2. 
‘Poetry gives most pleasure when only generally
and not perfectly understood’
-S.T.Coleridge
 “We
do not sufficiently understand the story
to analyze it”
-Robert Southey

3.  The
ancient mariner frustrated
interpretation because it defected
expectation.
 For the romantics it appeared an
enigma and a failure; its complexity
was comfortably construed to be
obscurity;
its
departure
from
conventional
expectation
where
adjudged as defects and its

4.  According
to C.M Bowra , the ancient
mariner is a tale of crime and
punishment.
 It falls into seven sections and each
sections tells of a new stage in the
process.

5.  The
first section tells of the
actual crime. The mariner kills
the bird out of anger or irritation.
 Therefore he suffers the most.
 Secondly, the crime is against
nature.

6. 
The mariner begins to suffer punishment.

The ship has ceased to move, and the sailors are
tortured by thirst while the moving things in the
hideous scene are the slimy creatures

7. This section shows how the guilty soul becomes
conscious of what it has done.
 The mariner first begins to realize the consequence
of his actions.
“Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold.
Her skin was white as leprosy,
The nightmare life in death was she,
Who thicks man’s blood with cold”


8.  The
sense of solitude is elaborated.
 Guilty soul is cut off not merely
merely from human intercourse but
from consoling friendship of
nature, which mocks it with majestic
detachment.

9.  The
fifth section continues the
process of souls revival.
 The ship begins to move, and the
mariner hears heavenly music and is
comforted by it.
 In the sixth section, the mariner is
still haunted by the presence of his
dead comrades.

10.  According
to psychoanalysts, the
mariner represents though peculiarly
the mother. He is an archetype, the
wise old man whose hypnotic
glittering eyes implies the Laccanian
phallic gaze of simultaneous identity
and alienation.

11.  The
tale begins with a
unquestionable premise: there was
a ship.
 The vessel constitutes a basic
metaphor for the body beginning
life.
 The ship’s movement follows the
pulsations and rhythms of fluid
preoedipal drives.
 In part one the mariner is passive.

12.  At
first the mariners only perceive
only a rhythm of natural variationthe rising and the setting of the sun.
 The rhythm is disturbed by the
storm blast which drives the vessel
into the frozen Atlantic.
 The sun and the storm are he while
the moon is she.

13.  According
to psychoanalysts the
masculine and the feminine however
with both pleasant and unpleasant
sensations.
 The father sun implies comforting
regularity.
 But the storm blasts, also male, is
experienced as an abusive father.
 The albatross connotes mother and
father in both good and bad aspects.

14.  Life
in death is a recurrent theme in
Coleridge’s thought and it meant to
him a mixture of remorse and
loneliness.
At the end, the life in death still haunts
the mariner, and he says
“since then at an uncertain hour,
The agony returns
and till my ghastly tale is told
The heart within me burns”