In "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", Samuel Taylor Coleridge tells the story of a sailor and his dangerous adventures. This story follows the sailor and his crew as they travel between the equator and the South Pole, then returning to England. On the surface this story appears to be just another sailor's story. If the reader delves deeper, he will discover not just a story, but a quest to understand man's place in God's plan. Coleridge, like other Romantic poets, seeks to find the right balance between reason and spirituality and uses his poetry to show the complexities of free will and the consequences of neglected divine influence. Furthermore, like other Romantic poets, Coleridge uses symbolism to connect the material world with the spiritual. Coleridge's chosen symbols help him illustrate this theme of spiritual connection in a world overrun by reason, because "for Coleridge, symbolic vision is profoundly religious, elevating the symbol-maker - the poet - into the divine realm of the Symbol-Giver" (Levy 225). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The Romantic movement can be seen as a reaction to the Enlightenment's emphasis on logic and reason. Indeed, the Romantic movement is an attempt to explore consciousness, imagination and feeling. The main themes of the Romantic movement include the relationship between man and nature, contemplation of the divine or the infinite in nature, respect for the natural world, and the symbolic nature of liminal spaces. A typical theme of romantic narratives is the transformation of the protagonist from a state of innocence or grace to the realization of human nature, usually achieved through some sort of spiritual intervention. Drawing from the Enlightenment's focus on reason and evidence, the Romantics place great weight on the protagonist's experiences and revelations. Although "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is set in the physical world, it can be interpreted as an allegory of the dangers one faces when struggling against the divine. In the epigraph Burnet weighs man's need to understand the visible world with the ability to accept the invisible. The divine approaches man through the invisible world by presenting him with symbols and omens present in nature. The Mariner is a mortal man who is intertwined with the supernatural. Because the Mariner is mortal and part of the natural world, he can only accept the supernatural through physical events in the natural world. Coleridge's poetic world is a balance between the limitations and difficulties of mortal man and the discipline and guidance of the divine. Coleridge illuminates the hidden workings of the spiritual world to draw attention to man's inability to escape his connection to the supernatural. In his arrogance the sailor ignores the divine message and seeks to assert his will over the natural world. Since it is man's nature to question the divine plan and his place in the natural world, the sailor's sin can be punished and atoned for. The poem begins with the sailor approaching guests outside a wedding. The backdrop of the wedding is Coleridge's way of grounding the story in the mundane world. “In this context the Sailor stands out as a 'grey-bearded madman' – and an epithet, however, that tells more of the callousness of the common man than of the madness of the Sailor” (Chandler 405), demonstrating that worldly reason does not always allows one to see the true value of a person. In the wedding guest, the sailor finds the ability to learn a lesson from his predicament. He feels the need to vent withthis unfortunate stranger. As he introduces his story, the Mariner piques his listener's curiosity. When the wedding guest exclaims, “God save you, ancient mariner! /From the demons that torment you like this!- /Why do you look like this?" (Coleridge ll 79-81), the Sailor knows he has found the right one to whom he must teach the lesson. The sailor begins his story with the killing of the albatross, which is not a common bird. This albatross brought with it a “good south wind” (Coleridge ll 87) to the fog-plagued ship, and is considered by the crew to be a good omen. The sailor strikes the albatross with the his crossbow and his shipmates curse him for betraying their good fortune. When, after the bird's death, the fog cleared, his shipmates hailed the Mariner as a champion "It was right, they said, to kill such birds, /that bring fog and mist" (Coleridge ll 101-102). The Mariner's shipmates are not only superstitious, but are easily influenced by the meaning of those superstitions. By killing the object of the crew's superstition, the Sailor exercised the human ability to reason above divine will. The sailor shoots the albatross to prove that it is not a spirit, but a mortal creature. The killing of the bird is their undoing, for the sailors were right in their first hypothesis: the bird was an omen of divine guidance. By killing the defenseless albatross, "the sailor commits a grave crime which, however cryptic it remains, consists of something more atrocious than killing the bird: he has transgressed a moral order" (Netland screenshot 1). It is not long before the albatross begins to take revenge, because the sailor's "act of violence is evil and requires penance" (Foakes 51). When the ship reaches the equator, it calms down and the wind stops filling the sails. Thus begins the sailor's penance for killing an innocent bird. At this point Coleridge begins to use the ship as a symbol of the crew's penance: “Water, water, everywhere,/Nor any drop to drink” (Coleridge ll 121-122). Zens elaborates by stating, “The vast sea surrounds the crew, but the dehydrated men are unable to drink the available salt water” (Zens 194). Coleridge also takes the next stanza to show how he feels about these men, who would turn their backs on divine intervention: “Yes, the slimy things crawled with legs / Over the slimy sea” (Coleridge ll 125-126). All the men on board the ship know who caused this punishment, and so they hang the albatross around the sailor's neck. Not only has the albatross become a very physical reminder of the sailor's spiritual indiscretion, but it "makes the sailor like a cross upon which the body hangs" (Hillier 12), symbolically linking the death of the albatross to the death of innocence that Christ suffers on the cross. Then a spirit comes and moves the ship, without a breath of breeze filling its sails. Men all think that they have paid their penance and have achieved salvation. This feeling of hope disintegrates when they see a ship that is just a simple structure, and “rather than a revelation of light, this is a revelation of darkness; rather than life, death, rather than salvation, destruction” (Watkins 27). On this ship there are two ghosts playing dice. The sailors realize that they have arrived at the day of judgment and find themselves before the representatives of God and the Devil. The woman, who is the avatar of God or Life in death, has won and can choose the man she will spare. The exchange between the two ghosts shows the Romantic poet's use of symbolic liminal spaces, or thresholds. These thresholds are used to show the uncertain division between two areas, such as the city and the countryside, two concepts, such as love and hate, or twokingdoms, as in the case of the Mariner. The dice game is the Mariner's liminal space, because the outcome determines whether he will remain in the realm of the living or enter the realm of the dead. This threshold connects the possible destinies of the Sailor: to die and be damned or to live and suffer his penance. The Sailor becomes the chosen one and must pay the next part of his penance. He has to watch as each member of the crew dies and curses them. Now the life of the sailor begins to truly parallel the life of a prophet, even that of Christ. His destiny is to live and see the consequences he has wrought. The spirit of the albatross then sends the sailor to the South Pole, "this cold is followed by entry into a new world, one into which no human being had ever penetrated" (screenshot Peckham 1). Coleridge uses this wasteland to represent Hell and the time Christ had to spend there. The sailor has taken on the role of Christ and must travel to hell to absolve the sins of his shipmates and himself. The spirits that populate this frozen Hell join in the Mariner's punishments: “'Is it him?' one said, "Is this the man?" /For him who died on the cross,/With his cruel bow he utterly felled/The harmless Albatross'” (Coleridge ll 398-401). Finally the Sailor is able to pray again and in doing so he unconsciously blesses the horrible serpents swimming around the ship. The act of contrition, represented by his prayers, causes the albatross to fall from the sailor's neck. The sailor's prayers are the turning point of the poem and the transition from punishment to atonement. After his time in Hell, the Sailor is freed by the words of one of these spirits. “Man has done penance, / And other penance will he do” (Coleridge ll 408-409). Not only has the sailor regained the ability to speak, but he is also able to sleep again. When his dreams come true, the Sailor dreams of quenching his thirst. The sailor wakes in the rain and declares, “Of course I had drunk in my dreams, / And my body continued to drink” (Coleridge ll 303-304). Although his journey did not end, the Mariner's act of contrition improved the conditions of his journey. The release does not end the sailor's suffering, and an angel arrives to take his ship away. The angel puts the sailor into a trance and moves the ship from underneath. The sailor must be in a trance because the ship is moving faster than any human could travel. When the angel brings the ship back to the equator, the sailor wakes up. When he wakes up, the Sailor sees all the corpses of the crew standing, animated by angelic spirits. Thanks to the help of the spirits, the sailor knows that his sea voyage is coming to an end. The dead men lead the ship back to the sailor's house. When the sailor reaches his home port, he sees a ship approaching his. As the ship approaches, the dead crew give the sailor a final farewell as they lie down to take their last piece. This confirmation from the angelic spirits tells the sailor that he has paid his penance. The boat that comes to retrieve the sailor from his ship has a hermit on board. The hermit is sent to the Mariner as his confessor. When the Sailor sees this hermit, he asks to be "shrieked", to be absolved. Modiano states: “This is one of the central paradoxes of the Sailor's situation. He can ease his inner agony and maintain sanity after his return from the vast solitudes of the ocean only by shaping an otherwise formless, incomprehensible, and unbearable past into a structured narrative with a beginning, a climax, an end, and a moral lesson. like this” (Modiano 43). The completion of his penance does not prevent the Sailor from requesting a hearing of his confession; he knows he will have to. 66.4 (2008): 194.