Themes of the Rime of The Ancient Mariner

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  • Created by: Lily
  • Created on: 14-05-13 11:07
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  • Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Themes
    • Natural World
      • Beautiful yet frighteningly powerful
        • Punishes yet enlightens the Mariner
      • Typical of Romanticism
      • Dwarfs mankind
        • When Ancient Mariner offends it - "revolting" "slimy"
        • When Mariner accepts it - beauty
      • Personified
        • Hermit reflects the balance between that and spirtuality
    • The Spiritual world
      • Symbolism of the Albatross
      • Punishment for deying it
        • Gratitude for accepting it e.g blessed with water & saviour
      • The Dead mates rising
        • Mankind always attempt to define it but the spiritual world is beyond human knowledge
          • Symbolism of the Albatross
      • First & Second voices, life-in-death always talk about him rather than TO him
        • Beyond the physical realm
        • Real or a guilty consicence?
        • Emapthises the way the spiritual world afflicts mankind
      • Wedding Guest & Mariner apart from wedding = mans alienation from organised religion
    • Liminality
      • Distance between spiritual & physical realm
        • changes in characters
          • Mariner is forced into the spiritual world to value natural beauty
      • "place on the edge of a realm" - sea
        • pain & pleasure
        • Life-n-ndeath = limbo?
          • wild and mysterious terriotory
            • "liquid" (sea), "gas" (mist), "solid" (ice) - definitely in the sea but remnants of land - limbo
          • "liquid" (sea), "gas" (mist), "solid" (ice) - definitely in the sea but remnants of land - limbo
          • "glittering eye" - after his repentance he is forced to retell his story - genius & pain (eye)
        • The Equator
          • icy storm of pain when crossed
        • liminal state of mind - industrial society, organised religion, tradition
          • threshold of imagination
      • Religion
        • Champions the "Hermit" who is a figure of prayer
          • Closeness to God ans his creatures
        • Alba-tross killing = adam & eve, cain & able
          • Fails to obey Gods rules
          • Tempted into sin
          • "murders the Christian soul"
        • Prophet?
        • Baptised by the rain - washed away of sins but does not forget
      • Imprisonment
        • icy prision - trapped in the physical world
          • Foreshadows his entrapment in life-in0death
          • Lose control of the ship
        • Trapped by their thirst - human desires
          • silences them - isolates them from civillisation as they cannot communicate
        • Mariner is trapped by the ghost ship - guilt?
          • Trapped by his soul and conscience to replay the story
            • "glitetring eye" = frenzied soul trying to escape
            • Imprisons others by telling the story
        • Ships traps the sun
          • Spiritual power over the limits of physicality
      • Retribution
        • thirst and deat
          • torment of salty water
          • shipmates die and the mariner is alone
        • Killed the albatross
        • Life In Death
          • Eternal state of limbo - forced to never die but to repeat his suffering
      • Storytelling
        • Mariner = coleridge - gifted storytellers but are marred by a need to write but an torment to do so
          • Gift is a curse (Mariners punishment yet was saved)
            • Storytelling is their drug
            • Inspires yet hurts
              • Pschyological burden
            • Painfull limbo
          • Wedding Guest = the reader, forced to suffer through a sharsh tale to see a new way
            • A background presence to forces we do not understand

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