Analysis Of 'The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner'

The first stanza of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ begins with the line ‘The Sun now rose...’. Coleridge has immediately drawn the reader in with the use of the temporal adverb ‘now’, allowing the stanza to be read in the present tense, thus immersing the reader into the poem. Like the previous part, the sun is again personified in line two when Coleridge writes that ‘Out of the sea came he’. Referring to the sun as ‘he’ poses great significance when examining the background of this play. The weather plays a vital role in the journey of a sailing ship - the sun is used to tell the time, provide light, and usually where there is sun, there is no stormy weather and thus no rocky water for sailors. Therefore, on a journey like the one described in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ the sun is incredibly important, and thus Coleridge’s reference to the sun using the personal pronoun ‘he’ suggests that the sun is as, if not more, important as the actual people on the ship. Also, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ was written in 1797, which had a very patriarchal, male dominant society, and so using the masculine pronoun ‘he’ conveys the superiority of the sun itself.

The adverb ‘still’ is used twice between the first two stanzas. In stanza one, the reader

The audience is then informed that suddenly, because ‘The glorious Sun uprist’ the shipmates’ form the conclusion that it was indeed ‘the bird // That (had) brought the fog and mist’. Like the marginal notes state, by siding with the Mariner, these sailors have ‘(made) themselves accomplices in the crime’. This fickle nature of these shipmate’s could be seen as a sly attempt made by Coleridge to be satirical, challenging authority by bringing to light the fact that everybody is always looking for somebody to blame for the misfortune of the world, however we cannot know who really is to