Coleridge’s Rime
Style:
Similes and personification often combine the supernatural dream or sea
world to the actual world of land’s nature
Sound effects and imagery are realistically vivid but often ironic and
paradoxical
Musicality and dialogue of rhythm and speech also emphasize the
supernatural and the real respectively
All of the above combine to create the mix of the contrasts
World of Land: real
 Frame story
o Of wedding
o Logical sequence of kirk, hill, lighthouse top
o Compulsion to tell a story containing a clearly stated moral
World of Voyage: dream and imagination:
 Dream quality of voyage and all its events
 Participation of real both living and non living in one organic whole
 An unending series of shifts between objects and subjects,
 Sights and sounds shift in the phenomena of the perceived world
 A logic and non-logic to the main events and symbols in the poem
 A machinery of spirits not found in the ordinary world
A special distinction between
appearances vs. reality and substance and surface
developed in the description of objects, especially the sea
Moon, colors of angels, sea creatures, spirits and demons,
albatross, songs and speeches of other beings, weather
changes, switches in time within a day, contrasts
Theme:
“Fall, redemption, skepticism, spiritual will, faith”
Sin, guilt, punishment, redemption process with a baptism, more
punishment with revenge, towards full redemption or reconciliation
Plot Sketch by Parts:
Part I
The Wedding and Wedding Guest
The Ship sets out
Wedding sounds the start and entrance of bride and groom (30)
The South Pole and Ice
The arrival of the albatross
Part II
Voyage to Pacific and Equator
Sun, no breeze
Heat, parched sailors
Albatross is hung about the Mariner’s neck
Part III
Setting western sun
Nightmare ship
Nightmare Life in Death (female) and Death (male) on the specter bark
toss dice for Mariner’s life
Death of 200 crew members and failure of Mariner to pray
Simile of crossbow
Part IV
Moonlight
Curses, struggles, Prayer
Mariner’s blessings on sea creatures (Prays)
Albatross falls to into the sea
Part V
Death, clouds and moon
Blessed Mother sends mariner sleep
Baptismal rains fall
Polar spirit comes, demons
Angels inhabit crew’s corpses and operate the shop
Night to dawn
Mariner is singled out by spirit as the one who shot the albatross
More penance to go for Mariner
Part VI
Spirits speak to miraculously drive ship home to harbor
Mariner is in a trance
Mariner feels the curses of dead still
Angels leave corpses and form light in sky above mast
Seraph (Hebrew for burn) light attracts the small crew on boat
Pilot is afraid but not hermit
Hermit will forgive Mariner of albatross’s blood
Part VII
Ship sinks, a rumble and Polar Spirit leaves
Rescue of floating Mariner
Dialogue of the crew of three
“Shieve me”
Mariner confesses to pious Hermit
Mariner wanders land compelled to tell his story when he sees the right
person
The Wedding sounds signal exit from church
Theme is directly stated lines 600 to 617
Mariner turns and is gone
The Wedding Guest, a sadder and wiser man, rose the morrow morn.
Prayer: lines 244, 288, 442, 470