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Unit 3: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge

on-board the Pilot’s ship, and the Pilot’s son, who was very scared, laughed unbelievably and Notes
stated that the devil knows how to row. After making it back to the shore, the Mariner requested
the Hermit to shrive him, and the Hermit told the Mariner to tell his story. After having
narrated the story, the Mariner got free from the pain of his guilt. Though, the Mariner’s guilt
returned time and again and continued till the Mariner travelled to a new place to tell his tale
again. The very instant he comes across the man to whom he is meant to tell his tale, he knows
it. He doesn’t have an option but to narrate the entire tale then and there to his chosen audience
and the Wedding-Guest is one such individual.
The church doors opens, and the wedding party runs outside. The Mariner states to the Wedding-
Guest that he who is fond of God’s creatures leads a happier and a better life; he then leaves from
the function. The Wedding-Guest walks away from the function, astonished, and wakes up the
next morning only to be “a sadder and a wiser man.”

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Caution Always remember while reading this poem that conditions change really fast. In
just one stanza the sailors decided that the albatross was not a good luck charm instead it
brought with it bad luck for the sailors. It only takes a stanza for the weather to turn from
delightful to frightful.

Example: Main Theme: Liminality
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” typifies the Romantic fascination with liminal spaces.
A liminal space is defined as a place on the edge of a realm or between two realms,
whether a forest and a field, or reason and imagination. A liminal space often signifies a
liminal state of mind, such as the threshold of the imagination’s wonders. Romantics such
as Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Keats valorise the liminal space and state as places where
one can experience the sublime. For this reason they are often – and especially in the case
of Coleridge’s poems - associated with drug-induced euphoria. Following from this, liminal
spaces and states are those in which pain and pleasure are inextricable. Romantic poets
frequently had their protagonists enter liminal spaces and become irreversibly changed.
Starting in the epigraph to “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, Coleridge expresses a
fascination with the liminal state between the spiritual and natural, or the mundane and
the divine. Recall that this is what Burnet calls the “certain [and] uncertain” and “day [and]
night.”
In the Ancient Mariner’s story, liminal spaces are bewildering and cause pain. The first
liminal space the sailors encounter is the equator, which is in a sense about as liminal a
location as exists; after all, it is the threshold between the Earth’s hemispheres. No sooner
has the ship crossed the equator than a terrible storm ensues and drives it into the poem’s
ultimate symbolic liminal space, the icy world of the “rime.” It is liminal by its very
physical makeup; there, water exists not in one a single, definitive state, but in all three
forms: liquid (water), solid (ice), and gas (mist). They are still most definitely in the ocean,
but surrounding them are mountainous icebergs reminiscent of the land. The “rime” fits
the archetype of the Romantic liminal space in that it is simultaneously terrifying and
beautiful, and in that the sailors do not navigate there purposely, but are rather transported
there by some other force. Whereas the open ocean is a wild territory representing the
mysteries of the mind and the sublime, the “rime” exists just on its edge. As a liminal
space it holds great power, and indeed a powerful spirit inhabits the “rime.”

As punishment for his crime of killing the Albatross, the Ancient Mariner is sentenced to
Life-in-Death, condemned to be trapped in a limbo-like state where his “glittering eye”

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