For this blog I feel as if I did a bit more summary on the short story/poem, however I did not feel this required as in depth thinking. However, maybe I am missing something? If anybody has any points to add please do!!
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
The ballad starts out with an old seaman who meets three men going to a wedding. This man has come to tell a story at a wedding about an experience on a ship he had. The ship goes south to try and outrun a storm “And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he Was tyrannous and strong: He struck with his o’ertaking wings, And chased us south along.” They end up going south towards the south pole where they believe there is no life. However, line 63 says “At length did cross and Albatross”. At the conclusion of part one the crew decides the bird is lucky, and the old man telling the story at the wedding decides to kill him and bring him along. In the second part of the story the crew decides the man has brought them bad luck by killing the bird and decide there is a spirit that is following them. So they hang the dead bird around the man’s neck. The interesting thing is that the whole time the old man is telling his story the wedding is trying to go on. At one point the wedding music started playing, but the man continued talking and the wedding guests are listening intently. At this point the story is being told so well that I was even on the edge of my seat to find out what happened next. As the story progresses it turns out that a ghost ship has approached their ship. Then he says “The souls did from their bodies fly-They fled to bliss or woe! And every soul, it passed me by, Like the whizz of my CROSS-BOW!” In the fourth part of the story he is on the ship by himself and he begins feeling lonely and sorry for himself. For example he says “The many men, so beautiful! And they all dead did lie: And a thousand thousand slimy things Lived on; and so did I” I believe by this statement he is jealous that the other men died and that he is still living. He feels that living is actually a curse. At the end of this section however he blesses living things and is able to pray. At this point “The albatross fell off, and sank Like lead into the sea”. The story continues and the old man finally sees a ship and is able to return back to land after his own ship sank. Then he tells the wedding guest that “I pass, like the night, from land to land; I have strange power of speech”. Pretty much what he ends up telling them is that he goes around from town to town and he tells people about love and to love all of god’s creatures. He never again was able to return to the sea because of the curse, but he was able to pass along love. The story ends sadly because it says “A sadder and a wiser man, He rose the morrow morn.” As if to say that the man is getting older and wiser with age, but he will wake up again just to go out and talk about the same things and then repeat the process the next day.
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Jenny,
You are correct in pointing out the central problem of this post--most of the time it consists of a plot summary of Coleridge's poem, rather than an analysis of it. WHen you catch yourself just retelling a poem or story, STOP and try to think of a different way to approach it. You might speculate on why this event occurred, or how it made you feel, or why the poet might have wanted to make you have that reaction, or how the poet constructed your response. In other words, penetrate the surface and use critical thinking to ask more analytical questions about the poem.
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