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Unit 3: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge

Guest gets transfixed by the ancient Mariner’s “glittering eye” as the magnetic glow of his eyes Notes
is even more powerful than his grip. The Wedding Guest can’t do anything but quietly sit on a
stone and hear the Mariner’s strange story. The old sailor starts narrating his story. He says that
he sailed on a ship out of his native harbour below the kirk, below the hill and below the
lighthouse top into a sunlit and joyful sea. The wedding guest hears bassoon music coming from
the direction of the wedding and pictures the bride entering the hall, but he feels helpless as he
is unable to tear himself from the sailor’s story. The ancient mariner recollects that as a massive
storm rose up in the sea and chased the ship and took it southward, the voyage quickly darkened.
The ship quickly came to a very cold land of surrounded by snow and mist where “ice, mast-
high, came floating by”; the ship was hemmed inside this maze of ice. When the sailors left port
and the ship sailed down near Antarctica to get away from a bad storm, the sailors got caught in
a foggy ice field. The sailors then came across an Albatross which is a great sea bird. As the
Albatross fluttered around the ship, the ice around the ship cracked and split. A wind from the
south pushed the ship out of the chilly areas, into an unclear and foggy stretch of water. The
Albatross followed the ship, which was a symbol of good luck for the sailors. Suddenly an
upsetting and pained look comes on the Ancient Mariner’s face. Seeing this troubled look on the
Mariner’s face, the wedding guest asks him, “Why look’st thou so?” . At being asked this question
the Mariner admits that he shot the Albatross with his bow and the bird died.
The Mariner continued to narrate his story and said that at first, the other Mariners got extremely
angry with the ancient Mariner for killing the Albatross that made the winds blow. As soon as
the Albatross died, the fog immediately lifted. The other sailors soon realised that the bird had
actually brought the fog not the cool breezes. The sailors now congratulated the ancient Mariner
for killing the Albatross. The wind pushed the ship in a quiet sea where the sailors were stuck;
the winds died down, and the ship was “As idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean.” The
ocean solidified, and the sailors did not have any water to drink. It looked like the sea were
rotting and was filled with slimy and creepy creatures that crawled out of the sea and paced
towards the surface. At night, the water burned blue, green, and white with death fire. A number
of the Mariners dreamt that a spirit, nine fathoms deep, shadowed them underneath the ship
from the land of snow and mist. The other sailors again blamed this Mariner for their troubles
and hung the body of the Albatross around the Mariner’s neck like a cross.
An exhausted time had passed; the Mariners became so thirsty and their mouths so dry, that they
were barely able to speak. One day while looking westwards, the Mariner noticed a small
particle on the horizon. It looked like a ship, moving their direction. Too dry-mouthed to make
any utterances and tell the other sailors, the Mariner bit his own arm and sucked some blood so
that he could dampen his tongue. He then cried out loud, “A sail! A sail!”. Hearing this the
sailors took a sigh of relief and smiled, being sure that they were saved. As the ship neared, they
were shocked to see that it was a ghostlike, skeletal structure of a ship. Its crew consisted of two
figures: Death and the Night-mare Life-in-Death, who takes the form of a pale woman with red
lips and golden locks, and “thicks man’s blood with cold.” Death and Life-in-Death started
throwing the dice, and the woman stood victorious, so she whistled thrice, making the sun sink
to the horizon and the stars to immediately appear. When the moon rose, chased by a single star,
the Mariners started dyeing one after the one except the Mariner. Each sailor cursed the Mariner
“with his eye” before taking his last breath. The souls of the dead sailors jumped from their
bodies and rushed to the Mariner.
The wedding guest says that he feels scared of the Mariner because of his skinny hand and his
glittering eye. The Mariner assures the wedding guest to not feel scared as he was alive. The
Mariner said that he was not amongst the men who died and that he is not a ghost, he is a living
man. Being alone on the ship the Mariner was surrounded by two hundred dead bodies of the
sailors. He was also surrounded by the slimy sea and the creepy creatures that crawled on its
surface. The Mariner tried to pray but was discouraged by a “wicked whisper” that made his

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