The Rime of the Ancyent Mariner

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Author Centred Approach the Rime

The Rime of the Ancyent Mariner is a poem directly inspired by the events occurring in its author’s own life. Its fundamental message is powerfully conveyed across time and culture, and its textually “aesthetic dimensions” invites readers of all backgrounds to consider its literary quality.

Adopting an author-centred approach to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s, The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, reveals powerful influences in the life of the author which he sought to expound to a wider and spiritually disillusioned audience, through his allegorical construction of the text. The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere reflects the author’s own personal battles with guilt and punishment, a powerful and recurring theme embedded in the behavioural psyche of any hierarchal member, such that even today, two hundred years after the text was originally written, its message still permeates throughout contemporary culture. Most prominent in the poem’s creation however, is the author’s awareness and recognition of audience as he conveys his message using the voice of the narrating Mariner, to the extent that viewing the text incites its reader to assume the position of the intended reader: the captivated wedding guest.

A fundamental force guides the Mariner on his journey of self-discovery and spiritual awareness. This force is espoused by a belief in which Coleridge placed his faith when authoring The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere. Coleridge’s intention was to inform the reader of the fundamental spiritual fabric which the author perceived as the source of all ethereal influence and intervention, and over which the reader as a member could sew his or her own spiritual and moral actions and thoughts. The poem’s protagonist demonstrates such an action when he shoots and kills the Albatross. His lack of guilt in committing this action inspires the punishment which he receives, a punishment which is only ended when he learns to appreciate the beauty shown by one of the spiritual fabric’s living manifestations, the Watersnakes. The difficulty in escaping from this punishment lies in its need to be achieved unwittingly; only a pure and selfless appreciation could free the Mariner.

Such a scenario reflects strongly the beliefs of the Romantic Movement to which Coleridge subscribed at his time of writing. Central to the period in which Romanticism flourished was the affirmation of the need for a freer and more subjective expression of passion and personal feelings.

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