46 pages • 1 hour read
Samuel ColeridgeThe Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1798A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1 Summary
Three men are on their way to a wedding when one of them is stopped by an old man with a “long grey beard and […] glittering eye” (1): this is the Ancient Mariner. The Mariner ignores the Wedding Guest’s pleas to let him carry on to the party and begins his tale. The Wedding Guest chooses to stay, as he becomes drawn in by the old man and his story.
The Mariner’s tale tells of his time at sea, when he was a younger man, and how his ship and his crew members sailed southward. The Wedding Guest can hear happy sounds coming from the party and tries, once more, to get away, but finds he is too fascinated by the old man’s tale: “The wedding-guest he beat his breast, / Yet he cannot chuse but hear: / And thus spake on that ancyent Man, / The bright-eyed Marinere” (3).
The Mariner tells the Wedding Guest of the conditions in which he and his shipmates found themselves when a storm left them stranded at the South Pole. They were surrounded by ice, mist, and snow, and the only noise they can hear is the sound of the ice cracking. The silence is broken by the arrival of an albatross on the ship: “At length did cross an Albatross, Thorough the Fog it came; / And an it were a Christian soul, / We hail’d it in God’s name” (4). The crew believes the bird to be a good omen; albatross were viewed as such by sailors, and they feed and play with the bird. The sailors are delighted when the wind starts to blow and the ship starts to move north again. They attribute this good fortune to the albatross.
The Wedding Guest interrupts this part of the story to ask why, upon revealing the crew’s good fortune, the Mariner looks unhappy. The Mariner reveals that with great sin, he had taken his crossbow and killed the Albatross. He does not give a reason for why he does this.
Part 1 Analysis
The poem begins with a description of the Ancient Mariner—his eyes, and his uncanny ability to compel the Wedding Guest to listen to his story. Although human, there appears to be something at least quasi-supernatural about him. There is no introduction to his story; instead, he simply begins to speak; meanwhile, the Wedding Guest repeatedly interrupts him. In these interruptions, we see the natural/mundane world meet with the world of the supernatural/sublime. For example, the Wedding Guest cries out as he hears his friends enjoying the festivities, but is nonetheless transfixed and unable to move away from the Mariner, as he tells his tale. We might, then, view the Wedding Guest as fulcrum for the Mariner, who personifies the sublime, and the friends of the Wedding Guest, who represent the secular/mundane.
The ideal of the sublime, and the essence of Romanticism, are expressed through the storm and the dangerous beauty that the Mariner and his crew encounter at the South Pole, “the land of mist and snow” (6). Although the ship is in a perilous position at the South Pole, the conditions are also beautiful and majestic. The albatross comes out of the fog and joins the ship in a place where there should be no life; the sailors, therefore, view the bird as a good omen. The Mariner’s unexplained killing of the albatross begins a cycle of sin and punishment. He has committed a crime against both the natural world and against God.
