The Rime of the Ancient Mariner can be interpreted in various ways:
1)It may be the description of a dream caused by opium;
2) It may be an allegory of life in which the ship represents the human soul, the voyage=
progression from sin to redemption, the crew= the whole mankind, the sun = the
benevolence of nature, ice= obstacles and dangers, the drought= punishment, the
albatross= life and the respect we must give to it.
3) It may also be seen as an allegory of the life of the soul (a sort of moral parable of
man) from the original sin (the killing of the albatross) through punishment (isolation and
drought), repentance (blessing of the water snakes), penitence(obsessive repetition of the
story) to his final redemption.
4) It may be seen as the contrast between rationality and irrationality, the former
identified with the sunlight(the main bad events take place during the day) that is with the
power of reason, while the latter is identified with the moonlight( the main good events
occur at night) that is with the power of imagination.
5) It can be seen as a description of the poetic journey of Romanticism.The Mariner is
the poet, possessed by a song which derives from guilt. This guilt is the actual origin
of poetry: it is the regret for a state of lost innocence caused by the Industrial
Revolution, or an attempt to rediscover it. Poetry coincides with this sense of loss
and, at the same time, tries to fill it.
Importance of imagination
Like Wordsworth, Coleridge stressed the role of imagination. In his famous 'Biographia
Literaria' he distinguished between 'primary imagination' and 'secondary imagination'.
Primary imagination, which is common to all men, is the power to give chaos a
certain order, to give the material of perception a certain shape. It goes beyond the
mere perception of objects and enables man to form concepts and produce
communication.
Secondary imagination is the poetic faculty, which not only gives shape and order to
a given world but builds new worlds.
Both Wordsworth and Coleridge considered fancy inferior to imagination: it is a
kind of mechanical faculty which receives materials, ready made from the laws of
associations, and aggregates them ( for example, Coleridge uses fancy in the' Rime'
when he describes the water snakes, remembering and adapting Captain Cook's
descriptions).
Nature
Unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge did not consider nature as a moral guide or as a source of
consolation and happiness.His Christian faith did not allow him to identify nature with
the divine, in that form of pantheism adopted by Wordsworth. He saw nature in a sort of
neo Platonic interpretation: the material world is nothing but the projection of the 'real'
world of Ideas on the flux of time. Consequently Coleridge believed that natural images
have abstract meanings and he used them in his poems.