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Rime of the Ancient Mariner rests firmly on the philosophical mindset of the Romantics. Coleridge’s lines in this poem are steeped in Romantic philosophy, the importance of love, love for humans, birds, and animals, and the dangers of rational thinking.
Coleridge was one of the founders of the Romantic movement, a literary movement that developed in response to the Enlightenment in the early 19th century. Enlightened philosophy honors reason above all, and appears to have developed in the eighteenth century, as well as contributing to the emerging industrial revolution and changing the balance of human relations with the growing industrial and technological nature. The Romantics valued emotion more than reason, and they glorified and valued nature. Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner fits into the romantic tradition. The poem begins at the wedding feast, where the wedding guests watch and enjoy a civilized environment that conquers nature. But when the old navigator imposes himself on the wedding guest and tells his story, the scene (and the wedding guest) shifts from relaxed civilization to nature, in this case on a ship from around the world. Taking off into the world, the Mariner has to fight against nature in the form of violent storms and dangerous seas and must survive the dangers of the natural world. In view of this, the killing of the albatross mariner can be considered an attempt to control nature, to assert the authority of man over nature.
But the poem presents nature as more powerful, provocative, and surprisingly terrifying than human comprehension. Moreover, the poem depicts any attempt to control nature as meaningless. Nature is very powerful, as is evident when a sudden lack of wind traps a ship in solitary waters, and sailors and sailors begin to die of thirst. The poem shows that fighting with nature, or simply surviving or trying to control it, is the wrong way for humanity to approach the natural world.
However, the poem does not portray nature merely as some kind of negative fundamental force that is too powerful for humans to conquer. Instead, the poem imagines nature as an expression of the spiritual world. This connection between nature and the spiritual world explains the terrible and supernatural reactions that the Mariner and his ship’s crew must face after killing the Albatross. Nature, as in the poem, is God’s creation, and therefore when a person communicates with nature he communicates with the spiritual world. Thus, when a navigator attempts to dominate or control nature (such as killing an albatross), it is an insult not only to nature but also to the spiritual world and to God. So, harming nature is a moral failure. It is a sin. This type of sin leads to punishment, and punishment comes as a natural and spiritual combination: it is supernatural. This supernatural punishment manifests itself when the core soul rises and pulls or stops the navigator’s ship, and in the human soul that combines death, life, and death.
Only when the navigator learns to live with the natural world and pays the price, as he does when he sees the beauty of a water eel, seems to have hated her before, how easy is it to punish them. Then the poem realizes and evaluates nature, the act of embracing romance, not only important in itself but above all a spiritual and religious necessity.
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