The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
The Mariner is not in the hands of a merciful God because his agony always returns. He asks for forgiveness of his agony but still after he tells his tale the agony returns at random times. A merciful God would grant permanent mercy. For all, the Mariner has been through death and hardship of his crew because of the killing of the albatross. The thought of his crime is enough agony but the Mariner's agony returns until he has to relive the tragedy of the killing of his crew by telling his tale to another person.
The fact that the agony always returns is particularly horrible about the Mariner's punishment because no matter how hard he tries or how much he prays his sin is carried along within him. The pain of his sin goes away right after he tells his tale but it returns shortly afterwards. The Mariner says that, after telling the Hermit his story, 'Since then, at an uncertain hour that agony returns.'; Since the first time the Mariner confessed his crime to the Hermit at an inconsistent hour God reminds the Mariner of the sin he has committed by piercing his heart with agonizing pain. He tells the Wedding Guest that, until he tells his story, 'The heart within me burns.'; This is God's way of expressing his anger to the Mariner for the curse he put on his crew when he killed the Albatross. God makes sure that the Mariner has and will fell agony, that the agony will always return, and that the agony will return at an unsure hour each day which causes the Mariner to relive his tale and to live in agony for the rest of his life.
The Mariner is granted relief from his agony by telling his tale which releases his agony for a short while. The Mariner is telling the Wedding Guest why he must continue to tell his tale, 'Which forced me to begin my tale; And then it left me free.'; God has granted him the power to tell his tale which sets him free for a short while. Maybe God is merciful for letting him tell his tale but his agony always returns. He can't enjoy his little time of freedom because he is uncertain when the pain will return again. The Mariner travels, looking for the right person to tell his tale to, the face which relieves his agony and lets him feel free.
Using powerful diction and verbose imagery, Hardy furthermore instills his attitude of the sinking up employing references to God indirectly. When he states that “The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything Prepared a sinister mate”, he is referring to God and how fate made the iceberg. He also refers to the power of God again when he says, “Till the Spinner of the Years Said, ‘Now!’.” In this phrase, he conveys that God said it was time for the people onboard the Titanic to go down under. Hardy’s references to God supported his own claim that fate claimed the Titanic.
“The Seafarer” begins with a man’s story of the hardships he faced at sea. He is on a voyage to discover new lands and riches, yet he is not happy. Despite the great journey the man is undertaking, he feels in exile from his people. He has been lonely for a long period of time now and has had no success. As he is pondering this topic, he thinks of how he only hears the sounds of birds instead of the laughter of people in the mead hall. He thinks of how he is cold instead of warm and sharing drink with his friends; he is lonely and his kinsmen can offer him no comfort, so his soul is left drowning in desolation.
He expresses the distress he feels from this when he says, “One strange night, I lay awake, listening to the recurrent thud of the ocean and planning our flight. The ocean seemed to rise and grope in the darkness and then heavily fall on its face”(606). By means of the waves, he expresses the pain he for all intents and purposes feels about his plan. Without any attempts or proof, He believes that his fantasies are bound to meet failure. The ocean reaches a point of success, then falls to an unfortunate place. He describes the unfortunate place as isolated, distressing, and arduous, which is the same place that he finds himself in. It impacts him so particularly much that actually has no way to save Colette from her pain in a subtle
The costs of their decisions would weigh heavily on them both throughout their travels. Because of his rash decision, the albatross was hung around the Mariner’s neck, a burden which, along with his guilt, he’d have to carry for a long time. Avenging the albatross also were the ghastly duo who gambled for the Mariner’s life- all the members of his crew, some of whom were very close to him, “dropp'd down one by one… With heavy thump, a lifeless lump” (l. 219-220), killed by Death. They, too, shared the blame for the Mariner’s crime, as they had condoned his action as long as things were going well. Ma...
At first he does not seem content with his seafaring life. During the early descriptions of his time there, it is painted as a life of hardship and penance. Images and adjectives of the sea and life there are harsh and foreboding-"ice cold", "hung round with icicles" , "fettered with frost". The sea is seen as cold, and not just in the physical sense .It is remote, a place of despair , an earthly purgatory, where there is "always anxiety …. as to what the Lord will bestow on him"2. The narrator is cut away from the comforts ...
The Seafarer highlites the transience of wordly joys which are so little important and the fact thet we have no power in comparison to God.
The resolution of the Mariners decision caused him and his shipmates to fall into a curse, which led the Mariner into an eternal penance. The Mariners penances was to retell the story of what a Mariner's choice against nature he made and the events that he went through at sea. After the death of the Albatross, the Mariner felt as if he was pull down by a curse. The vengeance of the curse occurs as a result of his actions, leading towards the Mariner's shipmates souls being taken away. Following the death of the Mariner's soul, the Mariner began to experienced redemptions against the decisions he
The mariner reconciles his sins when he realizes what nature really is and what it means to him. All around his ship, he witnesses, "slimy things did crawl with legs upon the slimy sea" and he questions "the curse in the Dead man's eyes". This shows his contempt for the creatures that Nature provides for all people. The mariner begins to find his salvation when he begins to look on the 'slimy things' as creatures of strange beauty. When "the mariner begins to find his salvation when he begins to look on the 'slimy things' as creatures of strange beauty" he understands the Albatross is a symbol of nature and he realizes what he had done wrong. The mariner is forgiven after sufficient penance. The mariner's experience represents a renewal of the impulse of love towards other living things. Once he reconciles his punishment is lifted. The bird, which is hung around his neck as a punishment, falls into the water and makes the change from punishment to penance.
The Mariner comes to terms with killing the albatross, and consequently killing his crewmates, by repeatedly voicing his guilt. His description of the souls passing him "like the whiz of [his] crossbow," (l 224) assumption that telling his tale to the hermit will "wash away/ The albatross' blood," (ll 512-13) and expression that "The pang, the curse, with which they died/ Had never passed away" (ll 438-39) shows how the mariner can never accept his actions and alleviate his guilt. I think that it's natural for people to want to come to terms with their past actions in order to better accept one's present state of self, which is why the mariner continually attempts to reconcile his past. The mariner is unable to accomplish this by telling others his story.
As the ancient Mariner described his adventures at sea to the Wedding-Guest, the Guest became saddened because he identified his own selfish ways with those of the Mariner. The mariner told the Guest that he and his ship-mates were lucky because at the beginning of their voyage they had good weather. The mariner only saw what was on the surface -- he did not see the good weather as evidence that Someone was guiding them. Also, when he shot the Albatross, the Mariner did not have any reason for doing so. The Albatross did nothing wrong, yet the Mariner thought nothing of it and without thinking of the significance of the act, he killed the bird. At this, the Guest was reminded of how self-absorbed he, too, was, and the sinful nature of man. At the beginning of the poem he was very much intent on arriving at the wedding on time. He did not care at all about what it was that the Mariner had to tell him; he did not want to be detained even if the Mariner was in trouble. Instead, he spoke rudely to the mariner, calling him a "gray-beard loon", and tried to go on his own way.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, as a product of its culturally inscribed author, presents a confused Unitarian world view consistent with that of the Romantic Movement of its time. It attempts to exemplify this view within an unpredictable and often mysterious universe, and by rebuking the hegemonic ideologies held by the text’s cultural antagonists, seeks to grant the awareness of an often unreasonable world populated by its reader’s passionate persona.
He starts the story immediately with a lot of detail creating the setting of where the mariner is going and to whom the mariner is going to tell his tale. He chooses three men on their way to a wedding and one in particular we know as the “wedding guest.” When we think of a wedding we think of a happy event where two people are united under the grace of god. The mariner stops him from going in this event though and tells him the story, at the end of which he tells him that he doesn't need anything but god to be happy. The detail and emphasis of the wedding symbolizes temporary happiness on earth. The mariner explains that loving god and having him in your life is “Oh sweeter than the marriage feast, 'Tis sweeter far to me” (Coleridge, lines 86-87). Here the mariner is saying that the temporary happiness on earth that one may get from a marriage celebration is nice but it is nowhere near as good as the love of god you get from making a religious transformation. Coleridge explains all of the sing and drinking and happiness going on in the wedding as the mariner is telling the story but in the end the mariner tells the guest that none of that is as good as the love of god. And we can see that wedding guest actually learns something from the story because he decides to not go into the wedding but rather “and now the wedding-guest. Turned from the bridegroom's door. He went ...
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” In Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, is a story of a sailor who undergoes the brutality of God due the sailor’s carelessness towards nature. Coleridge uses numerous Gothic elements: supernatural events, dreams/visions, and overwrought emotions—which are all eminent in the poem. There are many supernatural events which occur throughout the poem. Coleridge mentions, “The Nightmare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she, / Who thicks man’s blood with cold” (line 194-195). This quote signifies the crew encountering the ghost-like vessel with Death and Nightmare Life-in-Death onboard to which the two clash by taking fate and chance (which is a disbelief for Christians) on rolling dice for the crew.
The conflicts in the story form the Unity of Effect, but they also teach us that we should never do things blindly without preparation. In the rising action, the fishermen notice unusual circumstances, but decide not to pay much attention to them. When the fisherman says, “We never out upon this expedition without a steady side wind for going and coming-one that we felt sure would not fail us before our return-and we seldom made a miscalculation upon this point,” he is assuring us that they did throw caution to the wind, and this resulted in the fight against the maelström (27). The fishermen were warned by nature one last time before being attacked by the maelström in “All at once we were taken aback by a breeze from over Helseggen. This was most unusual-something that had never happened to us before-and I began to feel a little uneasy, without knowing exactly why” (28). They knew that something was wrong, but when they noticed what was happening, it was much too late. In the quote, “It had run down at seven o’clock! We were behind the time of the slack, and the whirl of the Ström was in full fury,” the main fisherman realizes that they had stayed out for too long, and begins to panic as death becomes almost certain (30). The maelström is not only malicious, however, as it has great beauty despite its evilness. In the quote, “I began to reflect how magnificent a thing it was to die in such a manner, and how foolish it was in me to think of so paltry a consideration as my own individual life, in view of so wonderful a manifestation of God’s power,” we observe that the fisherman had an epiphany during the battle against the maelström that changed his outlook on life
I burned with rage to pursue the murderer of my peace and precipitate him into the ocean. I walked up and down my room hastily and perturbed, while my imagination conjured up a thousand images to torment and sting me. Why had I not followed him and closed with him in mortal strife? But I had suffered him to depart, and he had directed his course towards the mainland. I shuddered to think who might be the next victim sacrificed to his insatiate revenge. And then I thought again of his words -- "I WILL BE WITH YOU ON YOUR WEDDING-NIGHT." That, then, was the period fixed for the fulfillment of my