The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: Key Poetic Devices

Allegory

An allegory (AL-uh-GO-ree) is a term used to describe a narrative that can be interpreted to reveal two distinct but correlated levels of meaning. A common example of allegory is Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan. This narrative tells of a man named Christian who travels from the “City of Destruction” to the “Celestial City.” A reader can enjoy Pilgrim’s Progress solely for the adventure that unfolds as Christian makes his way in the world. However, a reader can also interpret a second level of meaning, where Christian is an allegorical figure who stands in for all Christian believers. Understood in this way, his journey to the Celestial City allegorizes every Christian’s spiritual journey toward God. Like Pilgrim’s Progress, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” bears many hallmarks of a Christian moral allegory. The Mariner’s story begins with his “sinful” murder of the albatross. The many terrifying events that occur in the poem seem to relate either directly or indirectly to this original sin, for which the Mariner eventually seeks absolution from the Hermit. In this sense, we can interpret the Mariner’s compulsion to tell the Wedding-Guest his story as an allegory of confession—the Catholic ritual in which the sinner disburdens themself by disclosing their wrongdoings.

Personification

Personification refers to instances where a poet invests a nonhuman entity, an inanimate object, or an abstract concept with human-like attributes or feelings. This literary device appears at several points in the poem, typically in relation to parts of the natural world. In Part 1, for instance, the Mariner refers to the sun as “he” and attributes to this cosmic entity a certain degree of intention and agency (lines 25–28):

The sun came up upon the left,
Out of the sea came he!
And he shone bright, and on the right
Went down into the sea.

Another example of personification appears a few stanzas later, where the Mariner describes the coming of a storm in more obviously human terms (lines 41–44):

And now the storm-blast cam, and he
Was tyrannous and strong:
He struck with his o’ertaking wings,
And chased us south along.

Here, the Mariner clearly attributes human-like intentionality to the storm, which he says actively “chased” his ship. Though brief, these early examples of personification subtly promote a sense that the natural world is permeated with the supernatural. This is a motif that emerges more forcefully later in the poem, when supernatural phenomena become increasingly prominent. Take the appearance of “Death” and “Life-in-Death” in Part 3. It isn’t perfectly clear whether these are meant to be allegorical figures, or if we should understand them as personifications of abstract concepts. Regardless, the Mariner presents them as supernatural beings whose presence in the poem is prefigured by his earlier personifications of the sun and the storm.

Repetition

Among the most important features of Coleridge’s verse in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is the use of repetition. Repetition is one of the most common verbal tics of the Mariner, who often repeats words, phrases, and even full lines. In general, this tic has the effect of adding extra emphasis to key moments in the Mariner’s narrative. For instance, after slaying the albatross, the speaker recounts how his crew’s opinion of him shifted with the changing weather (lines 93–96):

For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay,
That made the breeze to blow!

The repetition of the line, “That made the breeze to blow,” underscores what’s truly at stake in this scene, in which the lack of wind strands the ship. If the albatross did in fact bring the wind, then the Mariner’s murder of this creature is responsible for the current lack of wind and hence the ship’s stranding. Shortly thereafter, however, when a wind rises and blows in some foggy air, the Mariner reports (lines 99–102):

Then all averred, I had killed the bird
That brought the fog and mist.
'Twas right, said they, such birds to slay,
That bring the fog and mist.

Virtually every part of these lines involves repeated material. The first line is nearly identical to the first line in the passage quoted above. Likewise, the phrase “such birds to slay” echoes “the bird to slay” in the previous passage. Finally, the second and fourth lines are almost identical. Overall, the repetition in this passage emphasizes the sailors’ apparent reversal of fortune, which is again attributed to the Mariner’s action.

Aside from emphasizing key plot points, repetition also functions in the poem to underscore moments of emotional intensity. Indeed, repetition often appears at moments of desperation, when the Mariner’s narrative rises to a fever pitch. One telling example appears at the beginning of Part 4, immediately after the ship’s entire crew has mysteriously dropped dead. Now by himself, the Mariner falls into a feverish hysteria (lines 232–35):

Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.

The repetition of “alone” reflects the fear and desperation the Mariner felt when his companions died and left him by himself. But the Mariner isn’t content only to repeat the word “alone.” He also emphasizes his isolation through the repetition of “all, all,” which stresses the completeness of his solitude. He further underscores the sense of fear of being left alone by emphasizing the vastness of the “wide, wide sea.” In yet another example, repetition again functions to highlight the Mariner’s hysteria (lines 119–122):

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

These lines are among the most famous in the poem, and the use of repetition here powerfully captures the awful irony of being surrounded by water but unable to slake one’s desperate thirst.

Simile

If his frequent use of the device is any indication, the Mariner is a great fan of simile. Recall that a simile (SIH-muh-lee) is a figure of speech that explicitly compares two unlike things to each other, typically with a connecting word such as “like” or “as.” Similes appear everywhere in Coleridge’s poem. The first example comes very early, when the speaker says the Wedding-Guest listens to the Mariner “like a three years’ child” (line 15). For the most part, however, it isn’t the speaker but the Mariner who makes use of simile. In Part 3, for instance, with his ship stranded due to a lack of wind, he employs the following simile (lines 117–18):

As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean

Then, much later in the poem, he uses another simile to describe the ship’s mysterious forward propulsion (lines 389–90):

Then like a pawing horse let go,
She made a sudden bound

As the simplest form of figurative language, it makes sense that the simile might be the Mariner’s poetic device of choice. The Mariner is undoubtedly an effective storyteller, but he also arguably lacks the more refined rhetorical techniques of an accomplished poet. The simile therefore offers a level of poetic sophistication that’s appropriate for his character. That said, near the poem’s end the Mariner does venture a rather elaborate simile that shows him stretching his poetic capacity to its limit (lines 442–51):

And now this spell was snapt: once more
I viewed the ocean green,
And looked far forth, yet little saw
Of what had else been seen—

Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.

In a single long sentence, the Mariner describes himself as being like someone who, walking “on a lonesome road,” tries unsuccessfully to pretend that they are alone and that no “frightful fiend” is following them.

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