The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, Essay Example

The poem of Coleridge on the Ancient Mariner defined so much of the correlating value of emotion and imagery that connected the thoughts of the mariner with that of his emotions during particular situations of his voyage. In part five of the poem, the mariner was presented to be talking to the wedding-guest. Described to be terrified and all, the wedding-guest is assumed to be seeing ghosts as the mariner considers himself one as well. He mentions about the spirits in the ship and how they should not be feared about as they are happy where they are hence they are not planning to do any particular harm to those who enter the ship as guests. To this, the words used by Coleridge to describe the mariner’s feelings were rather light spirited in nature, as if persuading the wedding-guest to believe that the ship is safe and the spirits themselves are harmless.

In the course of the voyage, there were two voices presented to be having a conversation about how the moon overpowered the sea which specifically enabled the ship to move during a particular peculiar stop that it was subjected to. It was as if the conversation suggested that there was an angelic power that was behind the movement of the ship towards north bound in a fast pace. From that point, the mariner was shown to have been awakened by a sudden stop after the fast paced journey and was taken back to his homeland as he sees familiar scenes and faces. Several imageries followed after this, showing how the mariner tried to relieve the pain that he has been feeling as a man alone in his journey with supposedly dead men and their spirits just wandering around his ship.

To the mariner’s dismay, he desired that the hermit, the holy man, to shrive him clear of his guilt and his sadness. To be able to do this, the hermit instructed the mariner to tell his tale over and over again to a person or people who are willing to listen to his voyage. The wedding guest was one of the individuals referred to by the hermit. Understandably, as the voyage and adventures of the mariner has been told to him, he began to change his attitude towards life and has become a little bit sadder of a person but a wiser individual who knows the meaning of belongingness and being alone.

The poem of Coleridge uses different voices of different tones and authority defining the fact that the characters come from different background hence have different course of living and understanding of the situations that they are presented with in the story. Complication and conflict are among the two elements utilized by Coleridge to insist on the differences of the character from the main narrator, the mariner. Bringing in different settings at the blink of an eye takes the readers into different dimensions that represent the emotional bearing that describes the personality of the mariner in a deeper sense, a common characterization of poems following the principles of the romanticism period. Considerably, it could be analyzed that the swings of emotions have brought about the deepened sense of how the confusion has become an element of definition on the character of the mariner and how he affects those who listens to him such as that of the wedding-guest. The real meaning of the story lies beneath the complications and contradictions of the situations including that of the inclusion of characters that are already dead whom the mariner refer to as his particular friends in the ship. Life in a way has been displayed in this poem as a journey of both happiness and sorrow depending on how the person living it actually reacts on the situations presenting themselves in life.