A Study Guide (New Edition) for Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide (New Edition) for Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9781535867924

Book preview

17

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

1798

Introduction

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was published in 1798 in the collection Lyrical Ballads. The collection was a collaboration between Coleridge and the poet William Wordsworth. During a very productive period in Coleridge's career, he lived and worked in the Lake District of England, as did Wordsworth and Robert Southey. For this reason, these three poets are sometimes called the Lake Poets.

Lyrical Ballads is widely considered to be the genesis of the Romantic movement in poetry. Wordsworth wrote more of the poems in it than Coleridge did, but this poem is by far the longest in the collection. In it, an old sailor accosts a guest about to enter a wedding reception and proceeds to tell him a long and bizarre tale about a cursed sea voyage. The wildly imaginative tale combines Christian symbols, supernatural elements, and macabre images of suffering and death. Themes explored in the poem include sin and penance, redemption, and pantheism.

The poem can be found in a Dover edition titled The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Other Poems (1992) and in the Oxford University Press edition of Lyrical Ballads (2013).

Author Biography

Coleridge was born on October 21, 1772, in the village of Ottery St. Mary, in Devonshire, England. He was the youngest of ten children. His father, John Coleridge, was a vicar (clergyman), schoolmaster, and author. When Coleridge was nine years old, his father died after a brief illness, and Coleridge was sent to Christ's Hospital, a well-regarded preparatory school. There, Coleridge's exceptional academic performance in classical studies earned him a scholarship to Jesus College at Cambridge, where he enrolled in 1791. He continued to excel at school and became interested in radical politics. The ongoing events of the French Revolution were of great intellectual interest to Coleridge and his friends.

In 1794, Coleridge met Robert Southey, a fellow poet and radical. Together they wrote a play, The Fall of Robespierre, and gave a series of lectures. Coleridge was a popular speaker. Lecturing continued to be a source of income for him throughout his life. Coleridge and Southey devised a plan to establish a utopian society in America, in rural Pennsylvania. They called the experiment the pantisocracy, which involved a group of married couples eschewing private property and living in an egalitarian agricultural community, sharing the work and harvest. With the pantisocracy in mind, Coleridge began looking for a bride and found Sara Fricker, the sister of Southey's fiancée. They were married in October 1795.

After a bitter quarrel, Southey and Coleridge abandoned the pantisocracy project and their literary collaborations.