19th Century British Poetry

The following are some of the major themes in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

• The Natural World (The Physical) vs. The Spiritual World (Metaphysical)
• Nature vs. Man / Artifact
  
• Liminality (Liminal Space)
• Religion
• Imprisonment
• Retribution
• Narration (Storytelling)
  

Exercises:

Exercise 1:

Summarize each part and identify the main themes in each part.

Exercise 2:

What Christian and/or Biblical references are present in this poem. Look, for instance, for symbols referring to baptism, crucifixion, and original sin.

Exercise 3:

How does "nature" change after the Ancient Mariner kills the albatross? Look at symbolism, metaphor, and rhyme scheme to support your answer.

Exercise 4:

What types of imagery are present in this poem? Which senses do you think is emphasized in this poem? Why?

Exercise 5:

Find examples of "imprisonment" in the poem. Discuss how these instances contribute to greater themes of imprisonment, like imprisonment to fate or sin.

The YouTube-videos below are of the experimental 1977 film by Larry Jordan based on Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." The narrator is Orson Welles.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Ottery St. Mary, a rural village in Devon, and raised in London. He was educated at Jesus College, Cambridge, but fell into a dissolute lifestyle. He fled to London and served in the Light Dragoons until his brothers secured his release some months later. In 1795 he met Wordsworth, with whom he published Lyrical Ballads (1798), one of the most revolutionary collections of poetry in the history of English literature. From the age of thirty, Coleridge largely gave up poetry for philosophy and criticism. He is credited with introducing the works of the philosophers Immanuel Kant, Friedrich von Schlegel, and Friedrich von Schelling to England. At the height of his powers, he became addicted to opium, which had been prescribed to relieve agonizing physical pains that Wordsworth said were so unbearable they drove Coleridge to “throw himself down and writhe like a worm upon the ground.” He spent his last years in the care of a clergyman, writing and attempting to be reconciled with estranged family and friends. In an age dominated by skepticism and empiricism, Coleridge held fast to his belief in the powers of the imagination, which he believed capable of leading humanity to Truth – not through appeals to reason, but to the senses. Like Wordsworth, he strove to express “natural thoughts with natural diction” and to use simple syntax. His accessible style reached its culmination in his meditative, blank-verse “Conversational poems,” which influenced writers as diverse as Matthews Arnold, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Frost. Coleridge worked in both established forms, such as the ode, and fluid forms of his own making. He eschewed the use of conventional “mechanic” or “pre-ordained” forms that did not arise “out of the properties of the material” but were imposed from without, as when “to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish to retain when hardened,” for “organic” form, which arises “out of the properties of the material” and “shapes as it develops itself from within.” If Wordsworth determined the content of a century or more English poetry, Coleridge determined its shape. His theories on “organic form” provided a basis for the development of a freer poetic, and may have been the progenitor of many twentieth-century experiments in free verse.

From The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th Edition.