The Mariner's Setting

A major part of Coleridge’s appeal in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is his ability to enthrall the reader in the mariner’s tale. The audience becomes devoid of a physical setting when the mariner’s tale becomes the entire textual landscape, overshadowing the larger narrative it is part of. This separation occurs whenever the audience forgets the story is inside of a poem and that it does not constitute the poem entirely. Despite this performance of skill, it feels pertinent to, in fact, keep in mind the poem’s setting and to put that in dialogue with the somewhat obscured moral of the piece. The setting seems especially important because the story’s telling comes due to epiphany as the mariner recites at the end, “I pass, like night, from land to land;/ I have strange power of speech;/ That moment that his face I see,/ I know the man that must hear me:/ To him my tale I teach” (586-90). The mariner has no home and roams on telling his story, giving Coleridge endless settings in which to place this telling, which makes this particular utterance at this particular setting important.
So what can we glean from the comparison? Well if we want to utilize the historical author, it can be fathomed that the poem contains some of Coleridge’s own anxieties about marriage (his own marriage failing several years after the poem’s initial publication). The albatross, a vague and general symbol, could then come to represent anything from the promise of marriage to virginity; its white feathers like “moon-shine” (78) representing anything comparable to purity or hope.

At the end of the text itself, there seems to be little indication that the poem is explicitly about marriage. The narrator (whether it be the mariner or some form of omniscient third party) makes claims about a man’s relationship to God and what role solitude has in a life, but no direct lessons about marriage. Except in lines 601-4 where the narrator says, “O sweeter than the marriage-feast,/ ‘Tis sweeter far to me,/ To walk together to the kirk/ With a goodly company!-” Here, the narrator says he would prefer company to food, but “marriage-feast” can also be read more generally as the bounty of marriage. Thus, though through a stretch of interpretation, the narrator seems to say good company cannot come with marriage, that marriage in some way curses and corrupts company as the dead albatross corrupts the mariner’s voyage.