Ahira Yanez
Jane Lucas
British Literature II
March 9, 2020
The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner
In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s writing “The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner”, he writes in parts. There are 7 parts and each part contains a different narrative of things that Samuel writes about. The poem “The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner” is about three young men who were walking to attend a wedding, when they were stopped by an old sailor. The sailor makes the men sit on a stone and he begins talking about a strange tale. “The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner is compared to Iron Maiden’s song written about the poem. The song Iron Maiden wrote talked about the exact same thing the poem says. He used actual line of the poem and added the song to his album “Powerslave” which was released in 1984.
The poem goes on with the Mariner talking more about his time a sailor. He said that he sailed on a ship out of his native harbor, “below the kirk, below the hill/below the lighthouse top, and into a sunny cheerful sea.” in the song written by Iron Maiden, they sing the part where coleridge wrote in th poem of the mariner setting to sail. The mariner then remembers that the voyage quickly darkened, as a giant storm came up on the sea and chased his boat southward. The ship came up to a land, “of mist and snow”, where ice, mast-high, came floating by;” A pained look crosses the Mariner’s face, and the Wedding-Guest asks him, “Why look’st thou so?” The Mariner confesses that he shot and killed the Albatross with his crossbow. Albatross was a great sea bird that the sailor encountered. The other sailors at first were upset that the sailor had killed the bird that made the breezes blow, but when the fog lifted the sailors realized that the bird didn’t bring the breezes but the fog. Later on in the poem one of the wedding guest says he is afraid of the mariner with his glittering eye and skinny hand due to the fact that the mariner talked about how the other sailors had died and he was the only one that survived. The Mariner was surrounded by the slimy sea and the slimy creatures that crawled across its surface. He tried to pray but was deterred by a “wicked whisper” that made his heart “as dry as dust.” He closed his eyes, unable to bear the sight of the dead men, each of who glared at him with the malice of their final curse. For seven days and seven nights the Mariner endured the sight, and yet he was unable to die.
At the end the moon rose, casting the great shadow of the ship across the waters; where the ship’s shadow touched the waters, they burned red. The great water snakes moved through the moonlight, glittering; blue, green, and black, the snakes twisted and swam and became beautiful in the Mariner’s eyes. He blessed the beautiful creatures in his heart; at that moment, he found himself able to pray, and the corpse of the Albatross fell from his neck, sinking “like lead into the sea.” The whole poem was written in Iron Maidens song so that he could express more and make the reader feel more about what the mariner was talking about in his strange tale to the wedding guests.
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