Primary imagination is connected with human
perception and the individual power to produce images. It is the ability to
perceive the elements of the world giving order to the chaos and a shape to the
material of perception. Primary imagination is used unconsciously by everybody.
Secondary imagination is voluntary and uses in
a conscious way. Man perceives the world around him and uses the data of
reality to build new worlds.
Primary imagination is Wordsworth’s
“spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” and emotions “to be recollected in
tranquillity”.
Fancy is the poet’s mechanical ability to use
devices (metaphors, alliteration etc.) to express his ideas and communicate his
ideas and visions to everybody.
The role of nature in Coleridge’s poetry: not
the moral guide, source of joy and consolation, but awareness of the presence
of the ideal in the real. Nature is not identified with the divine (unlike
Wordsworth’s pantheism), Nature and the material world are the reflection of
the perfect world of “ideas” (Neoplatonic interpretation ) — |the material
world is the projection of the “real” world of ideas on the flux of time.
Language: archaic, connected to the ballads,
with repetitions alliterations and onomatopoeias.
THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER
· The story of a mariner who commits
an act against nature by killing an albatross.
· At the beginning of the poem the
mariner stops a wedding guest: he “cannot choose but hear” a sad, mysterious
story about the burden of the mariner’s guilt.
· The mariner expiates his sin by
travelling around and telling the people he meets his story to teach them
love and respect to nature’s creatures.
The characters
·
The
mariner à He is unnaturally old, with skinny
hands and “glittering eyes”.
·
Sailors
à Ill-fated members of the ship carrying
the mariner.
·
Wedding
Guest à One of three people on their way to
a wedding reception. After the Ancient Mariner’s story, he becomes both “sadder
and... wiser”.
THE ATMOSPHERE AND THE CHARACTERS
·
Death
à Embodied in a hulking form on the
ghost ship. He plays dice with Life-in-Death and wins the lives of the sailors.
·
Life-in-Death:
Embodied in a beautiful, ghostly woman. She wins the Ancient Mariner's soul
playing dice and condemns him to a limbo-like living death.
·
The
atmosphere is mysterious and dream-like.
|
The Rime
|
Medieval ballads
|
|
|
Structure
|
Mostly written in four-line stanzas;
a mixture of dialogue and narration |
Written in four-line stanzas;
a mixture of dialogue and narration |
|
Content
|
A dramatic story in verse
|
A dramatic story in verse
|
|
Language
|
Archaic; realistic in details and imagery
|
Archaic
|
|
Style
|
Frequent repetitions, refrain; alliteration and internal rhyme
|
Repetitions, refrain, alliteration
|
|
Theme
|
Travel and wandering; the supernatural
|
Magic, love, domestic tragedies
|
|
Aim
|
Didactic
|
No aim
|
THE RIME: INTERPRETATIONS
·
This
poem has been interpreted in different ways:
·
Description
of a dream.
·
An
allegory of the life of the soul: from crime, through punishment , to
redemption.
·
Metaphor
of man’s original sin in Eden
·
The
poetic journey of Romanticism:
o
The
mariner = poet
o
His guilt = the origin of poetry (Regret
for a state of lost innocence caused by the Industrial Revolution)
THE KILLING OF THE ALBATROSS
Set at a wedding feast (1-20) then on a ship
travelling to the Pole (21-82)
The characters introduced are:
·
Mariner
·
Wedding
Guest
·
Bridegroom
(5)
·
Guests
(7)
·
Bride
(33)
·
merry
minstrelsy (36)
·
albatross
(67) helmsman 76)
·
mariners
(74)
The Wedding Guest is angry , passive ,
impatient , absorbed ,
The Mariner is described as: old ,
beard
long and grey ,
glittering
eyes ,
eyes
are bright ,
hands
are skinny.
Being a magic character he hypnotizes the
Wedding Guest who is forced to listen to
him.
Ballad elements: the 4-line stanzas,
repetitions, a sort of refrain, it tells a dramatic story in verse, dealing
with supernatural events, written in archaic language, a mixture of dialogue
and narration.
The Wedding Guest interrupts twice the
narration of the voyage, but the Mariner holds him with his hypnotic power and
the passion of his story. The poet uses the senses to make the listeners /
readers use their imagination and enter this world.
The natural elements represented are
·
the
storm (personified as a huge bird
·
snow
and ice, magic element that becomes dangerous, surrounding the ship and paralysing
it, while the mist increases the atmosphere of uncertainty and mystery
·
the
Albatross represents the benign side of nature and its killing is absurd
The sounds of the wedding have a counterpart in
the sounds of the voyage (merry din – cheering of the ship; loud bassoon ,
merry minstrelsy – yelling and roaring; hollo of the mariners – cracking
growling and howling of the ice).
The bright sun is in antithesis with the
mysterious dismal sheen of the ice; the glimmering moon in the polar region
alludes to the glittering eyes of the Mariner, the red as a rose complexion
finds its counterpart in the green as emerald icebergs.
THE WATER SNAKES
The Mariner – a living being not a ghost – is
alone, with the men (seen as beautiful creatures) dead while slimy creatures
live in the rotting sea.
He cannot pray, haunted by the curse in the
eyes of the dead crew who undergo an unnatural death (they do not rot nor
smell). In the moonlight (nature and connection of man and nature à the Mariner feels a longing for the
night sky and the stars) he sees in the red water around the ship some water
snakes: the slimy creatures have become beautiful coloured snakes, and when the
Mariner perceives their beauty he feels love for them, he blesses them (unaware
à not conscious action) and he can
pray, free from the weight of his guilt symbolized by the albatross hanging
from his neck:
A SADDER AND WISER MAN
The final moral of the poem is given: loving
mankind and animals is commendable, but it is necessary to love each thing as a
creation of God, because it is a creation of God.
After the Mariner’s departure the Wedding Guest
leaves with a feeling of desperation, and the following day he is a wiser and
sadder man, as he has gone through what the mariner has.
