OK, so I know I'm late. Been a bit swamped, excuse me. Now, I'd like to write this blog post about what sets The Rime of the Ancient Mariner apart from the poetry of earlier periods and what distinguishes it from other works of romantic fiction.
First, I'd like to talk about something I noticed about the shift between Enlightenment thought and romantic thought. It seemed that there was a much larger focus on the trivial for its own sake in the Enlightenment literature we read. For example, while presented in epic fashion, The Rape of the Lock is fundamentally about nothing. Despite its medium, the whole piece is a knowing nod to the ridiculous, fully intending for the reader to laugh at its characters. In contrast, romantic authors spent a lot of time talking about almost nothing in the most grave, serious, and introspective of ways. Each action holds a greater weight (if there even is any action), and everything is heavily symbolic.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is unique among works of romantic fiction for a couple of reasons. To begin, it contains epic actions. Rather than contemplating a blade of grass or whining about the smog of the city, Coleridge drops us right into the middle of some crazy stuff - cursed birds, ghost ships, wagers for the lives of crews, and straight up zombies. While setting up tropes that would appear in films and books for centuries, Coleridge reverts to the romantic mode by somehow turning the whole thing into a heavy handed lesson about the treatment of animals and respect for all living creatures for almost no reason at all.
1. Why did Coleridge choose to shoehorn such a weird lesson into the story? Or was the story constructed around this idea?
Great post Dean, and I think there is a resurgence of the metaphysical in the romantic period, where spirituality takes the forefront again, even if it is clearly not strait Christian doctrine. In regards to the moral, I think it sets up a simple lesson but it is not quite as easy as that. Can we simply write off this poem as "be good to animals" or is there something else at play here? Certainly the wedding guest is not simply uplifted by the moral and proceeds on with his day. The moral is too abrupt, too forced to be the overarching purpose. What else might Coleridge be saying with his poem?
ReplyDeleteDean, I can see how the epic conventions are used in this romantic poem. It is kind of a hodgepodge of conventions and literary techniques. But in the end, he simply told a story that was in the midst of the main frame narrative. I think that Coleridge had many ideas that he could have elaborated on and even switched into an epic poem instead of romantic. I guess he could have made this an epic poem in the romantic literature style (if that can even be done?).
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