The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

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...

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...

In this poem, the mariner recounts the story of how he killed an innocent albatross that had been previously labelled as a good omen by the crew. The crew consequently fell into a series of...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The mariner tells his story to a random younger guy who's on his way to attend a family wedding. This guest is actually outdoors and on his way into the wedding, and is a stranger to the mariner,...

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...

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...

This passage from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is an excellent example of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's skillful use of sound devices. The lines exhibit the following poetic devices: Alliteration...

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...

There are several allusions in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." An allusion is an indirect reference to something outside of the work. Writers tend to allude to things...

To a certain extent, what is onomatopoeiac and what is not is a matter of opinion. Onomatopoeia is a technique wherein the sound of a word seems to reflect its meaning. This can include words which...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 answer as to why exactly the Mariner chooses that particular wedding guest is not given; however, readers do get a little bit of insight into why the Mariner has to tell the story at all. Near...

The mariner is old (ancient), described as having a long, grey beard. The mariner kills an albatross, apparently for no reason, even though the albatross had seemed to lead them out of the...

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...

Another possible "message" in this poem is that of death, repentance, and resurrection. There is a considerable amount of Christian symbolism in the poem as well as outright allusions to...

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...

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...

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 poem reflects the characteristics of the Romantic period in that it does reflect a love of and respect for nature, it uses supernatural elements of a fantastic nature, and elevates the common...

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...

Passage 1: At length did cross an albatross, Thorough the fog it came; As if it had been a Christian soul, We hailed it in God’s name. This passage is significant because it introduces the...

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a poem about respecting the environment. The great sin the Mariner commits, for which he and his crew members are cursed is killing an albatross for no reason....

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...

The poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in which an old sailor accosts a guest at a wedding and tells him a fantastic tale of peril and redemption, uses what is known...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Imagery can be a difficult kind of figurative language to discuss because it is varied and encompasses a lot of other types of figurative language. Basically any kind of figurative language that...

The Ancient Mariner and his crew are forced to suffer for his unnecessary killing of the albatross, but this is not yet penance, as this curse visits involuntary suffering on the men. The Ancient...