Laura Dolloff
Engl 210.3 MWF
February 7, 2003
Response #2

   In lecture, Prof. Wood asked if perhaps Coleridge’s “Rime of the 
Ancient Mariner” is contradictory in nature.  What makes it so strange 
that Coleridge imposes ideas of the existential upon those of the 
Christian mythos?  The mariner calls to Christ, and to Mary, and uses the 
cross/crossbow imagery, but there is also an essence of spirituality which 
cannot be defined by Christianity such as the arctic spirit (ln.130), the 
personifications of Death and Life-in-Death (ln.185-193), and the 
“spell”(ln.290) of the murdered albatross.  It would seem that he 
interweaves multiple ideologies in order to create tension between them 
and, ultimately, to give the reader his own personal view of the outcome.  
These are moral ideologies which have clashed in many ways outside of the 
Mariner – ideologies finding expression in a poem which sways gently from 
side to side on the issue.

   In this case, existentialism appears to win out, as the mariner is 
ultimately responsible for his previous offense of having shot the 
albatross.  Perhaps this is an attempt by Coleridge himself to reconcile 
the things he’d been taught as the son of a minister, and the things he’d 
gleaned from a voracious literary appetite.  The poem would seem to “be 
vigilant for truth ”(the Burnet introduction), as though the author were 
trying to discover the correct ways in which we as people are to react to 
our own misdeeds.  Coleridge obviously holds to the belief that each of us 
are personally responsible and that passing off our guilt, our penance as 
it were, to any supernatural source, be it Christian or any of the 
“spirits” in the poem, is the dishonourable action.


(http://www.english.uiuc.edu/facpages/Wood/student%20responses/Coleridge/dolloff.htm)