Summary
The Mariner continues telling his story to the Wedding-Guest.
Free of the curse of the Albatross, the Mariner was able to sleep,
and as he did so, the rains came, drenching him. The moon broke
through the clouds, and a host of spirits entered the dead men’s
bodies, which began to move about and perform their old sailors’
tasks. The ship was propelled forward as the Mariner joined in the
work. The Wedding-Guest declares again that he is afraid of the
Mariner, but the Mariner tells him that the men’s bodies were inhabited
by blessed spirits, not cursed souls. At dawn, the bodies clustered
around the mast, and sweet sounds rose up from their mouths—the
sounds of the spirits leaving their bodies. The spirits flew around
the ship, singing. The ship continued to surge forward until noon,
driven by the spirit from the land of mist and snow, nine fathoms
deep in the sea. At noon, however, the ship stopped, then began
to move backward and forward as if it were trapped in a tug of war.
Finally, it broke free, and the Mariner fell to the deck with the
jolt of sudden acceleration. He heard two disembodied voices in
the air; one asked if he was the man who had killed the Albatross, and
the other declared softly that he had done penance for his crime
and would do more penance before all was rectified.
In dialogue, the two voices discussed the situation. The
moon overpowered the sea, they said, and enabled the ship to move;
an angelic power moved the ship northward at an astonishingly rapid
pace. When the Mariner awoke from his trance, he saw the dead men
standing together, looking at him. But a breeze rose up and propelled
the ship back to its native country, back to the Mariner’s home;
he recognized the kirk, the hill, and the lighthouse. As they neared
the bay, seraphs—figures made of pure light—stepped out of the corpses
of the sailors, which fell to the deck. Each seraph waved at the
Mariner, who was powerfully moved. Soon, he heard the sound of oars;
the Pilot, the Pilot’s son, and the holy Hermit were rowing out
toward him. The Mariner hoped that the Hermit could shrive (absolve)
him of his sin, washing the blood of the Albatross off his soul.
The Hermit, a holy man who lived in the woods and loved
to talk to mariners from strange lands, had encouraged the Pilot
and his son not to be afraid and to row out to the ship. But as
they reached the Mariner’s ship, it sank in a sudden whirlpool,
leaving the Mariner afloat and the Pilot’s rowboat spinning in the
wake. The Mariner was loaded aboard the Pilot’s ship, and the Pilot’s
boy, mad with terror, laughed hysterically and declared that the
devil knows how to row. On land, the Mariner begged the Hermit to
shrive him, and the Hermit bade the Mariner tell his tale. Once
it was told, the Mariner was free from the agony of his guilt. However,
the guilt returned over time and persisted until the Mariner traveled
to a new place and told his tale again. The moment he comes upon
the man to whom he is destined to tell his tale, he knows it, and
he has no choice but to relate the story then and there to his appointed
audience; the Wedding-Guest is one such person.
The church doors burst open, and the wedding party streams
outside. The Mariner declares to the Wedding-Guest that he who loves
all God’s creatures leads a happier, better life; he then takes
his leave. The Wedding-Guest walks away from the party, stunned,
and awakes the next morning “a sadder and a wiser man.”
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 there are again 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
This second segment of the “Rime” concludes the Mariner’s
narrative; here he meets the host of seraph-like spirits who (rather
grotesquely) rescue his ship by entering the corpses of the fallen
sailors, and it is here that he earns his moral salvation through
his confession to the Hermit and the subsequent confessions he must continue
to make throughout his life—including this one, to the Wedding-Guest.
This second segment lacks much of the bizarre imagistic intensity
found in the first section, and the supernatural powers even begin
to seem sympathetic (the submerged spirit from the land of mist
and snow is now called “the lonesome spirit” in a side note). The
more gruesome elements still surface occasionally, however; the
sinking of the ship and the insanity of the Pilot’s son could have
come from a dramatic, gritty tale such as Moby- Dick, and
the seraphs of the previous scene evoke such fantastical works as Paradise
Lost.
