in the following:

The Sun came up upon the left,
Out of the sea came he!

A paradox is a statement that seem self-contradictory or absurd. Imagery is description that uses any of the five senses of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. The most famous paradoxical image in the poem is "water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink."

It is also paradoxical to call the personified death above "life-in-death" and to describe her as both red-lipped and yellow haired and white like leprosy. This suggests, paradoxically, that it is the red and yellow sun bringing death, a seeming contradiction as we usually associate sun with life-giving force.

The corpses, paradoxically, don't decompose or smell bad: "Nor rot nor reek did they." (This foreshadows that they are not really dead.)

The personification reinforces the idea that all of nature is alive with a divine life force and should be treated with respect. The paradoxical imagery underscores the supernatural strangeness of the Mariner's experience.

In Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the speaker employs personification when describing the actions of the sun and moon. For example, at the start of Part II, the sun is described as rising to the right of the speaker's point of view, out of the sea, and hiding in the mist. The act of hiding is a human behavior, not a celestial one, and the speaker also refers to the sun with the personal pronoun of "he."

In Part IV, the speaker treats the moon similarly, but using the personal pronoun of "she" while describing the moon rising over the sea "softly," which implies that the moon, like a person, has a choice to rise in a manner other than the one described here.

Paradoxical imagery is observable in the poem at the end of Part I, when the speaker discusses the appearance of the moonlight:

Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,
Glimmered the white Moon-shine.

Fog is a natural phenomenon that typically obscures objects and places in a dangerously opaque way, but in this context, the fog operates as a translucent screen; the moonlight glimmers through the moisture of the fog, suggesting that the power of light is actually stronger than darkness, literally and figuratively.

In Part IV, the speaker describes himself as completely alone, surrounded by the lifeless, soulless bodies of his crew, but then he mentions that "a thousand thousand slimy things / Lived on; and so did I," suggesting that he is not alone after all. The truth of this paradox is interesting, however, as the speaker feels spiritually and emotionally alone, a feeling perhaps enhanced by all the slimy things he sees in the seas.

There is lots of Personification throughout.  Most of it has to do with the sun.  The sun takes on human qualities and develops a pronoun of "he."

"The sun came up upon the left, Out of the see came he! And he shone bright, and on the right Went down into the see."

Then an example of a paradox could be when they are surrounded with water, yet cannot drink a drop.  They are dying of thirst, yet cannot drink the salt water.

"Water, water, everywhere, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink."

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 number follows each):

"red as a rose is she" (34)

"as who pursued with yell and blow/ Still treads the shadow of his foe" (46-47)

"as green as emerald" (54)

"like noises in a swound" (62)

"as if it had been a Christian soul" (65)

"like God's own head" (97)

"as idle as a painted ship/ upon a painted ocean" 117-118)

"like a witch's oils" (129)

"like restless gossameres" (184)

"as through a grate" (186)

"as white as leprosy" (192) 

"fear at my heart, as at a cup, / my life-blood seemed to sip" (204)

"like the whizz of my cross-bow" (223)

"as is the ribbed sea-sand" (227)

"as dry as dust" (247)

"like April hoar-frost spread" (268)

"like lifeless tools" (339)

"like a pawing horse let go" (389)

"clear as glass" (472)

"like music on my heart" (499)

"like one that hath been seven days drowned / My body lay afloat" (552)

"like night" (586)

"like one that hath been stunned" (622)

Finally, this entire stanza is a simile:

"Like one, that on a lonesome road/ Doth walk in fear and dread, / And having once turned round walks on, / And turns no more his head; / Because he knows, a frightful fiend / Doth close behind him tread." (446)

Metaphors are not as frequent, but here is one powerful example: "An orphan's curse would drag to hell / A spirit from on high; / But oh! more horrible than that / Is the curse in a dead man's eye!" (257) This compares an orphan's curse to the curse of a man who has died with his eyes open and cursing someone.

Here is a metaphor/simile comparing the sails of the Mariner's ship when he returns to harbor to fallen leaves: "I never saw aught like to them, / Unless perchance it were / Brown skeletons of leaves that lag / My forest-brook along." (533)

A couple of the above similes are also personification. The sun peering through a dungeon grate and fear sipping the life-bud from his heart give human characteristics to the sun and to fear.

Besides the powerful symbol of the albatross representing guilt, there are at least two other important symbols. The "slimy things" referred to in a couple different places represent the Mariner's lack of appreciation of nature--the very sin that made him shoot the albatross. The "water-snakes," on the other hand, show the beauty of nature. When the Mariner loves and blesses the water-snakes, he loses his guilt (the albatross falls into the sea) and he is able to pray again. The water-snakes represent the redemption found in loving "all things both great and small." 

Coleridge use a plethora of poetic and literary devices in his poem, adding to the beauty and depth of its language and sentiment.

Coleridge uses all of the above repeatedly in the poem.  One example is the personification of the sun's behavior as the sailors all become incapacitated with thirst:

"As if through a dungeon-grate he peered
With broad and burning face."

The sun appears to stare at them as though to taunt them as though it is aware of their situation.

There are numerous Christian symbols in the poem, as the sailor deals with sin and then redemption through suffering and pain.

Coleridge also uses metaphor throughout the poem, one memorable one is when he uses the supposed look in an eye to stand in for a curse:

Each turned his face with a ghastly pang,
And cursed me with his eye. (lines 215-216)

There are also a number of similes including the following:

[E]very soul, it passed me by,
Like the whizz of my crossbow! (lines 223-224)

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 mariner's neck, the albatross becomes a symbol of his thoughtless crime. The mariner doesn't seem to have any malice when he killed the albatross. However, he must deal with the consequences of his action. His penance is to continue to travel, presumably forever, to different lands to retell his tale. He is doomed to an eternity of warning others to avoid his mistakes.

And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.
I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach. (584-590)

This is why Life-in-Death won the dice game. Had Death won, the mariner would have died. Instead, the mariner is subject to a kind of life in death, traveling forever in order to tell his tale.

Keep in mind the epigraph, from Thomas Burnet, which begins, "I readily believe that there are more invisible than visible Natures in the universe." He goes on to say, "Meanwhile I do not deny that it is helpful sometimes to contemplate in the mind, as on a tablet, the image of a greater and better world, lest the intellect, habituated to the petty things of daily life, narrow itself and sink wholly into trivial thoughts." That invisible, better world is the idealistic or spiritual world beyond human perception. Thus, the symbols in the mariner's story could reflect spiritual as well as physical meanings.

The voyage is symbolic of the mariner's life: his path to sin and his subsequent repentance.

As the ship turns around Cape Horn, the southernmost tip of South America, the mariner and his crew head north towards the Sun rising in the east (on their right). The Sun is a symbol of God and this image is veiled by the foreboding fog which is indicative of an evil presence eclipsing the goodness of the Sun. (The Sun also becomes a symbol of, perhaps God's, punishment as it contributes to the drought.

The glorious Sun uprist:
Then all averred, I had killed the bird
That brought the fog and mist. (98-100)

The ship becomes like a prison. Stuck in the middle of the ocean with no drinking water, it is another punishment.

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink. (119-122)

The ghost ship, which Death and Life-in-Death arrive in, is simply symbolic of retribution, death, evil, and punishment.

The crew of the mariner's ship might be compared to the wedding party. The former is associated with the killing of an innocent life (albatross) and the latter is associated with a celebration of life.

"Rime" is a frost coating of ice. In poetry, ice can be symbolic of death. In this poem, the rime (ice) is similar to the foreboding fog and the lifelessness of the South Pole. It is symbolizes the mariner's sin or crime and his upcoming punishment; note the similarity of the words: (c)rime. So, the rime is the crime and the invisible (spiritual or demonic) elements manifested via fog and ice. The rime is also the mariner's story (his penance of having to retell his story), the "rhyme"/poem itself.

One narrative technique in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is the use of a frame story. The poem begins with the narrator's story of how the mariner stops some wedding guests and bends their ear. Then, the mariner starts telling his story-within-a-story about his long and strange voyage. At the end of the poem, the narrator returns to speaking about the wedding guest. The mariner tells his tale as a flashback, which is another type of narrative technique in which someone retells events that happened previously.

In addition, the poem features poetic justice, another narrative technique in which evil actions are met with retribution. After the mariner kills the albatross, his ship eventually encounters horrid heat and all the men on board are killed, save the mariner himself. Therefore, his action is punished as his fortunes go from good to bad. 

The poem also contains the narrative technique of foreshadowing. When the strange boat nears the mariner's ship, the mariner believes he sees death on board the ship. Then, strange occurrences take place in nature:

"The hornèd Moon, with one bright star/ Within the nether tip./ One after one, by the star-dogged Moon,/ Too quick for groan or sigh,/ Each turned his face with a ghastly pang,/ And cursed me with his eye."

The sighting of the strange ship and the strange look of the moon and star foreshadow the death of everyone on board the boat. Only the mariner survives. 

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 that are historically or culturally significant. For instance, in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Coleridge uses biblical allusions—allusions to the Christian Bible. Consider how the mariner explains:

At length did cross an Albatross,
Through the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God's name.

Here the mariner alludes to the Christian story of Jesus Christ. Christians believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God who was sent to Earth to save humanity from sin. By comparing the albatross to a Christian soul that came through the fog, the mariner is alluding to the story of Jesus coming to save humanity. Also, recall how the albatross brings a favorable wind, but the mariner kills it anyway. This is also an allusion to the story of Jesus Christ, because Christians believe that Jesus was killed on a cross in an event called the crucifixion.

At the end of part 2, there is a specific allusion to Jesus Christ’s crucifixion. The mariner says:

Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.

The cross has come to symbolize the weight of one's sins. Christians believe that just like Jesus carried the heavy cross, humans must carry the weight of their sins. By alluding to this story, the mariner emphasizes the weight of guilt placed upon him for killing the albatross.

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 helps create an image in the reader's mind is imagery. This image can be visual (what you see), auditory (what you hear), tactile (what you feel), gustatory (what you taste), olfactory (what you smell), kinesthetic (describing movement), or organic (creating a feeling or emotion). 

The first striking and memorable use of imagery is that describing the Ancient Mariner himself, in the third line of the first stanza: "'By thy long grey beard and glittering eye," which tells the reader that the mariner is old (grey), unkempt (long... beard), and intense (glittering eye.) The mariner's "glittering eye" is mentioned again in the fourth stanza, and in the fifth stanza he is described as "The bright-eyed mariner." This repetition makes the mariner's eye his most striking feature. The word "glittering" shows that the mariner, although old, has a quick intelligence and a mesmerizing story to tell. His bright, glittering gaze seems almost hypnotic, which helps the reader to feel what the character of the wedding guest feels when the mariner stops him.

That brings us to the story. The mariner begins by describing how the ship crossed the horizon line, obscuring the view of civilization, and then how the sun rose and fell, going higher and higher each day, as the ship sailed southward. In this part of the poem, Coleridge used personification to describe the sun:

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.

Personification is a kind of imagery. It ascribes human qualities to an inanimate object. Coleridge makes the sun seem like a character by referring to it using the pronoun 'he.' This is the first instance of the strong imagery of nature in the poem, and it also foreshadows the supernatural elements that will be introduced later in the poem.

The storm is also personified:

And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong:
He struck with his o'ertaking wings,
And chased us south along.

This makes the storm also seem to be part of a sentient force of nature that surrounds them, and makes the ship and the mariners seem small and powerless in comparison.

The next stanza has another kind of imagery, a simile: "As who pursued with yell and blow / Still treads the shadow of his foe, / And forward bends his head," which compares the ship to a man running from a huge predator, the storm.

The next several stanzas are filled with imagery describing the Antarctic sea filled with ice. For example, "The ice was here, the ice was there, / The ice was all around:" uses repetition to highlight the sheer amount of ice surrounding them, and "It cracked and growled, and roared and howled," uses aural imagery to show the sound the ice makes.

The most famous lines from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" are excellent examples of striking imagery:

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

The repetition of "day after day" highlights the long period of time during which the ship is stuck on the still sea and gives the reader a feeling of the passage of time; and the simile, "as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean" creates a visual image of the stillness of a ship in a painting.

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

More repetition creates an image of the small ship stranded in the wide, endless sea, while "and all the boards did shrink" means that the wooden boards constructing the ship dried out so much that they shrank, another visual image of the ship's idle state in the calm sea with absolutely no precipitation. When you read these lines, you can feel the thirst of the stranded mariners!

"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is absolutely filled with striking imagery like this. You can read the poem in its entirety on eNotes here and find out more information about it here.

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 ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around: 
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled, 
Like noise in a swound! 

A "swound" is a "swoon," meaning that the noise and cold are so extreme as to induce fainting. This is a dire predicament and had they become permanently stuck in this icy world, it is probable that they would have died then and there. This is when the albatross arrives and they welcome it "As if it had been a Christian soul, / We hailed it in God's name." They feed the bird and it flies around. The ice breaks up and a south wind begins to blow them north.

The ice symbolizes potential death. The cold weather and being stuck in the ice is enough to end their lives. There is also the added symbolism of the coldness of death, the coldness of a corpse, and the frozen image of lifeless bodies. Being freed of the ice, the sailors regain hope.

The sailors regard the albatross as a sign from God because its arrival corresponds with their escape from the ice (their escape from death). Then the Mariner shoots the albatross for no reason. The others blame him for killing the good omen, but then they blame the albatross for the subsequent fog and consider that it might have been a bad omen. They reinterpret things once again when they become stranded with no wind. They then hang the albatross around the Mariner's neck. 

The ice literally threatens death. It therefore symbolizes death for that reason as well as for its associations with the images of lifelessness and frozen bodies. Following these events, the sailors cannot make up their minds about the meaning of the albatross, but they eventually lay all blame upon the Mariner for his senseless act. 

A frame story is a story set within a story. That sounds similar to a flashback, but it is different. In a nutshell, if the main events of the story take place in the past, then the narrative is using a frame story. If the main events happen in the present, the story within the story is a flashback. In TheRime of the Ancient Mariner, the story begins with the Mariner stopping a wedding guest in order to tell him the events that occurred while onboard the ship. This is the bulk of the poem, and the narration returns to the mariner and the wedding guest at the end of the poem.

I think Coleridge's framing in this poem is one of the reasons that I like this poem so much. The narrator of most of the poem is a real character. He has a name, a face, and a body. He's talking to another person. This creates a sense of eavesdropping for the reader. The reader is not the person that is being told the story by some faceless narrator. Instead, the reader is privy to a private conversation between the wedding guest and the Mariner. This creates a great sense of mystery and mystique to his tale. It feels like we get to listen to something that we shouldn't be listening to, and that is technically correct because the Mariner admits that he feels a great urge to tell his story to a specific person, and we are not that person:

"Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.
I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach."

The "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is presented mainly in traditional ballad form, which creates a type of hypnotic, sing-song narration into which the reader is drawn. This story, presented in the "frame story" style, layers two separate narratives which tie together to lead the reader to the mariner's ultimate moral.

The outer frame engages the reader, who, in a sense, becomes the wedding guest.  The reader, as the guest, is compelled to hear the story regardless of his other desires or obligations.  The reader must sit and listen "as a three years' child" (Rime I, 15) to the mariner's horrifying tale.

The inner frame exemplifies the Romantic tradition of introducing supernatural elements and periods of self-reflection.  The reader joins the mariner as he commits a senseless act against nature and must thus endure the deaths of each man on the ship, periods of extreme thirst, and even an intense desire to die.  His redemption occurs when he realizes that

all things that inhabit the natural world have an inherent value and beauty, and that it is necessary for humanity to recognize and respect these qualitiess (Overview).

The mariner then is able to return home but with one caveat.  He must continually spread this message.  He has been, in a way, transformed into God's messenger:

I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach (Rime VII, 72-75).

This obligation implies that the reader, too, must hear this tale and understand its significance.  As readers, we all learn from the mariner's experience.

"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" has a great deal to do with the character of the mariner.  The poem doesn't tell us how old the mariner is when he kills the albatross, but certainly he is a much younger man than he is at the opening of the poem when he stops the wedding guest to tell the guest his story. It was the mariner's character that led him to kill the albatross for no reason.  He was a man who did not appreciate nature.  In Part IV, the mariner refers to what he sees in the ocean as "slimy things" and he sees the ocean as the "rotting sea".  He has been unable to pray since he killed the albatross and his crewmates flung the carcass around the mariner's neck.  Toward the end of this part, the mariner again refers to the water-snakes but this time, they are simply that and no longer "slimy".  As soon as he is able to pray, in the last stanza of Part IV, the albatross falls from his neck and he sees beauty in all the nature around him.  It is this realization that nature is beautiful and that all living things deserve respect that changes the mariner's character. He still must pay for his sin of killing the albatross though, and that is what he is doing when he stops someone to tell him his story. The retelling is his penance.  This is his character now in his old age. He is certain and relentless in his retelling to whomever he stops.

Much is wrapped up in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The obvious is that there are consequences to every action. When the sailor killed the albatross, suffering and death were inflicted on the entire crew. The mariner was the only one from the crew who lived, and his punishment was to tell his story over and over. He was sentenced to a life where he is trapped between life and death.

Coleridge also had a fascination with the natural world and the power that it contains. Man, no matter how hard he tries, cannot control the power of the ocean or the weather. The mariner learns how very important it is to respect nature and the spiritual world as well.

That spiritual world also exists in this poem. The dead sailors come back to life for a time, inhabited by some sort of spirit, and the albatross is also connected to the other side.

Coleridge conveys much more in his poem--themes of being imprisoned, religion, and punishment. He tells a story through poetry that is beautiful, but also makes his readers think.

Whenever a journey is part of a narrative in a story, poem, or novel, it is safe to assume that the journey is symbolic, and this holds true in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The mariner's journey is symbolic of a human's journey through life. His inexplicable and cruel killing of the albatross is something that he will carry the rest of his life and serves as a warning against impetuous actions that cannot be reversed.

The "glittering eye" of the mariner compels the Wedding-Guest to pause and listen to his story. Looking into another person's eyes has long had the symbolism of honesty: the eyes are viewed as a window into the human soul. It is important to the mariner that he tell his story, because he believes that it is his penance for killing the friendly albatross that had followed his ship. He needs to tell the Wedding-Guest about a truth that he has learned the hard way: to wantonly kill anything that God has created is a wrong and ruinous act that will lead to a cascade of destructive consequences.

The albatross itself is a symbol in the poem. It is a manifestation of the natural world that God has created. The sporting and companionable behavior that it displays to the crew is meant to be a gift from God, and squandering it is an affront that will exact a steep price. This becomes clear when the winds die and the men begin to succumb to thirst.

The frame story provides a rationale for the ancient mariner to tell his fantastic tale, while starting from the point of view of the wedding guest aligns us with the normal world of an everyday outsider hearing a bizarre and supernatural tale for the first time. The frame makes it as if we, the readers, are standing beside the wedding guest, listening as spellbound as the guest to the mariner's story. By the end, too, we know from the frame story that the mariner must find people to hear his tale so the he can spread his message:

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

Both the internal rhyme and the alliteration help add a pleasing sense of rhythm to the poem. Some examples of internal rhyme are as follows:

The Wedding-Guest
here beat his breast.

Here, the word guest, which rhymes with breast, falls on the fourth beat of the line, halfway through. The same is true below:

The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast.

Alliteration also adds a pleasing sense of rhythm and draws emphasis to important words in a line, as in

The death-fires danced at night

and

Was a flash of golden fire.

The repeated, alliterative l sounds below reinforce the monotonous, robotic sense of the lifeless limbs:

They raised their limbs like lifeless tools.

All of these literary devices add order and structure to the poem, underscoring the idea that it is not simply a random tale but one with meaning and purpose.