‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ is a narrative poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1798. It is about the mariner who shoots an innocent Albatross which creates problems for him when his ship stops moving due to the doldrum. When the ship became static, it was on the equator at the time and did not move for many days. With direct sun, it got very hot and there was no water to drink. The mariner’s shipmates all died but he stayed alive. When he eventually gets back to England and confesses his journey and unfortunate events to the Hermit through a poem, he learns that his penance for killing the Albatross is to continue to tell his story to people.
Overall, I enjoyed the story of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. I have never read a narrative poem until now and I found it fascinating how someone can tell a story through poetry. Even though the terminology was confusing at times, I was able to piece it together like a puzzle and try and figure it out along the way. Even though I liked how it was written, there were many parts where I was not expecting that to happen and seemed odd to me. Including when it wrote that ‘the dead men rose’ and how there was a ghost ship, ‘spectre barque’. But after finishing reading it, it fit together, and I understood what had happened.