The Ancient Mariner Is a Wise Man (An Essay About The Rime of the Ancient Mariner)

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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...

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...This is probably my favorite poem that I’ve ever read. It has such influence on so many popular ideas today. It talks about loving and respecting nature, which I agree with completely. When I hear of people killing animals just for fun, it makes me mad. It’s hard to make me mad, but one thing that never fails is total lack of respect for nature, or anything, for that matter. I think we should all take a good hard look at a certain stanza of this poem again. “He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all.” If everyone understood these lines, and took them to heart, Coleridge would be very pleased, and the mariner’s penance would have not been served in vain. The world would be a better place. Man and nature would no longer be “out of tune.” This is the romantic poem of romantic poems.

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