This poem is Coleridge’s major contribution to the “Lyrical ballads”
* ballad form = popular form (they wanted to spread culture in all the social classes)
Traditional ballad features:
1. sad plot
2. simply written story
3. typical pattern
4. mix of fantasy and real
5. traditional ballad scheme ( 4line stanzas)
Differences:
1. the typical rhyme scheme (abab) isn’t always followed
2. some descriptions are longer than usual
3. not all the stanzas have 4 lines
· *introduction in latin
· *divided into 7 parts:
1. an old mariner meets 3 guests and stops one of them because he wants to tell him his story
2. the story starts: the ship is blown away by the wind, after that it stops in a deadly silence after the mariner kills an albatros
3.on a ghost ship death and life in death appear: death wins the crew’s lives, life in death wins the old mariner’s life
4.feeling of compassion observing God’s creatures = repentance
5.spirits who take mariner’s sin and his punishment
6.spirits speak about the mariner’s native land and before reaching the land it sanks.
7.The mariner must live forever and teach the love and respect for all God’s creatures by telling his story
· *Symbols, characters
ALBATROSS: represents the human positive qualities,it is the link between reality and imagination, linked with the poetical imagination
CREW’S ATTITUDE: represents the human negative side: all mariners didn’t give a universal moral value to the mariner’s action but they follows the good and the bad fortune they receive from it
MARINER: human journey salvation ( sin punishment repentance and redemption )
NATURE: sun light (God’s punishment side, reason) against moonlight ( God’s grace, feelings imagination irrational )
PUNISHMENT: is the projection of Coleridge’s fear that in the universe can rule the chaos and the injustice, in fact the mariner’s sin didn’t deserve such a harsh punishment ( first the loneliness and then the immortality)
*Importance of colours = 1st white, green : positive nature , then red, black: negative nature