ENGL 3002 Position Paper "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

Year taken: 2012-2013

Professor: Nellie Vázquez

Class: INGL3002

University: University of Puerto Rico, Cayey Campus

Grace H. Rodríguez Cruz

February 24^th, 2013

Prof. N. Vázquez

INGL3002- British Literature part II

Position paper: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

      The powerful and captivate story of a cursed mariner who roams the streets to tell his tale, no doubt that even if it is a quite extensive piece of work, is a unforgettable poem and one of the few you might remember most later on. Coleridge expresses the feelings of loneliness, desperation and resentment from which the Ancient Mariner suffers. He was cursed upon for killing an albatross without any reason and since then he was forced to tell his story in order to not feel pain (Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched/With a woeful agony,/Which forced me to begin my tale;/And then it left me free). This poem received mixed views, but Coleridge’s friend’s, Wordsworth, was one of the most known. He shunned down the poem by expressing it didn’t motivate the reader to keep on finishing Coleridge’s book “Lyrical Ballads” and that his archaic writing was difficult to understand.  However, others believe this type of writing disconnected the reader and flourished the poet from us.

     In my opinion, the work embodies the transcendentalism and the empiricism. The first is seen in the story itself, where the Mariner explains his burden was cast because of his disrespect to God’s creations (He prayeth best, who loveth best/All things both great and small;/For the dear God who loveth us,/He made and loveth all.) and that we shall remember He loves them and we should not do otherwise as well. The empiric part of my analysis comes from both the Mariner and the author. In the poem, the Mariner learns of his mistake and reminds himself in this experience to become better and teach others what he went through. Coleridge however, had a life of depression and addiction to opium. He is thought to have the bipolar syndrome, but we may not really know for sure. The author then explores the feelings that made him and expresses them in the story. For desperation, anxiety and solitude had been the main topics of the written work and his real life. Therefore, I believe this work to be part of the Organicism movement.

     The overuse of the Opium substance by the author might’ve been the push for his thoughts from the death of the sailors to the ghost ship and all the way to the insanity of a Pilot and his son in the story. These sorts of hallucinations the Mariner believes as real are the ones who shaped him and formed him. All these were taken as real events, since the Mariner is the lone witness towards the situation and the one telling his life. He expressed every detail of what he had encountered, including the sight of Life-in-Death as a naked woman (Her lips were red, her looks were free,/Her locks were yellow as gold:/Her skin was as white as leprosy,/The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she,/Who thicks man's blood with cold). Wordsworth has criticized the poem for being filled (or over-filled) with imagery. This helps in my theory because this may happen because of the opium effects the author might’ve gone through while writing the poem. Even so, this kind of trippy imagery is what makes the work of Coleridge unique and memorable.

Source: Greenblatt, Abrams, Christ, Lynch, Ramazani, Robson, Stallworthy, Stillinger. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2: The Romantic Period through the Twentieth Century. 
8th: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006.