The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: Structure

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“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is a narrative poem that takes the form of a ballad. Over the course of this ballad, the Mariner recounts his story to a man known only as the Wedding-Guest. This story, which presumably took place in the Mariner’s youth, might be said to follow the pattern of the prototypical “hero’s journey.” This term originated with Joseph Campbell, a scholar of folklore and mythology who described a common narrative pattern in which a hero leaves home, faces adversity, and eventually returns home changed. The sea voyage the Mariner recounts in his “Rime” may be framed as a hero’s journey in the sense that he does indeed leave home, face adversity, then return home changed. However, he frames his tale more specifically as a Christian moral allegory in which, after killing an albatross, he made a spiritual journey through repentance, confession, and absolution. For his part, the Wedding-Guest also goes on something like a hero’s journey. Although he doesn’t experience any of the events recounted first-hand, the Mariner’s narrative takes him on a wild excursion that provokes real fear. When he reaches the end of the Mariner’s tale, the Wedding-Guest emerges transformed, “a sadder and a wiser man” (line 624).

In addition to the poem’s narrative arc, there are other structural elements that have significance for our interpretation of the poem. For one thing, the poem consists of seven numbered sections. Seven is an important number in Christian theology, being the number of both the “seven deadly sins” and the “seven cardinal virtues.” This structuring device may therefore lend credence to those readers who follow the Mariner in his interpretation of his tale as a specifically Christian allegory. That said, Coleridge has imposed another structuring device that complicates this reading of the poem as a straightforward Christian allegory. In the final version, he added a secondary text that runs parallel to the main poem. That is, he added a series of marginal annotations that summarize and comment on the primary text. These annotations create a self-consciously scholarly apparatus that encourages the reader to assume a critical distance from the poem. No longer can we read the poem as a simple account of an ancient Mariner’s tale. With the annotations, the poem definitively becomes a written rather than a spoken text. The complications created by this shift reveal that no single interpretation of the poem can have the last word.