The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

The Ancient Mariner is unnaturally old, with skinny, deeply-tanned limbs and a “long grey beard and […] glittering eye” (1). He used to be a sailor and, during a voyage when he was younger, he and the crew he was a part of become stranded at the South Pole. When an albatross appears, the ice breaks and the ship is freed. The Mariner makes a friend of the bird but then shoots and kills it.

The other crew members are angry with the Mariner at first, as they think the bird a good omen, after which they change their minds as they come to believe that it was the bird (and, by extension, Nature) that had caused their bad luck. However, by killing the bird, the Mariner has triggered a series of events that causes the cosmos to rise up against him and his shipmates. His fellow crew members blame him and he is punished for his crime by Life-in-Death. As his crew dies, the Mariner is left to live on with what he has done. It is only when he comes to accept the beauty of all of God’s creatures, and that he must be respectful towards them, that he is partially forgiven for killing

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