The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Summary

The Mariner stops one of three men going to a wedding. Although

the celebration is about to begin, the Wedding Guest quickly
becomes mesmerized by the old seaman and listens to the strange
tale he tells. The Mariner describes a voyage during which a storm
drove his ship off course toward the South Pole, a land of “mist and
snow."

 When an albatross appeared, the ship was freed from the ice and
sailed north. The albatross followed the ship, a friendly companion
to the crew, until the mariner senselessly shot it with his crossbow.
 After killing the albatross, the mariner and the crew were cursed,
and the voyage was beset by ghastly supernatural events. The
crew dead and the curse lifted, the mariner returned home.
 The Mariner travels from land to land, telling his story to expiate the
sin of killing one of God’s beloved creatures. Stunned by his tale,
the Wedding Guest becomes “a sadder and a wiser man.”

Summary
Coleridge’s masterpiece, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, was first
published as part of the Lyrical Ballads (1798), which thereby secured its
position as one of the landmark poems of its age, despite its archaic ballad
form. Structured as a frame narrative, the poem begins with the Mariner’s
detaining a guest on his way to a wedding with the spellbinding account of
a most strange ocean voyage. The Mariner tells of a southbound voyage to
the Antarctic. He describes how the ship, as it clears the horizon,
ominously dips below the church and below all of civilized and
conventional authority, descending toward the unknown, the wild, and the
hellish. Reaching the frozen, seemingly blank, polar world, the sailors call
to and feed a white albatross, a large seabird, as an apparent friend or
messenger from another realm. The Mariner inexplicably shoots it,
sacrificing it, innocent and pure, with his crossbow (echoing Easter
imagery). Thereupon, the ship idles without wind to move it while the
superstitious crew grows increasingly thirsty and hangs the dead bird
around the Mariner’s neck to punish him for his cruelty, which they feel in
some way has stalled their trip.
At last, a ship is sighted, but it is a skeleton ship, carrying the Spectre-
Woman, “Life-in-Death,” and her mate Death, who are types of avenging
spirits of the albatross. The two of them toss dice to determine who will
decide the fate of the Mariner’s ship, and the Woman wins. She imposes a
penance on the Mariner, which begins with the death of the crew while the
Mariner lives on, unable to die, unable even to sleep. Watching the now-
beautiful phosphorescent water snakes, which earlier looked monstrous to
him, the Mariner is impelled to bless them, and at once the albatross slides
off his neck into the sea. His unconscious action restores a balance upset
by his murder of the albatross, although his penance is not finished, as
disembodied spirit voices assert.

The Mariner is now able to sleep, and he dreams while the ship sails home,
manned by spirits animating the crew’s corpses. At length, the ship
escapes the haunted universe to return to home port, but then it suddenly
sinks, while the Mariner is rescued and immediately absolved of his sins, if
only for a time, by the Hermit of the Wood. Nonetheless, his need for
penance remains, for the Mariner must wander endlessly and solitarily,
until an agony seizes him, and he in turn seizes one whom he knows must
hear his tale. The Wedding Guest misses the marriage ceremony, but he
has been irrevocably changed by the Mariner’s words.

The poem has given rise to a multitude of interpretations, stressing the

existential, meaningless murder of the albatross in an incomprehensible
world; the Christian pattern of sin, confession, and penance within a
sacramental universe; the functioning of the symbolic or nightmare
imagination as the Mariner’s fate unfolds; and the necessity, even the
desperation, of narration. Coleridge himself after the first publication
appended marginalia that recapitulated the poem in an effort to clarify,
although what it actually did was to retell the plot at a slant and thereby
distance the author, as well as the frame, from the poem’s peculiar and
disturbing nature, relinquishing responsibility for interpretation to each
reader.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Overview

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner begins with one of three wedding guests
being accosted by the Ancient Mariner and kept from attending the
wedding first by the Mariner’s grasp and then by his hypnotic gaze as the
Mariner begins to tell the story of his fateful voyage. The Mariner gives no
reason for the voyage, saying that they sailed south until they reached the
South Pole, where they became icebound and enshrouded in fog. They see
and hear nothing but the ice

The ice was here, the ice was there,The ice was all around:It cracked and
growled, and roared and howled,Like noises in a swound

Then an albatross flies into view through the fog. Happy to see another
living creature, the men aboard the ship treat it “As if it had been a
Christian soul” and they hail it “in God’s name.” It circles the ship,
accepting the crew’s hospitable offerings of food, and then the ice splits
and a wind begins to blow, allowing the ship to move again.

For nine days the bird follows the ship, coming when the men call and
occasionally perching on or near the mast. Then, for no reason, the
Mariner shoots it with his crossbow. His shipmates’ initial responses are
horror and anger. They blame him for killing the creature responsible for
the wind that helped free them from the ice and fear that something bad
will happen. However, shortly after the bird’s death, the fog clears and the
shipmates change their mind, claiming now that the bird was responsible
for the fog and saying that the Mariner was right to kill the bird. As soon
as they have gone around Cape Horn and entered the Pacific Ocean, the
wind stops, and the ship comes to a standstill beneath the blazing sun, now
at the other extreme from the earlier cold and ice, though parallel in
immobility, as highlighted by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s paralleling of
word choice and order:

Water, water every where,And all the boards did shrink;Water, water,
every where,Nor any drop to drink.

The crew now again changes its mind and hangs the dead albatross around
the Mariner’s neck. Shortly thereafter the Mariner spots a ship
approaching. In initial joy, the desperate Mariner bites his arm and drinks
his own blood to get enough moisture in his mouth to announce what he
sees. However, as the ship draws closer it occurs to him to wonder how the
other ship can be moving when theirs is not. The ghost ship draws close
enough to reveal Life-in-Death and Death gambling for the Mariner. Life-
in-Death wins the Mariner and Death takes his consolation prize, the two
hundred other men on the ship.

A week passes with the Mariner alone with the dead bodies, whose eyes
curse him, and guilty but unable to pray. One night as he watches water
snakes swimming in the moonlight, he is so struck by their life and beauty
that he loves them and blesses them.

Now that he has repented, the journey homeward begins: The albatross
drops from his neck, rain begins to fall, and a strange wind begins to blow
above the ship, mysteriously moving it along. The Mariner falls into a
trance as the ship speeds faster than mortal endurance, driven by the spirit
of the South Pole and manned by spirits who assume the bodies of the
fallen crew. While in this trance, the Mariner hears two voices discussing
his crime/sin, the fact that he will have to continue to do penance, and the
manner by which the ship is moving. When he revives from his trance, he
again witnesses the curse on him visible in the dead men’s eyes, which
prevents him from looking away from them and from praying. Then the
spell snaps, “the curse is expiated,” Coleridge explains, and the Mariner
feels a gentle breeze just as he spies the familiar landscape of home.

As his ship enters the harbor, it is approached by a boat containing a Pilot,

the Pilot’s boy, and a Hermit. All but the Hermit are afraid of the
appearance of the Mariner’s ship. As the Pilot’s boat draws close, the sea
rumbles, and the Mariner’s ship suddenly breaks in two and sinks. The
Pilot collapses in a fit and the Pilot’s boy goes mad, leaving the Hermit to
fish the Mariner from the water and the Mariner to row the boat to shore.
Once on land, the Mariner begs the Hermit to shrive him, which the
Hermit does by having the Mariner answer his question concerning what
manner of man the Mariner is. The Mariner responds by feeling a terrible
agony that forces him to tell his story; only after he has finished does he
feel free. From that point on the Mariner periodically and unexpectedly
feels the same agony and travels “from land to land” until he spots the face
of the person that he somehow knows must hear his tale.

The poem draws to a close just as the bridal party is leaving the church.
The Mariner tells the Wedding Guest that far better for him than any
wedding is a walk in good company toward a church to pray and that the
best way to pray is to love all things. With that the Mariner bids the
Wedding Guest farewell, and the Wedding Guest is left to wake up the
following morning a “sadder and a wiser man.”