Summary
Three young men are walking together to a wedding, when
one of them is detained by a grizzled old sailor. The young Wedding-Guest
angrily demands that the Mariner let go of him, and the Mariner
obeys. But the young man is transfixed by the ancient Mariner’s
“glittering eye” and can do nothing but sit on a stone and listen
to his strange tale. The Mariner says that he sailed on a ship out
of his native harbor—”below the kirk, below the hill, / Below the
lighthouse top”—and into a sunny and cheerful sea. Hearing bassoon
music drifting from the direction of the wedding, the Wedding-Guest
imagines that the bride has entered the hall, but he is still helpless
to tear himself from the Mariner’s story. The Mariner recalls that
the voyage quickly darkened, as a giant storm rose up in the sea
and chased the ship southward. Quickly, the ship came to a frigid
land “of mist and snow,” where “ice, mast-high, came floating by”;
the ship was hemmed inside this maze of ice. But then the sailors
encountered an Albatross, a great sea bird. As it flew around the
ship, the ice cracked and split, and a wind from the south propelled
the ship out of the frigid regions, into a foggy stretch of water.
The Albatross followed behind it, a symbol of good luck to the sailors.
A pained look crosses the Mariner’s face, and the Wedding-Guest
asks him, “Why look’st thou so?” The Mariner confesses that he shot
and killed the Albatross with his crossbow.
At first, the other sailors were furious with the Mariner
for having killed the bird that made the breezes blow. But when
the fog lifted soon afterward, the sailors decided that the bird
had actually brought not the breezes but the fog; they now congratulated
the Mariner on his deed. The wind pushed the ship into a silent sea
where the sailors were quickly stranded; the winds died down, and
the ship was “As idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean.”
The ocean thickened, and the men had no water to drink; as if the
sea were rotting, slimy creatures crawled out of it and walked across
the surface. At night, the water burned green, blue, and white with
death fire. Some of the sailors dreamed that a spirit, nine fathoms
deep, followed them beneath the ship from the land of mist and snow.
The sailors blamed the Mariner for their plight and hung the corpse
of the Albatross around his neck like a cross.
A weary time passed; the sailors became so parched, their
mouths so dry, that they were unable to speak. But one day, gazing
westward, the Mariner saw a tiny speck on the horizon. It resolved
into a ship, moving toward them. Too dry-mouthed to speak out and
inform the other sailors, the Mariner bit down on his arm; sucking
the blood, he was able to moisten his tongue enough to cry out,
“A sail! a sail!” The sailors smiled, believing they were saved.
But as the ship neared, they saw that it was a ghostly, skeletal
hull of a ship and that its crew included two figures: Death and
the Night-mare Life-in-Death, who takes the form of a pale woman with
golden locks and red lips, and “thicks man’s blood with cold.” Death
and Life-in-Death began to throw dice, and the woman won, whereupon
she whistled three times, causing the sun to sink to the horizon,
the stars to instantly emerge. As the moon rose, chased by a single
star, the sailors dropped dead one by one—all except the Mariner,
whom each sailor cursed “with his eye” before dying. The souls of
the dead men leapt from their bodies and rushed by the Mariner.
The Wedding-Guest declares that he fears the Mariner,
with his glittering eye and his skinny hand. The Mariner reassures
the Wedding-Guest that there is no need for dread; he was not among
the men who died, and he is a living man, not a ghost. Alone on
the ship, surrounded by two hundred corpses, the Mariner was surrounded
by the slimy sea and the slimy creatures that crawled across its
surface. He tried to pray but was deterred by a “wicked whisper”
that made his heart “as dry as dust.” He closed his eyes, unable
to bear the sight of the dead men, each of who glared at him with
the malice of their final curse. For seven days and seven nights
the Mariner endured the sight, and yet he was unable to die. At
last the moon rose, casting the great shadow of the ship across
the waters; where the ship’s shadow touched the waters, they burned
red. The great water snakes moved through the silvery moonlight,
glittering; blue, green, and black, the snakes coiled and swam and
became beautiful in the Mariner’s eyes. He blessed the beautiful
creatures in his heart; at that moment, he found himself able to
pray, and the corpse of the Albatross fell from his neck, sinking
“like lead into the sea.”
Form
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is written in loose,
short ballad stanzas usually either four or six lines long but,
occasionally, as many as nine lines long. The meter is also somewhat
loose, but odd lines are generally tetrameter, while even lines
are generally trimeter. (There are exceptions: In a five-line stanza,
for instance, lines one, three, and four are likely to have four
accented syllables—tetrameter—while lines two and five have three
accented syllables.) The rhymes generally alternate in an ABAB or
ABABAB scheme, though again there are many exceptions; the nine-line
stanza in Part III, for instance, rhymes AABCCBDDB. Many stanzas
include couplets in this way—five-line stanzas, for example, are
rhymed ABCCB, often with an internal rhyme in the first line, or
ABAAB, without the internal rhyme.
Commentary
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is unique among Coleridge’s
important works— unique in its intentionally archaic language (“Eftsoons
his hand drops he”), its length, its bizarre moral narrative, its
strange scholarly notes printed in small type in the margins, its
thematic ambiguity, and the long Latin epigraph that begins it,
concerning the multitude of unclassifiable “invisible creatures”
that inhabit the world. Its peculiarities make it quite atypical
of its era; it has little in common with other Romantic works. Rather,
the scholarly notes, the epigraph, and the archaic language combine
to produce the impression (intended by Coleridge, no doubt) that
the “Rime” is a ballad of ancient times (like “Sir Patrick Spence,”
which appears in “Dejection: An Ode”), reprinted with explanatory
notes for a new audience.
