is portrayed through the Mariner’s epic journey. This text is set between the physical world and the metaphysical (spiritual world), similar to religious teachings found in the Bible. With the use of vivid descriptions and strong language in this ballad, moral lessons appear that connect both man and God in order to discover an innate bond and understanding. Though this tale is overwhelmingly bizarre and dark, the moral lessons taught are in line with central aspects of both the romantic period and the Christian religion. In Coleridge's ballad, "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," many Christian ideals are represented throughout the treacherous journey of the Mariner, such as sin, forgiveness, and prayer.