The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Duality is perhaps the major theme of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Duality is the notion that all things have both good and bad within them. Coleridge's poem presents nature and humanity as...

The living albatross is a symbol of God's creation and of innocence. The dead albatross is a symbol of sin. When the Mariner kills the albatross, the other sailors see this as a sign of bad luck...

The figures of Death and Life-in-Death make their appearance in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner after the mariner kills the albatross and brings down a curse upon his fellow shipmates. The two...

The Mariner kills the albatross because he associated the lack of wind with it. At first all the men thought the bird was good luck since a good wind blew and they moved swiftly. Then, the wind...

Coleridge's poem is rich with imagery and contains interesting uses of personification as it develops the theme of respect and love of nature, especially living creatures. Imagery is description...

The albatross is symbolic of a few things. As a living bird, the albatross is symbolic of innocence, goodness, God's creation, and even God's love and salvation. In stanza 16 of part 1, the sailors...

The line "He prayeth best, who loveth best" is the moral the Mariner learns from his supernatural journey. It echoes the theology of Augustine in Confessions, which Samuel Taylor Coleridge was very...

As an arch-Romantic, Coleridge believed that nature was a living force in its own right, and that we as human beings were an intrinsic part of nature. Humans and animals, plants, trees, and rocks,...

In Part IV of the poem, the wedding guest is also afraid of the Mariner. At this part of the poem, the Mariner has just described how Death came to the ship and took all of the crew. The wedding...

After the mariner shoots the albatross, the crew is upset with him because they believe that the bird caused the breeze to blow. The crew is then stuck in the doldrums, and their ship does not...

Coleridge wanted his poem to be spoken by a fictitious narrator in order to avoid giving the impression that he was speaking about an experience of his own. He invented the ancient mariner for this...

In "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," the albatross is a good omen for sailors and sometimes even represented the soul of a lost sailor. So, to kill the albatross is to bring bad luck. Hung on the...

A ballad in literature is a narrative poem that usually tells a dramatic story. Early ballads in English and Irish literature that were handed down orally are folk ballads; their authors are...

Personification is assigning human attributes to an animal or non-human object. Death, for example, is personified as a woman below: Her lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were...

There are a number of beautiful similes and metaphors in "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and Coleridge also uses the devices of symbolism and personification. Here is a list of some similes (line...

As his story begins, the Mariner's ship enters icy waters. There, he unthinkingly shoots the innocent and helpful Albatross with his cross-bow, killing it. The mariner does this because he can. He...

Alliteration occurs when words beginning with the same consonant are placed in close proximity to each other. Internal rhyme occurs when words rhyme within a line or in the middle of separate...

In lines 41-44, the Mariner tells the guest that a storm began to blow the ship south, toward the South Pole. They encounter mist, snow, and icebergs. Eventually, they are surrounded by ice. The...

The quote you have indicated in your question is a full stanza that comes from the second section of this great poem and comes directly after the mariner fatefully killed the albatross that is...

Although the majority of the poem takes place at sea, the initial setting of the poem is a wedding at which the mariner is a guest, as is the person whom he finds to relay his tale. The mariner...

In Part IV of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the Mariner continues to detain the wedding-guest in order to relate his tale to him further. The guest fears that the Mariner is a ghost, but the...

Yes, all kimfuji says I agree with, but we need to back up a bit. The Ancient Mariner's enlightenment begins when he carelessly kills the albatross: At length did cross an Albatross, Thorough the...

In Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the mariner is cursed because he has killed the albatross, showing a criminal disregard for a creature of nature. Everyone on the ship is cursed (the...

Coleridge repeats several phrases, ideas, and segments through the text of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and often the repetition is to emphasize something that happened or the danger of the...

Although the mariner is the one who shoots the albatross, a friendly bird at first viewed as a good omen by the crew, with his cross-bow, all the sailors share the guilt for the crime. That is...

Another role of the wedding guest in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is to function as a stand-in for the reader. The wedding guest provides a reason for us to hear the...

The language of this poem is deliberately archaic, a conscious choice on the part of the poet to evoke the sense that this "ancient" mariner is living in a world of legend, distanced from...

The struggles throughout the Mariner's voyage, as he recounts them to the Wedding Guest, have been caused by his sin of senselessly killing the Albatross. In Part V, after his men have been killed,...

"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is, to a large extent, an allegory of sin and redemption. At the time he wrote the poem, Coleridge was becoming ever more convinced of the truth of orthodox...

I edited your question to make it slightly clearer, so I hope it still asks the original question that you wanted to ask on enotes. It is clear that the albatross was hung on the Mariner's neck as...

It is important to remember the form that this excellent and unforgettable poem was written in. Coleridge wrote "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" as a literary ballad. The ballad form uses simple...

The mariner compares himself to the snakes because until he is able to bless the snakes "unaware" he has no appreciation for their beauty. Before, he looked as them as "slimy...

The narrator is an old, weathered, and wizened seaman who meets "three gallants" on their way to a wedding feast. He is able to detain one of them, and he proceeds to relate to this young man his...

The ancient mariner's encounter with the supernatural begins soon after he, for no discernible reason, kills the albatross that helped his crew free themselves from entrapment in the ice. The...

The Mariner is cursed, evidently by God, for killing the albatross for pure sport or amusement. When he finally manages to return to his home port aboard a ship manned by a ghostly crew, he meets a...

Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads was such an important milestone in the history of Romanticism that the Romantic period in England is sometimes dated from 1798, the year it first appeared...

This seems like a straightforward question, but it actually can be a little complicated. Most of the story is told in the voice of the ancient Mariner—hence the name of the poem—but the poem itself...

Coleridge, the author of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," saw imagination as related to intuition, and as a faculty that develops in communion with nature and with the transcendental, that which...

Samuel Taylor Coleridge includes the Wedding Guest only at the beginning and end of the poem; as the Mariner’s audience, he supplies a crucial part of the frame around the tale. There is a clear...

It is important to realise how these "slimy things" compare to the "water snakes" in this poem. Remember that the "slimy things" appear when the death of the Albatross begins to be avenged by the...

We are told that at the end of Part IV of the poem, the Mariner notices the beauty of the water snakes in the sea surrounding the ship. It is clear that the Mariner is attracted to them for their...

This stanza comes in the second section of the poem after the Mariner has shot the fateful albatross and it is clear that the slaying of this innocent bird has consequences that cause the other...

A young man who is undoubtedly well-dressed and in a hurry to get to a wedding is stopped by a seedy-looking old sailor who wants to tell him a story. The sailor grabs hold of the wedding guest's...

The Sublime is the emotion of awe and terror we experience when we gaze on nature and feel both overwhelmed by its beauty but at the same time frightened and humbled by its grandeur and power. The...

Yes, so the Mariner has killed, for no reason except maybe boredom, an albatross. Things that were going well on the ship's journey, now turned bad. The ship that moved so freely was now...

In Part 1, the mariner stops the wedding guest, against the will of the guest, and begins to tell him his tale. The mariner tells how his ship sailed south toward the South Pole and found...

The previous post was extremely thorough. I would like to add one more element present in the poem. The relationship with nature as being one where human beings must live in harmony with the...

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a first-generation Romantic poet. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is filled with many of the characteristics of Romantic writing, including a respect for nature (the sin...

The Ancient Mariner is an allegorical figure: someone who represents humankind's innate sinfulness. He is ancient, not merely in the sense of being very old, but in the sense of going back to the...

In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the mariner, speaking to his captive audience, a wedding guest, describes the storm that overtakes his ship as a male winged beast, “tyrannous and strong,” who...