by Paul Dice

Created on: June 01, 2007

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was the opening poem of the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads (1798), published anonymously with William Wordsworth, as a joint volume of poetry. The construction of the Ancient Mariner is that of a narrative-based medieval ballad, conforming to the genre's traditional rules of metre, of fairly regular quatrains, with a 8 syllable tetrameter structure, creating the impression that it is a product of oral tradition rather than a written culture.

The use of short sentence structure and internal rhyme, as in, 'The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared', the use of simile, 'And listens like a three years child:' and repetition as in, below the Kirk, below the hill, below the lighthouse top', reported speech, "By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?, and punctuation to create emphasis, 'I shot the ALBATROSS.', 'And now the STORM BLAST came.' and contracted verbs, 'May'st', enjambment, alliteration and half rhyme. All these techniques assist Coleridge in setting the mood and the genre of this poem and the varying of it's pace.

The subject-matter is the encounter of a wedding guest with what appears to be an Ancient Mariner. 'It is an ancient Mariner.' In this opening line, Coleridge uses the impersonal, 'It,' to describe this entity which may or may not be of this world. The wedding guest is there to attend his next of kin's wedding. However, the Ancient Mariner alludes later in the poem, to the fact that they were drawn to this meeting, as in, 'I pass, like night, from land to land; I have strange power of speech; that moment his face I see, I know the man that must hear me; to him my tale I teach.' As if the wedding guest was pre-selected as the student.

Some of the recurrent themes he has used throughout include references to, nature, both in it's beauty and horror, 'the ice was here, the ice was there, the ice was all around: it cracked and growled, and roared and howled, like noises in a swound!' Others have been water and clouds, mist, sky and the Sun and Moon and the stars, and snow, his use of light and dark, good and bad, partially symbolised by the woman. He has used references to human activities, music, 'the merry din', 'for he heard the loud bassoon,' whistling and voices, flutes, angels song and birdsong, and also addresses the loss of faith, 'I looked to heaven and tried to pray: but or ever a prayer had gusht, a wicked whisper came, and made my heart as dry as dust.'
Coleridge description

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