Coleridge's poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is wrote in a way that the reader is
expected to temporarily allow him or herself to believe it to be able to understand it.
The poem itself is about a Mariner who is telling his tale of sin and forgiveness by God
to a man referred to as the "Wedding Guest." The Mariner is supposedly responsible for
the death of all of the crew on his ship because of his killing of a creature which was
to bring them the wind that they needed to put power into the sails of the ship. The
whole point of the poem is to encourage or convince the reader to believe the tale that
Coleridge tells.
Coleridge wrote the poem as a means to induce the reader with what he calls a "willing
suspension of disbelief." The poem is written in such a way that the reader is expected
to willingly decide to temporarily believe the almost unbelievable story. The reason a
person is to make sure that he or she believes it temporarily to be true is because the
Mariner in the story is trying to get the point of forgiveness from God across to the
reader and if the reader chooses not to believe the story behind the poem then they will
not understand the effect of the point of the tale. Coleridge's main point in writing
the story was to get people to understand forgiveness by understanding the poem.
The Mariner in the poem is telling his tale to a "Wedding Guest" who has no choice but
to listen and to believe. The "Wedding Guest" in the poem represents "everyman" in the
sense that "everyone" is to be at the marriage of the Mariner to life. That is, the
reader is to follow, live, and participate with the idea of the poem.
Coleridge tells of a Mariner on a ship who makes a sin against God and therefore is
cursed. This curse, the killing of an Albatross - one of God's creatures, costs the
entire crew on the ship their lives yet he lives so that he can realize what he has done
and be given a chance to ask forgiveness for his sin. The deaths occurred when a ship
was sited and on it two women like figures were playing dice and life won the Mariner and
death got the crew. Until he began to pray and ask for forgiveness the crew's souls
couldn't enter Heaven but one he did the curse was broken, his life was saved, and Angels
came down from Heaven and took the crew's souls with them. He had become a saved man.
The whole point of the story becomes clear in the following lines.
"Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding Guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
"He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all."
The Mariner, whose eye is bright,
Whose beard with age is hoar,
Is gone: and now the Wedding Guest
Turned from the bridegroom's door.
He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn. (610-625)
In these closing lines Coleridge basically sums up the whole poem. Here he is telling
the "Wedding Guest" all about how to live a good life with God and to respect all things
that God creates (which is everything). The Mariner is doing his teaching of what he
learned on his voyage in these lines. It tells how the "Wedding Guest" left after
hearing the entire Mariner's tale and left a wiser man. What this meant is that he left
understanding the Mariner's words and learned from the Mariner's mistakes. The Mariner
had done his job in retelling his tale.
Coleridge did a good job of writing the poem in a way that the reader would be forced to
temporarily believe it without even realizing it. In a certain sense you could say that
through the tale he placed the "fear of God" in people that made them more likely to
believe the story. When people are fearful of something they have more of a tendency to
fall prey to something and Coleridge takes advantage of this in getting his point across.
The poem is written in a brilliant way that can curve the reader to think in whatever
manner Coleridge wants them to.
The poem was written to try to get people to temporarily believe a story that would not
normally be believable and it does just that. Coleridge wanted people to understand the
Mariner and to be able to relate to him and to understand him. He conveyed his point of
religion to the reader by making the reader subconsciously fall prey to the images and
thoughts he instilled in their minds. The poem for the most part does as Coleridge
intended and gets the reader to atleast understand and believe the tale that the Mariner
has to tell.
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