46 pages • 1 hour read
Samuel ColeridgeThe Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1798A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
The Power of the Imagination
The power of the imagination plays a special role in the poem and is a central tenet of Romantic-era poetry and art. Somewhat similarly to how postmodernism is defined by what it isn’t (first and foremost, not being modernist), Romantic-era poets’ championing of the imagination arrives as a counterweight to Neoclassicism’s assertion of the imperialism of scientific reason. There is no scientific reason, nor any real logical stance, for the Mariner to kill the albatross; nonetheless, the Mariner does exactly this. He doesn’t fare well from this decision, as he has gone against the order of the natural world, and the Lake Poets (a group of which Coleridge and Wordsworth, among others, were a part) regaled the natural world.
The sailors employ a scientific approach to life and therefore misconstrue many of the spiritual events, and their consequences. When the Mariner kills the albatross, and the ship begins to drift through the fog, he says, “all averr’d, I had kill’d the Bird / That made the Breeze to blow” (5). This action can be seen as extension of the imagination, even if a largely-dubious one: the Mariner kills the albatross because he can. In doing so, however, he disrupts the natural flow of the universe. As has been asserted, art seeks to elicit questions, as opposed to providing answers, and the implicit question here would seem to be how do the natural world and theology vie with individual imagination?
The Importance of the Individual in Romantic-Era Poetry
Coleridge never explicitly explains why the mariner shoots the albatross with this crossbow; this lack of explanation is withheld in order to affirm a central tenet of Romantic poetry: the worth of the individual. While Neoclassicist poetry championed for the worth of the group/society, Romantic poetry placed the individual ahead of the group. In doing so, eccentrics and outcasts (like the Mariner) were given top billing, in a manner to how heroes like Captain Ahab, in Moby Dick, were made more important than individuals would have been in literary movements preceding Romanticism.
Coleridge does not present the Mariner as a “good” person, and the Mariner’s fate affirms this: he has no reason to kill the albatross but does so, and he suffers for it. Nonetheless, it’s important to note that the relatively-odd Mariner is the protagonist of this poem; it’s not the wedding party guest or the sailors who are foregrounded here, but, rather, a strange old man that murdered a bird for no explicit reason. The implicit reason for doing so might be summed up as because the Mariner can: both God and Nature fail to intercede and stop the Mariner from doing so (though both also punish him, after the fact). This individualism effectively replaces the notion of theological predeterminism while, at the same time, in no way doing away with the concept of the Christian God as creator—a tough notion to parse, as the poem would seem to hold two contradicting ideas as valid at the same time.
