

Thus he moves onward to find the next person who must hear his story, leaving the Wedding Guest “a sadder and a wiser man.” Analysis of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ He ends with the explicit lesson that prayer is the greatest joy in life, and the best players come from love and reverence of all of God’s creation. The Mariner then explains to the Wedding Guest that he must suffer from agony if he doesn’t give in to his urge to share the story and that he can tell just from looking at their faces which men must hear his tale.

Powered by the Spirit from the South Pole, the ship races homeward, where the Mariner sees a choir of angels leave the bodies of the deceased Sailors. The Mariner falls into a kind of stupor and then wakes to find the dead Sailors’ bodies reanimated by angels and at work on the ship. With this realization, he is finally able to pray, and the albatross fell from his neck and sunk into the sea. Facts The Rime of the Ancient MarinerĪt this moment he has a spiritual realization that all of God’s creatures are beautiful and must be treated with respect and reverence. The Mariner is surrounded by the dead Sailors and cursed continuously by their gaze when he notices beautiful Water Snakes swimming beside the ship. After Life-in-Death wins the soul of the Mariner, the Sailors begin to die of thirst, falling to the deck one by one, each staring at the Mariner in reproach.

On its deck, Death and Life-in-Death gamble with dice for the lives of the Sailors and the Mariner. But the joy fades as the ghostly ship, which sails without wind, approaches. In this terrible calm, trapped completely by the watery ocean that they cannot drink, when the Mariner sees what he believes is a ship approaching, he alerts the crew, who all grin out of joy. The crew then hangs the albatross around the Mariner’s neck. The ship then encounters terrible events, with it moving into a stagnant sea where the sailors have no water to drink nor any food and some sailors dream that an angered Spirit has followed them from the pole.
