A Mariner's Life

812 Words2 Pages

A Mariner’s Life
(An analysis of three messages from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”) Festivals, mariners, ships, birds, nature, death, voyage. These are words that create images for readers when they begin to read the poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It’s quite an interesting, nothing people would expect during the Romantic era, mainly because the author who wrote the poem was inspired by a dream. Samuel Taylor Coleridge used dreams as the basis of many of his great poems, but The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was inspired by one of his friend’s dreams. Eventually, Coleridge and his companion, William Wordsworth, would begin to be creative with this dream and make it into a Romantic poem. Although, most Romantic poetry usually consists …show more content…

The main agenda in the poem is that a mariner kills a bird and everything goes downhill from there. Back then, people were very superstitious, and at before, people were questioning the church and their own beliefs. According to Benno Torgler, in Determinants of Superstition, he says, “There seems to be a certain concurrence between churches and superstitious beliefs, the correlation between superstition and attendance of church and other religious activities being mostly negative.” When the Mariner and his companions were at times of uncertainty and feel like all of they have to do is hope, and all of a sudden an Albatross appears and everything goes good from there. Because of this coincidental moment, everyone on the ship believes that the Albatross is good luck. When the Mariner kills it, and everything goes sour, everyone blames him and makes him wear it around his neck, so they were very superstitious. Eventually after everyone dies, the Mariner will have an epiphany about his wrong doings, he begins to appreciate the beauties of the sea. In lines 258-291, he says, “And I blessed them unaware; sure my kind saint took pity on me, and I blessed them unaware. The selfsame moment I could pray; and from my neck so free the Albatross fell off, and sank like lead into the sea.” After this event, everything goes great for the Mariner

Open Document