Subjects:
The beginning of the poem is represented by the good spirits felt by the mariner while telling to a gentlemangoing to a wedding about his voyage. Then there is the arrival of the albatross, that comes through the fog;it is seen as a good sign,but the mariner kills it in a stupid,unexpected way.From that momoent on,he has to live in a hostile nature,alone and deserted.He loses not only his shipmates and God,but also his speech,and remains silent most of the action.This way are tested the limits of Man’s power to convey through language the inner life of self which is intrinsically mysterious,preirrational and mute.
The mariner is conscient of what he has done, and he
. . .
The actual impressions and memories of his past cry out for words.
The suffering also comes along as, in a way or another,the mariner’s world is religious; the moral and intellectual confusions of the mariner,the seeming of incongruity and irrationality of his world,correspond to his inner conflict. So,after the solitary voyage on a “wide wide sea”,after his sisyphean labor and all the scarying moments and fights he sees the three things that he has seen at his departure,only that the order is different;this could mean that his total recovery is done and he had suffered enough,but it is just an impression.
The next inner struggle is centered on the unbearable scene of complete solitude,climaxing with the extreme isolation and even the morbid wish of dying. This is in a way the first sign of a possible redemption,that depends only on his self-acceptance,on his labor to “bring back fragments of former Feeling”. The usual ideas of causality and reason in this process are not operation,for whatever happens could be accepted as a part of the unified whole percieved in a phenomenological way. During this bizarre experience,the mariner’s world is dominated by sights “to dream of ,not to tell” . The influence of the moon (viewed as the positive supernatural power) seems to lost its force. Normally,real objects,like the sea,are not presented in descriptions which import the qualities of actual things. This is why The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,being scrutinized through the lines of a critical rather than a hermeneutic method,discovers more and more original conceptions;this way it can cease to be an object of faith –wether Romantic or Christian-and become,instead,a human or social and historical resource;this way we can never say that all has been interpretated and this poem manages to arise new ideas and ways of understanding. Sometimes,because this uncertainity,the mariner is not entirely certain of his own identity (305-308). In fact,he simply accepted the water snakes as a fact of experience,a mode of reality identified in some way with himself.
In this world of imagination two things are immediately noticeable: the participation of all reality, living and non-living, real and spiritual.
On the other hand, the mariner’s desire ordinary Christian absolution can be understood as a re-assertion of the laws of logical thinking and causality in his mind. The presence of the Supernatural is very strong,culminating with the spirit of the South Pole,that helps the ships’ moving on.
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