GOTHICISM and GOTHIC ELEMENTS IN COLERIDGE'S
POEM "THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER"
Gothicsim is a style in fictional literature characterized by gloomy settings,violent or grotesque
action, and a mood of decay,degeneration.The Gothic begins with later -eighteenth-century
writers' turn to past; in the context of the Romantic Period the Gothic is a type of imitation
medievalism.When it was launched in the later eighteenth century the Gothic features accounts of
terrifying expeirences in ancient castles -expeirences connected with dungeons,secret
passageways,flickering lamps,screams,moons,bloody hands,ghosts,graveyards and the rest.By
extension,it came to designate the mysterious ,fantastic ,supernatural, and again the
terrifying,especially the pleasurably terrifying, in literature more generally.
The Gothic is a prominent and distinctive element in the writings of the Romantic Age. The mode
had originated in novels of the mid-eighteenth century that in radical opposition to the Enlightenment
ideals of order,decorum,and rational control.It had opened to literary exploration the realm of
nightmarish terror, violence.
The Gothic introduces a genre that both influenced Romantic poetry and inits day for outstripped
it in popularity.This topic cluster explores signs of Gothic influence in some of the most frequently
read works of Coleridge.For example, the account of the skeleton ship and crew's reaction in
Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is full of strange ,uncanny or "Gothic" elements.Gothic horror
fiction was very popular at the time it was written.The Gothic elements in the poem;

The strange weather

The albatross as a bird of good men

Death and life-in-death

The spirit from the land of mist and snow,and the two spirits the mariner hears in his trance

The angelic spirits which move the bodies of the dead men

The madness of the pilot and his boy

The mariner's strange power of speech
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner has been acclaimed to be one of the many original works of
Gothic literature because of its supernatural,horrific and romantic elements that are brought together
within its narrative and language.The most dominant Gothic elements are the supernatural quality
which can be found in the mariner's voyage , and also The Mariner's killing of the albatross,the
terrifying death of his shipmates,and the grotesque descriptions of the supernatural spirits are chief
Gothic elements in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner that develop the story.