the rime of the ancient mariner by samuel taylor coleridge

“Glimmer’d the white moonshine.’ With my crossbow/I shot the Albatross” (1. The moon is mentioned in the ballad for the first time in this line from the rime of the ancient mariner. The story in the rime of the ancient mariner takes a turn when the mariner, for unexplainable reasons, decided to shoot the albatross. The sailors, a group of superstitious people, also take this as good fortune and merrily set off on their journey. It creates the visual of a bright calm day a day that would be ideal for sailing. The imagery here is strong and evocative. Photo by Dylan McLeod on Unsplashįor example, when the sailors’ ship was being lowered, “The sun came up upon the left,/Out of the sea came he!/And he shone bright, and on the right/Went down into the sea./Higher and higher every day,/Till over the mast at noon-” (1. While they were off to a swift start and are being overseen by a peaceful bird of good fortune, the sun is mentioned frequently in a positive context. The Symbolism Of The Sun In Rime Of The Ancient Mariner. Their smooth sailing was further reinforced by an albatross, a gentle seabird that guided the ship. The mariner launches into a narration of how he was at sea with a ship of sailors.Īs they embarked on their voyage, their ship moved rapidly over the water thanks to a powerful wind. In this poem, the mariner stops and demands a wedding guest to listen to a story he has to tell. Throughout “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Coleridge achieves different perceptions of the sun and moon as the situation and mood of the ballad changes using symbolism, imagery, and diction. Photo by Nareeta Martin on UnsplashĬoleridge especially demonstrates this on the sun and the moon. Meanwhile, aspects of everyday life, such as an albatross, rain, and the sea, are twisted into mystical and unnatural elements. The plentiful bizarre elements of the story are ordinarily presented with little explanation throughout the mariner’s monologue. This poem is powerful in its writing, most notably, in Coleridge’s ability to make the normal seem unearthly and the unearthly seem normal.

Symbols In The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner. Rime refers to the frost that is often found on the periphery of ships and sails. The rime of the ancient mariner is a rhyme that portrays the journey of an ancient mariner. In other words, the title depicts what the poem means. In this lyrical ballad, a man going to his cousin’s wedding is stopped by an old, haggard mariner who tells him an eerie and paranormal story of how he made a dangerous mistake which triggered a series of strange events that ruined his life. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was written in the 1700s by Samuel Coleridge. Let’s start off this poetry analysis with a brief summary of the rime of the ancient mariner.

The rime of the ancient mariner by samuel taylor coleridge