This document provides a summary of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". It describes the poem's publication in Lyrical Ballads in 1798. The summary outlines the characters, including the Ancient Mariner and the Wedding Guest, and provides a short synopsis of each part of the poem, describing how the Mariner kills an albatross and is subsequently cursed, leading to the death of his shipmates. Major themes of the poem are also summarized, including the natural world, the spiritual world, religion, and retribution.

1. VAIBHAV A GANGANE
MA II (2014-2015)
DNYANOPASAK COLLEGE, PARBHANI

2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834)
 Poet, critic and philosopher
 Born in Devonshire (a country in south west
England), as the youngest of 14 children of a
vicar
 Collaborating with wordsworth on the
revolutionary Lyrical Ballads of 1798
 Poems such as “The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner”, “christabel” and “Kubla Khan”
demonstrate Coleridge’s talent for fantastic
imagery
 “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is the first
poem in Lyrical Ballad

3. “RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER”
Context :-
 First published in Lyrical
Ballads
 The poem written in Romantic
Style
 protagonist Ancient Mariner is
the narrator of the story
 Poem is full of imagination,
fantasy and supernatural elements

4. Characters :-
1. Ancient Mariner
2. Wedding Guest
3. The sailors
4. Albatross (The Birds)
5. Death
6. The Night-mare Life-in-Death

5. A Short Synopsis ……
Part 1st :-
The Wedding guest – the voyage – struck in ice – he kills the
Albatross.
 Mariner stops a wedding guest and forces him to listen to his
story
 The ship sails south to equator
 Ship drives by storm into desolate Antarctica, They stuck in ice
 An Albatross appears through the fog like a messenger of hope
 It is befriended by the shipmates
 The ice splits, south wind springs up and takes them northward
 Mariner shoots Albatross with his crossbow
 The ship becalmed in the Pacific

6. Part 2nd :-
Shipmates punish him for his crime.
 The crew get angry against his deed
 They suffer from thirst but no water to drink
 They hang dead bird around Mariners neck
“Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ship.”

7. Part 3rd :-
A skeleton ship comes, and the shipmates dies.
 A ship of skeleton appears with crew of two Death and Life-in-
Death
 The cast dice and Life-in-Death wins Mariner
 Suddenly crewmates drop down dead one after another with a
silent course upon Mariner
 Their souls fly away audibly, leaving behind dead and rotten
bodies, laying with open eyes
Which constantly stairs at him

8. Part 4th :-
He is left alone for seven days. He blesses the water snakes
and spell is broken.
 The wedding guest is afraid that he is speaking to a ghost,
but the Mariner assures him that he did not die.
 He is alone on the ship and tries to pray but he cannot. For
seven days he looks at the dead men staring at him and cannot
die.
When he sees water-snakes he blesses them and he finds that
he can pray.
The albatross falls from his neck.

9. Part 5th :-
Its rains, The ship is moved north, crew rise.
 He sleeps and then it rains.
 A roaring wind and storm comes, and the dead crew rises and
manage the ship.
 The spirit from the snow and ice moves them to the equator
again, and the ship stands still.
 Eventually the mariner reaches home, but the curse remains
with him in that he must wander ever after land to land, seizing
upon people and compelling them to hear his tale.

16. Ship moving
North

17.  MAJOR THEMES :-
1. The Natural World :
 Realistic description of natural that helps in winning the
reader’s faith
“The sun came upon the left,
Out of the sea came he!
And he shown bright, and on the right
Went down into the sea”
 The natural world dwarfs and asserts its awesome power over
man
 The natural world seems to be a character itself, which
interacts with Ancient Mariner
 Killing of Albatross (representative of nature) is the action
against nature which takes him and shipmates to thought of
dead

18. 2. The Spiritual World :
 It had popularly interpreted as an allegory of man’s connection
to spiritual and metaphysical world
 After attempts at prayer and realization of what he has done, his
penance to forgiveness begins spiritually-
“I looked to heaven and tried to pray”
 Albatross - here a mortal creature is intimately tide to the
spiritual world
 The Ancient Mariner detects spirits several times in the poem

19. 3. Religion :
 It is a religious allegory conveying numerous themes
pertaining to Christianity
 a religious allegory carrying a main religious theme that
reflects Christian beliefs
 Albatross represents holy bird
 Ancient mariner fails to respect god’s rules and so suffers by
curse which is similar to the religious stories of Adam and Eve
 At the end he kept alive to pass words of god’s greatness onto
others

20. 4. Retribution :
 The poem is a tale of retribution, throughout the poem
Mariner spends most of his role playing for his impulsive error
(sin) of killing Albatross
 Spiritual world avenges the Albatross’s death by curse on the
Mariner and shipmates
 Even they are thirsty, their lips bake black in the sun, they
must endure the torment of seeing water all around them while
being unable to drink it
 Retribution is blind- The sailors suffer with the Mariner
though they themselves have not erred

21. 5. Depiction of The Supernatural Elements :
 The greatness of S. T. Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner lies
chiefly in the technique by which the supernatural has been
made so believable and convincing that easily appeals to reader :
“ Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold ;
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The night-mare Life-in-Death was she,
Who thicks man’s blood with cold”
Such suggestive description of supernatural elements is enough
to enable reader to imagine for himself of Life-in-Death
(Horrible woman)

22.  Coleridge depicts tactfully how nature punishes supernaturally
for killing its innocent member :
“All in hot copper sky,
The bloody sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the moon”
 To grasp the dreadfulness of Life-in-Death poet says :
“One after one, by the star-dogged Moon,
Too quick for groan or sigh,
Each turned his face with a ghastly pang,
And cursed me with his eye”

23. THANK YOU