European Humanities

Mr. Spragins

 

 

S.T. Coleridge       “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798)

 

Coleridge’s Rime

 

-         Read the whole poem out loud.

-         Discussion of study guide

-         Reading Comprehension Quiz.

 

Reading Comprehension Quiz

 

1.     What is the specific situation in which the story is told?

2.     Who is the listener?

3.     Describe the world into which the boat is driven by the storm.

4.     What do the sailors think of the albatross when it arrives in this world of dreams and ice?

5.     Why does the Mariner kill the albatross?

6.     What force drives the boat forward even though it moves through utterly calm seas?

7.     Describe the strange ship that draws near the boat. Who is on it?

8.     What makes it possible for the mariner to return to the normal world?

9.     What happens to the boat as it enters home harbor?

 

3.     Discussion

 

1.     The Frame:

-       Why does the Mariner come to this specific place and confront this particular listener?

-       Why does he need to tell his story again and again?

 

2.     The Story:

-      How does the action of the story teach us Coleridge’s religious beliefs?

 

-      Evil is an innate human characteristic which issues from a source deep within our psyche.

-      Expiation of sin issues from the same place and can only be achieved through an arduous spiritual process.

-      Guilt cannot be wholly expunged and confession needs to be enacted again and again.

 

3.     Ballad Music

      -     How does the sound of the poem, its music, contribute to its meaning?

 

-      It evokes a hypnotic, trance state with its driving rhythm, strange diction, sing-song rhyme, and dreamlike natural imagery.

-      In this state the reader can reach past the intellect and access the unconscious where the essential moral struggle takes place that forms our character

 

4.     What makes the poem Romantic?

 

-      The reader discovers truth through imaginative interpretation of poetry, not through inductive or deductive reasoning.

-      By interpreting symbol and responding to the music of a poem, the reader is allowed to participate in its creation.

-     The poem gives the reader the opportunity to experience a moral journey. As Kant explained, our only way to understand the truth and see God is through moral experience.

-     The poem’s simple form and diction allow any reader, not just a member of an intellectual elite, to access the truth. (Romantic Poetry is democratic, the poetry of the common man.)

-     The choice to reach back into the roots of English literature for the poem’s form and content affirms a national folk identity which has evolved through the centuries, not some universal, cosmopolitan vision of identity as conceived by the Enlightenment philosophes.