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 7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 7 Summary
The Mariner now moves on to tell the Wedding Guest the final part of his story. He describes the Hermit in the small boat, and the conversation between the Hermit and the Pilot. The Hermit and the Pilot look at the Mariner’s ship much like the Mariner and the sailors looked at the ghost ship as it approached them. Despite their horror, they continue to move closer.
All of a sudden, the water groans and swirls and the Mariner’s ship starts to sink. The Mariner is rescued by the Pilot and his boat, which also starts to sink in the whirlpool. The Mariner starts to speak, which sends the men in the boat into fits as they believed the Mariner dead. The Mariner takes the oars and saves the men who have saved him. The Pilot’s Boy states that, “the Devil knows how to row” (26).
Once the group has safely reached the shore, the Mariner throws himself on the Hermit’s mercy and asks him for forgiveness. The Hermit is bewildered and asks the Mariner to elucidate. The Mariner tells the Hermit what he has been through. This is the Mariner’s first telling of his saga to another human being. Since then, the Mariner explains to the Wedding Guest, he randomly feels an “agony” that remains until he tells his story again (26). The Mariner, since returning from sea, has been passing from land to land, always knowing which man he must stop to tell his story to.
The Mariner hears a loud outburst coming from the wedding party and tells the Wedding Guest that he must pray. He says that gathering for prayer is much sweeter than a wedding feast: “He prayeth well who loveth well / Both man and bird and beast. / He prayeth best who loveth best / All things both great and small” (28). The Mariner, having finished his story, now leaves. The Wedding Guest decides not to go to the wedding party and instead to return home, “a sadder […] wiser man” (28).
Part 7 Analysis
Things start to go wrong for the Mariner—despite the arrival of the Pilot, the Pilot’s Boy, and the Hermit—as the Mariner’s ship is pulled down by a powerful undertow. The Mariner begins to accept his fate as nature pulls him under the water. However, he is not able to die, as he has been cursed to endure a living death, and therefore he is rescued by the Hermit and the Pilot. The Hermit asks the Mariner, "What manner man art thou?” (26). The Mariner does not answer the Hermit’s question and tells his story for the first time, just as he is forced to tell it to the Wedding Guest. Through the Mariner’s inability to answer the question the Hermit puts forth, Coleridge imposes a level of ambiguity on the Mariner, reinforcing the Mariner’s limbic quality; trapped between living and dead, between salvation and damnation, the Mariner is forced to walk the earth, telling the story of his life again and again. In some ways, this echoes the myth of Sisyphus, who was forced, by the gods of Ancient Greece, to push a boulder up a hill every day, only to have the boulder roll back down the hill once it nears the hill’s apex. Sisyphus is doomed to repeat this act for all of eternity.
The Mariner has said he knows who he must tell his story to as soon as he sees the person. It can be argued that Coleridge effectively transforms the Wedding Guest into the Hermit, upon the Wedding Guest’s hearing of the Mariner’s tale: instead of going on to the party once the Mariner’s tale has concluded, the Wedding Guest heads home, thereby (at least in this moment) choosing a hermetic existence over a social one.
The Mariner explains to the Wedding Guest that at random hours, agony takes over and the Mariner’s heart burns until he has told his story once more. The Mariner’s eternal penance is unlike the traditional idea of Christian absolution, further aligning it with Greek myth and, in some ways, pushing Coleridge’s poem toward the Gothic, and away from elements of Romantic poetry. Coleridge has claimed that his intention was not for the poem to have a moral; however, the Mariner says in this final part: ”He prayeth best, who loveth best / All things both great and small; / For the dear God who loveth us, / He made and loveth all” (28). These are the Mariner’s final lines and, soon after, the poem ends. These lines further overlap the relationship between the Christian God and nature through the inclusion of “[a]ll things great and small” (28).
