TITLE:RIPPER BETTER THAN CROCE PALETTE:0223 0779 099b 09a9 3 THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER - AN ESSAY 2 by The Ripper of Nightfall It is an ancient Mariner And he stoppeth one of three. "By thy long gray beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?" Italians always think to have the best literature in the world, they claim to be the best writers, poets and so on screaming that the perfection of Petrarca's sonnet has never been reached by anyone, that Dante's rhyme and fantasy is the greatest ever found in the world (well, maybe that's right... Don't you think so Macno?), that Manzoni is God in writing prose and so on... The funny fact is that also strangers think Italian culture's the best. Just have a look at one of the latest issue of Zine where Orlando wrote that he loves the 'Commedia' (we know he's a clever guy!) and Boccaccio is one of his favourite writers. However I don't agree with him. At least not completely. English literature, for instance, is full of great writers and poets, it's full of great novels and deep poetry. Take a look on above. The first four lines of this text. You will surely recognize the mentioned lines as the first of 'The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner', a ballad, written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and published in the Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems done together with William Wordsworth and released in 1798. It tells a story and its chief events are governed by the supernatural; it has a tragic ending and it relates the adventures of one key character, the ancient mariner himself. Its language is basically simple and direct with deliberate archaisms however, to suggest the flavour of the old ballads and the imagery has the ballad's blunt directness and realism drawing on everyday concepts and parallels. Coleridge has chosen the standard ballad metre, the four-line stanza, though he varied it with longer stanzas, and all the literary devices of the ballad are present such as repetition, alliteration and internal rime. 'The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner' has some of characteristics of the epic. It tells of a voyage, a long and varied voyage which is not a quest because the mariner is not consciously seeking for anything; indeed he is strongly passive for a central figure. The only three active steps he takes are to kill the albatross, which precipitates the tragedy, to bite his arm so that his lips moistened with his blood can summon help, and his blessing the water-snakes which gives him a chance of redemption. The mariner is no Ulysses' figure, but the epic element is contained in the greatness of Coleridge's creation. The theme is no account of a contrast between the real world and the ghosts of the traditional medieval pattern, but it is a vast and comprehensive moral proposition. The mariner commits the sin of the motiveless killing of the albatross but it's not just a bird that is killed. The act is symbolic and the mariner has committed a crime against creation, against the positive life force; he has destroyed a part of the beauty of a divinely ordained universe. His shipmates are not without sin, they are guilty also, for they first condemn and then praise the act with brutal concentration on their own welfare, with no true comprehension of the nature of the mariner's act. For this they die, but their punishment is not so heavy as the mariner's sentence of eternal life and eternal compulsion to relive his crime in the repeated narration of it. The mariner's act of blessing the water-snakes, an act of positive love towards creation, gives him a hope of redemption because it leads him to a recognition of the value of all created things and so Coleridge has traced the pattern of sin, punishment, penitence and redemption. The voyage of the ship is into a realm, remote from the real world and the spirits have a cosmic force; even the Polar Spirit is subjected to the angelic troop that inhabits the dead men's bodies on the homeward voyage. In contrast to this spirit world is set the world of the Wedding-Guest, with its happy realities of the bridal procession and festivity; these two reinforce by comparison the strangeness of the mariner's experience. The Wedding-Guest is at first an unwilling listener, his attention half-distracted by the wedding feast he's missing, but, by the end, he's 'a sadder and wiser' man; he has been given a revelation of the meaning of life, of the great verities. The didactic intent of the poem is shown by the moral Coleridge clearly states at the end of the poem: 'prayeth best who loveth best, All things both great and small'. Some critics (for instance THe RiPPeR 8-}!) extend the moral lesson further, finding in the killing of the albatross and the blessing of the water-snakes a parable of original sin, of gratuitous fall and of redemption. There remains a deeper level still at which the poem can be studied: the voyage of the ancient mariner is into a world of irrationality in which ordinary laws of cause and effect are suspended and this has led many critics to seek for deeper symbolic meanings in the poem. Most interesting is the theory of an American critic (R.Warren) who notes a constant contrast between sunlight and moonlight in the poem and classifying the main events of the poem according to the kinds of light which they occur finds that the good events take place under the aegis of the moon and the bad events under the aegis of the sun. The sun then stands for day, representing the enlightened power of reason, while the moon stands for night, when moonlight diffuses a 'sudden charm' over a 'known and familiar landscape', representing the importance and the power of the imagination. Well, maybe some of you could think that this is a 'rape' of the text, that the poem has been forced to tell something Colerigde did not think. It's up to you. Read the whole poem, think and then write to Abnormalia for any comment.