the shore, he desperately desires to narrate the story to Hermit.

Even after many years

of the incident, he still feels the same need to save them. After expressing his emotions, the
Mariner departs, and the guest also returns home feeling wiser and sadder.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is written in loose, short ballad usually either four or six lines
long but, occasionally, as many as nine lines long. The meter is also somewhat loose, but odd
lines are generally tetrameter, while even lines are generally trimeter.

Symbolism is a use of symbols to signify ideas and qualities, by giving them

symbolic meanings that are different from their literal meanings. Here, Albatross is a symbol of
good luck, symbol of nature’s power and it was killed in pure caprice and woman represents
perpetual temptation. Coleridge believed that symbolic language was the only acceptable way of
expressing deep religious truths and consistently employed the sun as a symbol of God. Also, the
sun and the moon represent two sides of the Christian God: the sun represents the angry,
wrathful God, whereas the moon represents the benevolent, repentant God. The symbols of
colours are present in the poem: the colour green is used throughout the poem to show that
something is supernatural. At the beginning the ice is an unnatural emerald green; the ocean is
also green and turns a variety of colours that remind the mariner of witches’ oils so they seem
magical and mysterious. The colour red is associated with death, for example the water turns red
when the crew dies, moreover ‘Life-in- Death’ has red lips. However her red lips are not just
associated with death ‘her looks were free’ showing red to be a colour of sexuality or
promiscuity linking her with sin but also nature.

There are several subthemes in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner relating to
Christianity and the supernatural, and two primary themes. Coleridge presents in the Rime of the
Ancient Mariner, the Romantic idea of the sublime isn’t confined to just beauty, but rather
suggests an overwhelming awe, and is often connected to nature. In the poem, for instance, the
natural world is filled with beautiful yet horrible sights and events. The storm, which drives the
ship to the pole, is incredibly powerful and majestic at once. The ice, snow, and giant, ship-high
glaciers that the Mariner encounters in the pole are at once incredibly beautiful, eerie, and
dangerous. The sublime then can be seen as the intersection of beauty and terror, awe and horror.

This poem is Coleridge’s supreme fulfillment of his own critical theories. From
reading, from his perception of nature, from his dreams, his spirit of imagination combined and
unified a powerful vision.
 According to William Wordsworth, the poem was inspired while Coleridge,
Wordsworth, and Wordsworth's sister Dorothy were on a walking tour through the Quantock
Hills in Somerset.[6] The discussion had turned to a book that Wordsworth was reading, A
Voyage Round The World by Way of the Great South Sea (1726) by Captain George Shelvocke.
The book told of a privateering voyage in 1719 during which a melancholy sailor, Simon Hatley,
shot a black albatross.

In Table Talk, Coleridge wrote: Mrs Barbauld once told me that she admired The Ancient
Mariner very much, but that there were two faults in it -- it was improbable, and had no moral.
As for the probability, I owned that that might admit some question; but as to the want of a
moral, I told her that in my own judgement the poem had too much; and that the only, or chief
fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a

principle or cause of action in a work of such pure imagination. It ought to have had no more
moral than the Arabian Nights' tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of a
well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up, and says he must kill the aforesaid
merchant, because one of the date shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son.

However, when Lyrical Ballads was reprinted, Wordsworth included it despite Coleridge's
objections, writing: The Poem of my Friend has indeed great defects; first, that the principal
person has no distinct character, either in his profession of Mariner, or as a human being who
having been long under the control of supernatural impressions might be supposed himself to
partake of something supernatural; secondly, that he does not act, but is continually acted upon;
thirdly, that the events having no necessary connection do not produce each other; and lastly,
that the imagery is somewhat too laboriously accumulated. Yet the Poem contains many delicate
touches of passion, and indeed the passion is every where true to nature, a great number of the
stanzas present beautiful images, and are expressed with unusual felicity of language; and the
versification, though the metre is itself unfit for long poems, is harmonious and artfully varied,
exhibiting the utmost powers of that metre, and every variety of which it is capable. It therefore
appeared to me that these several merits (the first of which, namely that of the passion, is of the
highest kind) gave to the Poem a value which is not often possessed by better Poems.

In my opinion, this poem is beautiful because we can observe the poet's imprint in each
verse and that makes us see originality and perfection, the poet transmits our thoughts, our
emotions and also his upsets. After reading it for the first time I had a sad feeling because in this
poem we can see real emotions and the real sentiments of death, of the moment when the mariner
shoots the bird (the albatross) : [...] With my cross-bow /I shot the Albatross. I think it is a much
too deep poem that is not understood by everyone, it is a poem where we talk about evil,
sometimes misunderstood by readers. Therefore, the poet made all kinds of changes in his poem
and I think he was never satisfied with how and why he expressed the reader's poem may be
because he was too critical of himself and his creations because he presents a part of his life, a
part of his feelings and a part of his loneliness. George Whalley, in his 1946–47 essay, "The
Mariner and the Albatross", suggests that the Ancient Mariner is an autobiographical portrait of
Coleridge himself, comparing the mariner's loneliness with Coleridge's own feelings of
loneliness expressed in his letters and journals.

In conclusion, this poem made me think about life, about the good and the bad, about
the Sun and the Moon, about everything around us, so it makes you have so many thoughts this
poem even if he's talking about something obscure and it's pretty hard to read.