Has the Rime of the Ancient Mariner got a Moral?
In order to determine whether The Rime Of the Ancient Mariner is a moral story or has a moral to it, it must be understood what morality and a moral in literature are. Morality is an understanding with regards to what are the right and wrong actions to take in different circumstances. For a piece of literature to be moral it mist shoe us moral values or create a sense of moral awareness, so, does the 'Rime'?One of the most famous people to outwardly say the 'Rime' has no moral was Mrs Barbauld. Coleridge recalls her comments in Table Talk, "Mrs Barbauld once told me that she admired The Ancient Mariner very much, but that there were two faults in it -- it was improbable, and had no moral." (The Road To Xanadu, p276) It was his own opinion that it was over moralistic however, "I told her that in my own judgement the poem had too much; and that the only, or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of such pure imagination." (The Road To Xanadu, p276) If Coleridge felt these stanzas were obtrusively moralistic, why did he not alter or remove them? It could be presumed that Coleridge thought them to be integral to his poem.
His errors cause him radical change, new forms of expression, and a concern for the common people. At the end of the poem when the Pilot's boat goes out to investigate the returning, spectral ship, neither the Pilot nor the boatboy can bear the encounter. The Pilot faints and the boatboy goes mad. Spiritual values have transcended physical values. In acknowledging the supremacy of God's power in nature over his own individual existence, he recognizes his inadequacy and insignificance and replaces the pride of self-sufficiency with humility. A sailor and his ship are becalmed when an Albatross comes, bringing wind and relief. As in The Ancient Mariner, in the form of an explicit and detachable maxim that neatly sums up the poem's didactic drift. Many early critics have been unable to account for so apparently awkward an intrusion of sententious godliness. The blessing causes the albatross to fall off the Mariner's neck, like the millstone of Christian iconography, or the burden from the back of Bunyan's pilgrim, and sink 'like lead into the sea. However more recent readers have defended the moral stanzas in terms of their dramatic propriety. The Ancient Mariner is not a tract on the prevention of cruelty to albatrosses; it is an imaginative and profoundly moving exploration of the moral integrity of the universe, which concludes -- and here is the problem -- with an unsettlingly naive expression of this leading idea in the form of two sentimental quatrains. The Mariner, on the other hand, symbolizes man's hubris in regarding himself superior and separate from nature. The Mariner, however, is mustering pride and decides to shoot the Albatross, "With my cross-bow, / I shot the ALBATROSS!" (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, p33) He illustrates his belief that he does not need the good luck of the Albatross. The many men, so beautiful! And they all dead did lie: And a thousand thousand slimy things Lived on; and so did I.
Common topics in this essay:
Ancient Mariner,
Mariner Mariner,
Road Xanadu,
Jew Coleridge,
Forbidden Fruit,
Mariner Christ,
Albatross Coleridge's,
Albatross Mariner's,
ancient mariner,
Whereas Christ,
God Nature,
rime ancient,
rime ancient mariner,
killing albatross,
water snakes,
mariner p47,
ancient mariner p47,
moral error,
ancient mariner p33,
moral stanzas,
mariner p33,
moral story,
ancient mariner p75,
mariner p73,
ancient mariner p49,
|
Acceptance Essays
