Coleridge's

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Part of Coleridge's daemonic group of poems, which also includes Christabel and Kubla Khan, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the story of the Romantic archetype, the Wanderer, the man with the mark of Cain, doomed to walk the earth alone and alienated from all others. What is presented to the reader is a theme of guilt and remorse, juxtaposed with the background joy of a wedding feast.

An old gray-headed sailor, the idealized portrait of Coleridge as a poet, approaches three young men headed for a wedding celebration. The audience is unwilling, but is forced to hear the tale anyway. It seems that as a penance for what he has done, the Mariner is compelled to tell his story whenever the agony returns.

Immersed in a hypnotic and gothic atmosphere (unnatural events, sense of mystery, and horror, symbols and ghosts)  the extraordinary events narrated leave the poem open to many interpretations.

One man speaking with another man of rather personal and emotional things is a very Romantic idea, which remembers Wordsworth's definition of the poet ("he is a man speaking to men . who has a great knowledge of human nature..).

So, this rhythmic poem that moves the story along like a song, can talk about  Coleridge's life: Just as the mariner experienced a series of terrible events on his voyage, Coleridge's life was difficult.

He struggled with addiction to opium, his marriage was sometimes difficult, and he certainly seems to have questioned the strength of his poetic gift. It is possible that, like the mariner, Coleridge experienced storytelling and creative urges in connection with feelings of guilt and failure and saw the creation of a poem as an act that is fundamentally cathartic and which expurgates guilt.

There are several religious references in the poem, for example, God, Christ, holiness and Lord. Then you can read The mariner as a moral parable of man, from original sin to his final redemption, or as an allegory of life, where the ship is a microcosm in which every deed of a single person has a repercussion on others.

Coleridge's interests always lay with the exotic and the supernatural, which he hoped to make more real for his readers by employing simple, straightforward language in an archaic English ballad form. In this relatively brief poem, he succeeds in making the extraordinary believable.

Anyway this poem is an outpouring of emotions, that creates an exotic and magic atmosphere, according to the best works of English romanticism.