The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner ANALYSIS: SPEAKER

The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner By Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Analysis (Speaker) 

You got to love a speaker that says eleven words in the first two lines before passing the poem off to a strange old man who likes to hang around outside wedding celebrations. But in all seriousness, the speaker of the poem is basically a narrator who sets up the action in this dramatic poem. The narrative has two levels: there's the story of the Mariner and the Wedding Guest, and then there's the story-within-a-story of the Mariner's voyage, which takes up most of the poem. We can comment briefly on the nature of the narrator of each story.

The narrator of the poem has a third-person limited perspective. That is, he knows the thoughts of only one of the two characters, the Wedding Guest. But he stays out of the way for most of the poem, and we don't learn the Wedding Guest's thoughts until the end, when we discover how he became a sadder and wiser man. At the beginning of the poem, the narrator uses one of the most ingeniously simple devices we've seen: "It…