For the Romantic poet Samuel T. Coleridge, the role of imagination is very important in his works. For example, his poems “Kubla Khan” and more specifically, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” are extremely imaginative. Although they are extremely imaginative, they are still grounded in reality, which is where the human imagination is rooted. Heavy symbolism is also very prevalent in his poetry. In fact, in “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the symbolism is rather allegorical. A deeper meaning can be extracted from beneath the surface. Because of the extensive symbolism and the real-world grounded imagination, readers can come to a profound understanding of the human condition, or, rather, the human experience.
As mentioned before, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” can be read in more than one way. To discover the deeper meanings of the poem, it is necessary to work through the literal reading of the poem. On a literal level, the poem begins with a wizened old mariner stopping a guest in a way to a wedding. As we find out, as much as the mariner is compelled to tell his tale, the detained wedding guest is very much compelled to listen to the story, “Yet he cannot choose but hear; And thus spake on that Ancient man.” Here, we see that the wedding guest is enthralled by the story and cannot get up to leave.
The mariner begins to relate his adventure which begins in the south. Ice and mist are all around the ship. After a while, an Albatross comes along and becomes a good omen for the ship and her crew. This assumption is drawn from the lines “The ice did split with a thunder fit; the helmsman steer’d us through!” The bird is a good omen because it leads the ship through the ice and fog without harm. Without warrant, the mariner shoots down the Albatross with his crossbow. At first, his men are angry with him for killing the albatross. They change their minds when the fog lifts. They condone the killing until the wind that had come up when the Albatross was around stops in the absence of the Albatross. They are stuck with no water in blistering sun. The mariner describes how the sea seemed to rot and there are water snakes all around the ship.
Soon, the universe takes vengeance upon the mariner and all 200 men in his crew die, leaving him alone for seven days and seven nights. Only then does the mariner appreciate the beauty to be found in the water snakes, which, for the record, should be feared more than a harmless seabird. Then the spell begins to break. Spirits inhabit the sailors’ bodies and the mariner is lead back to his home port. His ship begins to sink in a whirlpool as a hermit and a pilot and his son come up to the boat. They rescue the mariner. Once on land, the mariner begs the hermit to shrieve him of his misdeeds so the hermit lets the mariner tell him his story.
Then “the penance of life falls on him.” His penance is to tell his story so as to warn others and to teach them, from his own example, not to make the same mistake he did- not respecting God’s creation. Now that the Mariner has told his story, he feels at ease. The wedding guest, however, “went on like one that hath been stunned.” He had gained knowledge from the mariner’s story and he was a ‘sadder and wiser man” when “he rose the morrow morn.” Quite understandably, the wedding guest was not the same person after he had listened to the mariner.
The second level of meaning is derived from interpreting some of the elements in the poem in another light. If we allow the albatross to represent mystery- or the magic that life holds like when we are children- the haze to represent innocence, the lifting of the haze as maturity, and the mariner as experience, we can develop a deeper meaning which holds an important life lesson. When we begin our lives, we are innocent. As we go along in life, we want to know. We don’t want to be kept in the dark. What do we do about it? We kill mystery. We kill it with our questioning and curiosity. By doing so, we also kill the magic that life holds. When it is all gone, the fog lifts to show that there is nothing there. We are left with clarity because we now know something we didn’t know before.
After that, life is kind of disappointing. That driving force that keeps us dreaming, like the wind for the mariner’s ship, is gone. We stagnate. Inherently, we are much like the philosophe as described in the lecture “What is Romanticism?” the lecture says that the philosophe congratulates himself in exposing life for what it really is but “ after all the destruction, after the ancient idols fell, and after the dust had cleared, there remained nothing…” (Is this quote not reminiscent of the haze lifting after the albatross is shot down?) When there is something to appreciate or believe in, life is a little easier to deal with. We find it easier to keep going. We aren’t so disappointed.
Experiences such as maturing become part of who we are. They shape how we think and deal with things that happen to us. We cannot forget those kinds of experiences, try as we might. It is our job then, to teach by example how to go through life so that others do not make the same mistakes and do not have to go through any terrible occurrences like we did.
A third level of interpretation can be made from “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” This level may also be the bigger picture that Coleridge was trying to create for us to learn from. On this next level of understanding, it is likely that the Mariner represents Coleridge. The story is just a life lesson which is, as one of the side notes indicates, to respect and love all of God’s creations. The penance that the mariner must serve for life, could be Coleridge’s idea of the function of a poet; to relate information and to restore beauty into our world which is supported by the line, “In stepped the Romantics who sought to restore the organic quality of the past” from the Romanticism lecture. The wedding guests are his readers. The inclusion of the many spirits in the poem also follows the characteristics of a Romantic. “The Romantics returned God to nature- the age revived the unseen world, the supernatural, the mysterious.”
In summary, Coleridge could be trying to say that he functions as a means of repairing the damage done to us by experience and the knowledge gained during the course of our lives. He also is sending us a warning and giving us a lesson, all too often we learn the hard way, without the experience. This is Coleridge’s underlying message; which is found in all three levels of interpretation: we must respect God’s creation. If we do not do this, vengeance will be exacted upon us. In other words, if we commit a misdeed, karma will come back to bite us in the end.
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