The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the story of a long sea voyage told by an old mariner condemned to wonder the world repeating his story as a punishment for a terrible crime he has committed. The mariner tells how his ship, after crossing the equator, was trapped by ice in the Polar Regions. For some days the seamen saw no sign of life; but one day an Albatross appeared. The bird seemed to bring them luck because a wind rose, the ice opened and the ship started to sail again. The Albatross followed the ship, the shipmates fed the bird. During the sailing without apparent reason the Ancient Mariner killed the Albatross. At first the shipmates cursed him for his evil act, but when the fog and mist cleared they said he had done a good thing, since it was the bird who had brought the fog. The ship sailed into the Pacific where, owing to the dropping wind, it was unable to move. A spirit, who had followed the ship from the Pole now, began to take his revenge for the albatross. The sailors, dying out of thirst, hung the dead bird round the mariner's neck. Later on a ship was seen in the distance. The sailors were happy but soon realized it was no ordinary ship, but a skeleton whose only passengers were a Spectre-woman or Life-in-Death and a male figure or Death. Death and Life-in-Death played dice to decide the crew's fate. Death won all except one, the old mariner who was won by "Life-in-Death". The mariner was left alone with his dead companions, he was unable to escape, to hope, to pray until, inspired by the beauty of nature, he was able to bless the creature "the water-snake" which lived in the sea and to break the curse which was upon him. The dead bird dropped from his neck. This involuntary contact with nature is the Ancient mariner's redemption. Killing the Albatross, the old mariner had violated the laws of nature and committed a crime against the natural world, so to placate the spirit of the South Pole he had to tell his story and to teach everyone to love nature. Coleridge's interest in the supernatural derived from nature to whose minute description he devoted many lines; but his convinced Christian faith did not allow him to identify nature with the divine in the form of pantheism which Wordsworth adopted in his early phase. Coleridge saw nature and the material world in a sort of Neo-Platonic interpretation, as the Shadowy reflection of the perfect world of "Ideas". In other words, the material world is nothing but the projection of the real world of Ideas on a flux of time. As concerning "Style" Coleridge adopted an archaic language. He used personification and similes and enriched the sound quality of the ballad through the use of onomatopoeia, alliteration and refined examples of patterns of repetition. When he describes nature such as rivers, landscape, sea he uses pentameter conflets, but when he describes the mystery of the poet's inspiration he uses truncated tetrameters which confer a chant-like rhythm on the lines.

Main points:

Primary Imagination is a repetition of the eternal act of God.

The Secondary Imagination is an act of conscious will. It is not spontaneous. It differs from the Primary Imagination also in degree and in the way it operates. Infact, before recreating, the Secondary Imagination dissolves and dissipates, whereas the Primary Imagination unifies the scattered elements of perception.