Professional paper
God save thee, Ancient Mariner! Stories of the Book of Genesis and their relation to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Tomislav Domazetović
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner has
some obvious Christian influences, from the angelic troop to the blessing of the water snakes. However, this paper proposes that Coleridge made the poem as a form of reversal of the stories found in the Book of Genesis, especially the stories of Cain and Noah’s Ark. It suggests that the moral dimension of the poem, which is one of its most important features, is directly connected to Cain’s murder of his brother and to Noah’s dove as a bird of good omen. The harshness of the punishment is a point of tension in the poem, but this essay gives examples of God being just as punishing in the Book of Genesis, so the punishment of the Mariner is not without a predecessor. The story of the Fall is also transformed because Coleridge uses the image of a snake – or a water-snake – to return the Mariner to the world of prayer, while the snake in the Book of Genesis is responsible for tempting Eve and thus causing the Fall from Eden. Other elements that further connect the poem to the Book of Genesis are listed. A connection is also made between The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and another poem by Coleridge, “The Wanderings of Cain”, which can be seen as sibling
poems, both in how they came to be and in the predicament of their main characters.
Keywords
Book of Genesis; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; Christian symbolism; the Fall
Hrčak ID:
244488
URI
Publication date:
4.4.2020.
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