The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: Themes

The Captivating Power of Narrative

As suggested by its title, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is a poem that is, in some way, “about” storytelling. The poem features a nested structure that allows for the Mariner, a character within the main story, to take over the narrative and regale us with his own tale. From the very beginning, his tale proves captivating for his main audience, the Wedding-Guest (lines 14–16):

The Wedding-Guest stood still,
And listens like a three years' child:
The Mariner hath his will.

If the Wedding-Guest feels captivated, it’s because the Mariner has lulled him into a state of hypnosis. Indeed, the phrase “the Mariner hath his will” alludes to a theory known as mesmerism. This theory posits the existence of an invisible magnetic force that may be used to compel someone into a trance-like state. The Mariner’s hypnotic power is ominous, and it initially seems to stem from his “glittering eye,” which the Wedding-Guest references twice, in lines 3 and 13. Arguably, though, it’s less the Mariner’s eyes than his narrative that compels the Wedding-Guest’s attention (lines 37–39):

The Wedding-Guest he beat his breast,
Yet he cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man

Several times in the poem the Wedding-Guest interrupts the Mariner to express his terror and suggest that he should stop his tale. Yet each time the Mariner continues, and his audience can’t help but pay attention.

The Consolation of Confession

For the Mariner, his tale functions as a confession, the purpose of which is to find consolation. We get our first hint about this purpose quite late in the poem. In Part 7, when he meets a holy man known as the Hermit, the Mariner begs him to “shrieve” him—that is, to hear his confession and grant him absolution. The Mariner’s description of his confession to the Hermit reads as a mirror image of the way his tale captivated the Wedding-Guest at the beginning of the poem (lines 574–81):

“O shrieve me, shrieve me, holy man!”
The Hermit crossed his brow.
“Say quick,” quoth he, “I bid thee say—
What manner of man art thou?”

Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched
With a woful agony,
Which forced me to begin my tale;
And then it left me free.

Just as the Wedding-Guest felt overcome by the need to listen to the Mariner’s story, here the Mariner feels overcome by the need to tell it. His account of his sins causes him “a woful agony,” but in the end, he says, “it left me free.” It’s significant to note that though the Mariner had earlier removed the physical albatross from his neck, he still carried the spiritual weight of having murdered it. It’s only through this narrative act that he finally feels spiritually unburdened. He now recounts his tale to the Wedding-Guest as a continuation of this spiritual unburdening.

The Sanctity of All God’s Creatures

A central theme in the Mariner’s narrative revolves around the sanctity of all God’s creatures. This theme relates closely to the story arc that encompasses the Mariner’s unwarranted murder of the albatross, his recognition of the sinful nature of that act, and his final confession and absolution. After the Mariner kills the albatross, his crew’s main concern relates to the bird’s symbolic importance. Thus, when the wind stops and the ship gets stranded, they identify the albatross’s death as the cause. Only at this point does the Mariner begin to feel the weight of his sin, which is literally manifested in the dead albatross he hangs around his neck. At the end of Part 4, with his entire crew now dead and his ship surrounded by slithering serpents, something miraculous happens. A “spring of love” (line 284) for the serpents suddenly erupts in his heart, and as he assumes a prayerful attitude, the albatross falls from his neck. The Mariner echoes this key plot moment at the poem’s end, where he summarizes what he believes to be the true moral of his tale (lines 612–17):

He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

For the Mariner, at least, the moral of his tale is that all creatures belong to God and must be loved equally.

The Impossibility of a Definitive Interpretation

At the poem’s end, the Mariner asserts what he thinks is the moral of his tale: the sanctity of all God’s creatures. For the reader, however, this interpretation isn’t entirely satisfying. The Mariner reads his own narrative as a straightforward Christian moral allegory. According to this interpretation, he committed a sin, bore the grievous weight of that sin, and eventually achieved absolution through repentance and confession. A key piece of evidence for the Mariner’s reading of his own tale occurs when he a feels sudden and inexplicable fondness to a host of serpents roiling the sea around his ship. It’s this moment of affection that, he implies, caused the dead albatross to fall from his neck. Yet for a Christian moral allegory, it’s arguably rather odd that love for a serpent would be the key to redemption, given that the serpent traditionally symbolizes God’s chief antagonist: Satan. There are many additional elements in the poem that seem decidedly un-Christian. Consider the supernatural spirits that guide the ship and inhabit the crew’s corpses, or else the bizarre figures of “Death” and “Life-in-Death.” These and other occult elements in the poem can’t be explained by the Mariner’s reading and suggest the need for an alternative interpretation.

Coleridge himself signaled the impossibility of a definitive interpretation when, for the 1818 edition of the poem, he inserted substantial marginal glosses to accompany the main text. These glosses create an odd scholarly apparatus that alternately summarizes, comments on, and interprets the poem. Quite often the glosses add information that doesn’t appear in the poem. In Part 2, for instance, Coleridge added a note about the spirit that follows the ship nine fathoms deep (see note to line 131):

One of the invisible inhabitants of this planet, neither departed souls nor angels; concerning whom the learned Jew, Josephus, and the Platonic Constantinopolitan, Michael Psellus, may be consulted.

This gloss suggests that we readers should interpret the indicated passage in relation to these obscure scholars, who claim that the spirit in the poem is a mysterious figure that cannot be accounted for by a Christian worldview. Yet later in the poem, another marginal gloss explicitly identifies other spirits in terms derived from Christian theology (see note to line 345):

But not by the souls of the men, nor by daemons of earth or middle air, but by a blessed troop of angelic spirits, sent down by the invocation of the guardian saint.

In short, the marginal glosses function as a parallel text that asserts alternative interpretations. These interpretations sometimes clarify what’s going on in the poem, and sometimes they may confound the reader. Regardless, their presence confirms the notion that there can be no single interpretation of the poem.

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