CIA II
The Man Who Shot the Albatross
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Class: TYBA
Roll number: 226
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Course Code: ENG.6.01
The Romantic movement is often looked upon as a reaction against the Enlightenment's focus on the logical in favor of the purely emotional. It was deeply rooted in the Enlightenment's focus on reason, and often portrayed love as tormented and unreachable. The best way to describe the Romantic movement is as "the rebellious child of the Enlightenment". The Romantic era spanned approximately 1798 to 1832, although many contemporary scholars extend the dates to varying degrees on either end.
The movement arose during a time when print culture was continuing its sharp rise. Printed materials were available to a wide audience instead of on a manuscript basis, inspiring writers to delve into "ordinary" themes and characters. However, this is not to say that the quality of the Romantics' writing was less than those preceding them, mundane, or low quality.
Rather, it strove to discover the extraordinary in the ordinary. Some major themes of the Romantic movement include the subjectivity of experience, the marriage of pleasure and pain, the location of the infinite or sublime in nature and a corresponding reverence for the natural world, and liminal spaces and states. The typical progression of a Romantic narrative describes the hero's journey from a state of innocence to one of sad wisdom, attained through realizations that occur in a liminal space and often involve magical or spiritual intervention.
Most notably, the tale is told from the hero's individualistic perspective. While contemporary readers take the prevalence of the word "I" in literature for granted, it was not so pervasive before the Romantic movement; stories focused on a protagonist's experience as didactic and universal. The Romantics, drawing on the Enlightenment focus on empirical evidence, placed great importance on their protagonists' subjective experience of the world.
The greatest example of Romantic individualism is Wordsworth's much-revised
Prelude,
in which he wrote thousands of lines about his personal experiences of his surroundings.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a British poet, philosopher and literary critic, and along with William Wordsworth, was the founder of the Romantic Movement in England. He wrote several poems, such as Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan. He also wrote the major prose work, Biographia Literaria. Coleridge's friendship with William Wordsworth began a period of great creativity in English literature.
Wordsworth greatly influenced Coleridge's verse. They befriended each other in 1795 and the following year, Coleridge published his first volume of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects as well as the first of the ten issues of political publication entitled The Watchman. In collaboration with Wordsworth, Coleridge produced a joint volume of poetry called Lyrical Ballads which is considered the first great work of the Romantic school of poetry and contains Coleridge's famous poem, Rime of the Ancient Mariner. That autumn, they both traveled to Europe together, where Coleridge spent most of his time in Germany, studying the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Jakob Boehme and G.E. Lessing.
He returned to England and introduced German-idealist philosophy to the English-speaking culture. Coleridge's poor health was being treated with laudanum, which fostered a lifelong opium addiction, which Coleridge died of. Under the influence of laudanum, he wrote a mysterious poetic fragment called Kubla Khan. He never did complete it and there are many theories about that too.
Most critics have concluded that this poem should be read a "meaningless reverie" and is enjoyed for its vividness and sensuousness.
Coleridge's achievements have been widely assessed and the broad agreement remains that his enormous potential was never fully realized in his works. His reputation as a poet precedes himself; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan remain two of the greatest poems ever written in English literature and the sensuous lyricism was often echoed by later poets.
He also has a reputation as one of the most important literary critics, largely on the basis of his Biographia Literaria. According to him, a union of emotion and thought constructs the basic element of literature - which he described as imagination. He emphasized greatly on poetry and its capacity to integrate the universal and the particular, the objective and the subjective, the generic and the individual.
The function of criticism for Coleridge was to discern these elements and to lift them into conscious awareness, rather than merely to prescribe or describe rules or forms. In all his roles, as a poet, social critic, literary critic, theologian and psychologist, Coleridge expressed a profound concern for the underlying creative principle that is fundamental to both human beings and the Universe as a whole. To Coleridge, imagination is the archetype of this unifying force because it represents the means by which the twin human capacities for intuitive, non-rational understanding and for organizing and discriminating thought concerning the material world are reconciled.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the longest major poem written by Coleridge in 1797-98. It is the story of an old sailor who is narrating his voyage to a man he stops on the way to a wedding ceremony. It is about his one impulsive, irrational and heinous act of killing an Albatross and he faces an inner struggle over the crime he has committed. He is on the journey of abandoning his negative views and openly accepting God's creatures.
From the time of his act of crime, this voyage turns into a journey of learning lessons of accountability, acceptance, forgiveness and repentance. The act of killing the Albatross was absolutely mindless - the bird was of no danger to the Mariner or the other men on the ship. On the flipside, it was a "Christian soul", a spiritual guide who safeguarded the ship and its crew.
As their journey progresses, the ship and its crew faces many difficulties as it comes to a halt on the sea. The Mariner is angry at first, instead of being remorseful about his action and curses the sea and creatures in it. He does not respect all of God's creatures for which he is to pay his price. He is utterly surprised when he comes face-to-face with "Death" and "Life-in-Death".
With a roll of the dice, Death wins the lives of the crew and Life-in-Death wins the life of the Mariner. The Mariner is left all by himself on the ship as one by one, the men on the ship die. At first, he grieves only for himself, saying, "Alone on a wide sea! And never a saint took pity on My soul in agony". The next seven days and nights are spent in solidarity, as he reflects on the events that have occurred, the eyes of the dead sailors fixed on him with blame.
The Albatross then falls from his neck into the sea.
The Mariner begins to broaden his horizons and acknowledge the spiritual wonder and joys of the Universe. By letting go off his negativities, he has set free the spirits of his dead shipmates. The spirits aid the Mariner's journey back home but even though the Albatross no longer hangs around his neck, and the ship is back on course, the Mariner has not found absolution.
The Polar Spirits say, "The man hath penance done, And penance more will do". Therein lies the Mariner's next lesson; forgiveness is not only asked for, but it is also earned.
He finally turns to the Hermit in order to seek exculpation for his transgressions. The image of the Albatross' blood is still vivid in the Mariner's mind, irrespective of the fact that it no longer hangs from his neck. He asks the Hermit to release him from his inner turmoil and when asked what he has done, the Mariner confesses his sins. A sense of freedom washes over him and it is this freedom that he will be in search of and spend endless days and nights seeking.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is unique among all of Coleridge's important works. Its uniqueness lies in its intentionally archaic language, the length of the poem, it's bizarre moral narrative, it's strange notes printed in the margins, thematic ambiguity, and the long Latin epigraph that begins it, concerning the multitude of unclassifiable "invisible creatures" that inhabit the world.
Its peculiarities make it quite dissimilar from the works that were typical of its era, not having much in common with other Romantic works. The margin notes and archaic language give the impression that the "Rime" is a ballad of ancient times, reprinted with explanatory notes for a new audience. Coleridge turned to the Middle Ages for inspiration because he wasn't happy with the imposing 'reasoning' in content and 'rules' in the form of poetry.
It establishes that Nature is supreme and violation of its fundamental laws will lead to catastrophic events for man. The poem portrays the intrinsic bond between creatures and human beings, as well as the visible and invisible beings of the nature. The crime committed against the Divine law of love by the mariner creates chaos both in his mind as well as the external world of nature.
The bird that he kills is not just any bird, but it is perceived as a "Christian soul" that comes out of nowhere from the "fog and mist". The bird serves to be a very friendly creature whose company is greatly enjoyed by all the mariners, but the sinful act of killing it brings doom upon all of them as the sanctity of life is violated. The other mariners also suffer because they unknowingly make themselves accomplices in his sin by justifying his act and saying it was right to kill the bird which brought the fog and mist.
During the ship's voyage, natural elements such as the wind, ice and water were given human qualities. The natural elements almost become characters in the poem. Religion and spirituality play an important role in this poem. The albatross is perceived as a Christian-like savior, appearing out of nowhere to lead the mariners to salvation. The sailor is looked at as a Judas-like character when he kills the albatross and betrays the bird's benevolence.
The mariner's advice at the end, "He prayeth best, who loveth best/ All things both great and small", suggesting that salvation comes not just from loving fellow humans, but loving all living creatures that have been created by God. Another important element of Romanticism prevalent in the poem is that of formal experimentation. Among the formal experiments, the most prevalent is the "story within a story" frame he establishes in the poem.
'The Ancient Mariner', in addition to its other unique qualities, is both an unconscious projection of Coleridge’s early sufferings and a vivid prophecy of the sufferings that were to follow. The poem was probably not originally intended to be a personal allegory; but that is what, in Coleridge’s eyes, it became later as the prophecy was slowly, inexorably and lingeringly fulfilled.
'The Ancient Mariner' has never been interpreted as a personal allegory. To do so (and the evidence for it is weighty) not only gives a clue to the source of the poem’s intensity but also explains beyond cavil its moral implications. 'The Ancient Mariner' is, however, of primary importance
as a poem; and no specialized interest – moral, biographical, or allegorical – can be allowed to assail the integrity to which, as a poem, it is entitled. But the interpretation I have suggested does bring the reader into intimate contact with Coleridge the man. Even to attempt to understand him will induce sympathy, and from sympathy some understanding can grow.
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