This poem is one of the culture's standard texts as far as the poetic interpretation is concerned;it has been viewed as a sacramental vision of crime,punishment,and salvation;as a nightmarish tale of sensless suffering ;as a discourse on prayer;as a parody of the Christian doctrine of atonement;as an elaborate structure of occult symbolism;and as a prophetic allegory of Coleridge's life.
             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 cannot help feeling guilty about everything that happens on the ship; there is the influence of the sunlight that makes all the things get dry, including the sailors,that are more and more thirsty;the albatross can thus be seen as part of the mariner's superstitious preconceptions;this way we can talk here of a particular symbolic and religious discourse,but in his mind there always is the superstitious phenomena held in a significant relation with various Christian ideologies.
             The self-conscience becomes extremely influencing with the apparition of the skeleton ship on the calm sea,with the figures of Death and Life-in-Death.This is when the mariner performs a sacrificial gesture to regain his speech,bitting his arm to draw blood.But he can only say :"A sail! a sail!"[161],that can be interpreted as wo...