romantic poets and poetry term paper
Excerpt via Term Newspaper:
SYMBOLIC THEMES OF MYSTERY AND THE SUPERNATURAL IN SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE’S
RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER
In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Old Mariner, inches considered by many scholars while the quintessential masterpiece of English Intimate poetry, the symbolic styles of unknown and the unnatural play a really crucial function in the poem’s overall effect which Steve Hill Bradzino sees since Coleridge’s “attempt to understand the mystery around the human heart in a whole world moved by simply forces and powers… immanent and transcendent” (157). The Mariner him self appears to be stuck in this supernatural world resulting from ghostly manifestations which emanate from the area of the not known.
The Rime of the Historic Mariner” was initially published in Lyrical Ballads in 1798, a collection of poems written and published with each other by Coleridge and his close friend William Wordsworth. Yet the text message of the composition generally used today appeared in Couvert Leaves in 1817. The narrative in “Rime” will be based upon many sources and some of the ideas portrayed in the poem were encouraged by other pieces of sentirse read by simply Coleridge. The central actions, however , seems to have been advised by Wordsworth, who was acquainted with Shelvocke’s A Voyage Across the World by the Way of the Great South Marine (1726) which describes the killing of the albatross by an confidential mariner during some very undersirable climate. According to the Reverend Alexander Dyce, a close connect of Wordsworth, “Rime” was initially based on a strange dream skilled by David Cruikshank by which he beheld a dispatch manned by a skeleton staff.
As Graham Davidson remarks, the “Rime of the Historical Mariner” “reads as a unnatural poem when the representation of the real… is secondary to the representation of spiritual realities” (134). This observation can be supported by analyzing a number of important stanzas which contain images and symbolic topics related to secret and the great, such as the odd weather came across by the ship (1. 11-12), the property of snow and snow (1. 14-15), the appearance of the albatross as a sign of good omen (1. 16-18), the death in the albatross as a result of the Mariner (1. 19-20), the revenge of the albatross (2. 9-11), death and Death-in-Life (3. 10-11) and the apparition in the dead crewmen aboard the ship (5. 9-10).
The narrative which will describes the strange weather conditions in Part One, stanzas 11-12, is the 1st instance where Coleridge starts to draw you into his haunting symbolism. “And today the Storm-Blast came, and he/Was tyrannous and strong” (lines 40-41) equates the elements as being a physical manifestation lorded over by a masculine occurrence with “o’ertaking wings” (line 42), very much like an wicked messenger that sprang from Hell alone. In his research on the Romantic imagination, J. Livingston Lowes notes that in this stanza “the natural and great appear to merge” (57) that may also be applied to stanza 18 (“And presently there came the two mist and snow/As this grew wondrous cold, ” lines 55-56). Though this setting might at first appear to be strange and unearthly, it truly is indeed depending on reality, including crossing the Equator into the southern hemisphere during the winter months with “ice, mast-high” (line 57) suspended in the open ocean “as green as emerald” (line 58). But the spiritual realm with the sea, lengthy considered by mariners as benevolent and peaceful, will soon be changed into an market of horror and secret when the ancient Mariner commits a heinous crime against nature very little.
With stanza 16, you is introduced to the albatross, a great, snowy-white sea fowl which has always been considered simply by sailors in every cultures like a sign great omen, specially when one’s send is found in the clutches of a terrible storm. This form of exultation is best expressed with “And a good to the south wind sprung up behind/The Albatross would follow/And each day, for meals or play/Came to the mariner’s hollo! ” (lines 65-68). And it is right here that Coleridge begins to dwell on whiteness, that way of the chicken, which represents not only purity but likewise the fear associated with the not known and the strange.
In stanzas 19-20, the death with the albatross as a result of the historic Mariner represents far more compared to a crime against creation, for this assures that the Mariner fantastic fellow crewmen are condemned to walk the oceans as living-in-death spectres. Rich Holmes remarks
