An Epistemological Crisis in a Smug World: The Problem of Perception in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

I. A Critical Overview

Beginning her article, “Words and ‘Languageless Meanings: Limits of Expression The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, critic Raimonda Modiano lists succinctly the many interpretations scholars have made about Coleridge’s long poem:

…as a sacramental vision of crime, punishment, and salvation; as a nightmarish tale of senseless suffering; as a discourse on prayer; as a parody of the Christian doctrine of atonement; as an elaborate structure of occult symbolism; as a poetic workshop for Coleridge’s later metaphysics; and as a prophetic allegory of Coleridge’s personal life.[1]

Modiano states that the “myriad of critical interpretations points to a fundamental center of ambiguity in the poem”,[2] an ambiguity which no single interpretation has been able to account for in the poem as a unity.

In fact, many critics fragment the poem by their “fanciful” interpretations, as Coleridge would say.  For example, several critics ignore or dismiss the Gloss and reduce the dialogue of the Wedding Guest and the Mariner in order to make the Mariner’s past experience the poem.  Critic E. Douka Kabitoglou sees the poem as a failed “marriage between Platonism and Christianity”.[3]  Critic James Boulger, in response to Robert Penn Warren’s “sacramental view of the Universe” and Edward Bostetter’s “nightmare world of inconsequence, [filled with] illogic, terror and meaningless”[4] simply stands in the middle of these two viewpoints, stating that the poem is “of the dream world itself… not nightmare nor… sacramental vision.”[5]  Boulger, however, does not account for the reason for the Gloss nor the interrelated roles of the Wedding Guest and the Ancient Mariner as narrator in this middle viewpoint.  Similarly, critic Abe Delson also takes a middle stance, as he describes the alternating “good, then bad, then good again, then bad again” of the Sun and Moon in the poem such that “the Mariner’s direct exposure to the instability of nature… has disoriented him and – except when he relives his voyage through his tale – made him hide behind the pietistic rationalization of the moral tag.”[6]  But Delson never speculates about why Coleridge would create such an unstable nature.  Critic Edward E. Gibbons tries to save the unity of the poem by analyzing the character of the Ancient Mariner as “a highly superstitious Catholic sailor” such that “[t]he moral is organically related to the action of the narrative” because the moral is simply the outgrowth of the Ancient Mariner’s point of view.[7]  But in saving the poem in this fashion, Gibbons reduces the Wedding Guest into “a device for leading the reader into the poem”, reduces the Mariner into “a Catholic [who] reads the world sacramentally, and dismisses the Gloss as “alien to the mariner’s frame of reference” without explaining why the Gloss is alien.[8]  Likewise, critic Arnold E. Davidson tries to account for the concluding moral of the poem by analyzing the Mariner.  But he casts the Mariner as ironic, whose motivation for teaching this moral to the Wedding Guest is ultimately selfish: “He [the Mariner] appalls his hearers; they reject him.  Then, neither shriven nor accepted, he must find another hearer, again tell his tale, and again be rejected – an unending progression.”[9] Modiano herself locates the ambiguity of the poem in the Mariner’s inability to articulate accurately his story to the Wedding Guest who has “resistance to the Mariner’s tale.”[10]  Although Modiano makes good distinctions between the Mariner and the Wedding Guest and also identifies that the Gloss is “what can happen to a work if clarity and secure moral explanations replaced its [the poem’s] vastly nebulous universe”,[11] she ultimately casts the Mariner as an unreliable narrator of his actual experience[12] because “[t]he very nature of knowing has become problematic.”[13]

            Herein, Modiano introduces the problem of epistemology:  How does one know what really happened to the Mariner, and what does it all mean?  Critic Frances Ferguson wrestles with this problem of epistemology in his analysis of the poem’s Gloss, for “the Gloss provides a strange kind of clarity and unity… [by] bespeak[ing] conclusions that do not echo the main text because the main text never reaches such value judgments.”[14]  Similarly, critic Wendy Wall sees the Gloss as an example of “readerly tension.”[15]

As with the aforementioned critics, however, both Ferguson and Wall describe the problem but supply no answers to the many questions that riddle the poem:  Why have the too-moral ending?  Why have the overly moral Gloss?  Why does the Mariner kill the albatross?  What is the role of the sailors?  What role does the dice game, won by Life-in-Death, play?  Why is the Mariner “unaware” in his blessing of the water-snakes?  Why must the ship sink?  Why is the Mariner still restless if he is supposed to be saved?  Why doesn’t the Wedding Guest rejoin his wedding party?  What makes the Wedding Guest the candidate for the Mariner’s story?  Why is the Mariner’s eye glittery?  Why is the Mariner ancient?  And, especially, is the question: Why would Coleridge do this?  In other words, what does Coleridge intend when he creates a poem as ambiguity-filled and contradictory as “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”?

            This final question, of course, assumes that Coleridge has an intent and has created this poem in order to carry out this authorial intent, which some critics, as seen above, may dismiss in light of the contradictions and ambiguities found in the poem.  But since Coleridge himself works out a robust aesthetics, i.e., a philosophy of art, in his prose works, one cannot merely dismiss “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as a failed experiment in his metaphysics, nor as another result of a drug-addled mind, nor a weak attempt to smash Christian orthodoxy with Romantic sensibility.  I argue that Coleridge intentionally makes his poem ambiguous and frustrating throughout the whole of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in order to create reader discomfort such that the reader must work – and work hard – to try to understand the vision which the Mariner tries to relate.  He imitates an epistemological crisis of perception in the poem so that the reader will experience the same crisis within the self; and the working out of this crisis, although morally painful, is also intellectually pleasurable[16], such that the reader, through the guidance of the poem itself, will arrive at a truth.  In short, Coleridge, like the Mariner, gets to wreck the reader’s day because it needs to be wrecked, for the sake of the reader, because, as Coleridge puts it, “for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dewdrops.”[17] But, I am getting ahead of myself.  Before we jump into the poem itself, let us briefly go over Coleridge’s aesthetics to see why “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is a coherent whole with a coherent intent, or, to use Aristotelian terminology, a telos.

II. Coleridge’s Aesthetics

            In Chapter 14 of “Biographia Literaria” Coleridge states that a poem’s “immediate object [is] pleasure, not truth,” although “truth either moral or intellectual, ought to be the ultimate end.”[18] This is reminiscent of Aristotle’s statements in his Poetics, that “no less universal is the pleasure felt of things imitated” and “to learn gives the liveliest pleasure”.[19]  For both Coleridge and Aristotle, learning, i.e., gaining knowledge, and pleasure are interrelated because through pleasure one gets at knowledge.  But the pleasure which poetry imparts is not merely materialist, sensual pleasure but “such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part” because “nothing can permanently please, which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise.”[20]  So, in this respect, pleasure does not merely serve as a vehicle for knowledge but is intimately part of the epistemological process in the creating and reading of poetry.

            As implied above, the form of art, or poetry, is important in this process of pleasure and knowledge.  In one of his lectures on Shakespeare, Coleridge speaks about two kinds of forms in art, the mechanic and organic:

The form is mechanic when on any given material we impress a predetermined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material, as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened.  The organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes as it develops itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form.  Such is the life, such the form.  Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally inexhaustible in forms.  Each exterior is the physiognomy of the being within, its true image reflected and thrown out from the concave mirror.[21]

Obviously, it is the organic form which will contain in itself the reason, or ratio ( to use the Latin root of the word “reason”), of its form.  Coleridge is very clear in regard to the holistic nature of the organic form, for “[t]he fairest part of the most beautiful body will appear deformed and monstrous, if dissevered from its place in the organic whole.”[22]  The organic form of the poem is the natural product – i.e., a creation, not a commodity – of the poet’s organic faculty, which is the imagination.  Organic form is to imagination as mechanic form is to fancy, as one sees from Coleridge’s distinction between imagination and fancy:

The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.  The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, coexisting with the conscious will….  It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify.  It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

            Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites.  The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space…. [I]t must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.[23]

Fancy is a strictly mechanical faculty, putting together mechanic form, such that the reason for the form’s being is external and is not part of the form itself.  Imagination, on the other hand, is “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.”  In alluding to Genesis (God’s good creation) and Exodus (God’s response to Moses’ question of identity, “I AM”), Coleridge gives a moral and pedagogical compass to this innate human faculty, in so far that what the imagination creates will be good – Coleridgean pleasure -- and will be a guide to a universal truth.

            The imagination, however, does not point to these truths as fixed, static entities.  Doing so would render these truths “impoten[t,] caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.  Truths… most awful and mysterious… are too often considered as so true, that they lose all the life and efficiency of truth, and lie bedridden in the dormitory of the soul”.[24]  The imagination, or “genius”, “rescues the most admitted truths”[25] by remaining “unfixed and wavering between them [images], attaching itself permanently to none”.[26]  The imagination “reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities”[27] while never fixing the balance into a static form.  Thus the truths arrived at by the imagination will not be the truths commonly considered truths.  Moreover, these truths will be slippery by the very virtue of their being dynamic and alive for man, not having lost “the life and efficiency of truth,” as mentioned earlier.  Coleridgean morals and truths are not the everyday conception of morals and truths, but morals and truths they are.

            This consideration of morals and truths brings one to Coleridge’s well-known response to Mrs. Barbauld, who said that “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” “had no moral”:

…but as to the want of moral, I told her that in my judgement the poem had too much; and that the only chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of such pure imagination.  It ought to have had no more moral than the Arabian Nights’ tale of the merchant’s sitting down to eat dates by the side of the well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up, and says he must kill the aforesaid merchant, because one of the date shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie’s son.[28]

Most critics, like Gibbons and Davidson, concentrate on Coleridge’s assessment, but, surprisingly, not on Mrs. Barbauld’s.  This response is dated 31 May 1830, over thirty years since the original composition and publication and over fifteen years since the addition of the Gloss.  Mrs. Barbauld, one can assume, has read the moral Gloss and the moral ending, which the Mariner declares in the end to the Wedding Guest.  Yet, she declares the poem as having no moral while, for Coleridge, the moral is an “obtrusion.”  Based upon the previous consideration of Coleridgean morals and truths, one can say, “Both are right.”  Mrs. Barbauld, with her traditional conception of orthodox morality, reads this wild tale of ambiguous spirits, of dryness and water-snakes, of impassioned old sailors and hypnotized youths, and, despite the moral platitude at the end and the Gloss, is not convinced that this is a moral tale because of its strange ambiguity.  Coleridge, somewhat wary of anything smelling like Christian orthodoxy, faults himself for dabbling in fancy, with his additions of the Christian externalities.  The moral sentiment should have been organically assumed in the story, he declares, without obvious signposts for readers to easily pick up with their fancy.  But one must take, I would argue, Coleridge’s self-criticism as somewhat ironic, as a criticism of Mrs. Barbauld’s shallow reading.  For Coleridge does contradict her – there is a moral, there is a teaching of truth in the poem.  And, even after thirty years and then fifteen years, Coleridge does not go back to revise his poem, does not remove the obviously “moral” parts because, as mentioned earlier, doing so would violate an organic whole, i.e., violate Coleridge’s aesthetics.  There is a moral there, bound within the poem in narrative layers like an onion, but it is not what it may seem.

III. Peeling the Layers of the Poem

One can see the narrative frames, or layers, of the poem thus:

Reader ¬Poet /Poem [Gloss ¬Ballad [Wedding Guest ¬Mariner [Mariner’s experience]]][29]

The central imaginative event is the Mariner’s past experience in the past.  This becomes a narrative tale for the Mariner to relate to the Wedding Guest.  The dialogue between the Mariner and the Wedding Guest becomes the body of the Ballad, on which a fictional reader creates a Gloss as a type of marginalia.  All of the above is the product of the poet’s imagination, i.e., a poem, including the Latin epigraph and the Argument.[30]  It is this organic whole which the external Reader finally reads.  Since the Mariner’s actual experience is what drives the poem, so to speak, the following analysis of key  epistemological crises of perception will move outward, from the Mariner’s experience to the Reader.

The key epistemological crisis in the Mariner’s experience is his motivation for killing the albatross.  Although this act is certainly, as critic Joe Christopher states,  “impulsive [and] unrationalized”[31]—an arbitrary and senseless act – one can see this brute disconnection with the albatross as an extreme actualization of his erroneous perception of the world:  He is only an ordinary sailor in an ordinary sea voyage, and he is complacent and content with this view: “The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared, / Merrily did we drop / Below the kirk, below the hill, / Below the lighthouse top.” (21-24)[32].  The complacency in these man-made structures – ship, harbour, kirk, and lighthouse – lulls the Mariner into a false perception of self-sufficiency, cut off from the larger community of Nature.[33]  With this pre-existing false perception of repose in self, the Mariner sees, albeit unconsciously, the Albatross as an interloper, even though the community which is the ship’s crew sees the bird as a “Christian soul,” (65).  Thus, the killing of the Albatross is an assertion of this solipsistic perception, which, in the framework of Christianity, is a sin against a fellow creature because he sees the fellow creature as a thing.[34]

This solipsistic perception is dangerous for the sailors because the ship is a microcosm of the human community, and the Mariner’s sinful act introduces sin into this community.  As Christopher rightly states, “his sin, is two-fold.  First, there is his impulsive, unrationalized action of killing the albatross….  Second, he leads his fellow mariners into accepting his sin, and hence sharing his guilt for the action.”[35]  This second effect of his sin, the leading others to sin, is reminiscent to the Matthew Gospel passage, Mt. 18:6,  “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”  The other mariners do indeed hang the dead Albatross around his neck like a millstone (141-42), but the expected punishment of the Mariner – death -- does not happen.

What does happen is the other epistemological crisis, which is the dice game between Death and Life-in-Death.  The dice game makes the fate of the Mariner and his fellow sailors seem arbitrary; there is no way of knowing exactly why the Mariner has been spared and his fellow sailors have not, except to assume that there is no reason – the decision is by pure chance.  Many critics do take this image of this game of chance at face value, saying, like Modiano, “The fact that his fate is decided by an irrational fortune game played by frightening and alien figures undermines the logic of a Christian world view.”[36]  From the point of view of the Mariner, a mere mortal, the decision does look like pure chance.  But Life-in-Death’s reaction, “The game is done!  I’ve won!  I’ve won!” (197) suggests a certain intent on the part of Life-in-Death towards her “prize,” the Mariner.  The flippant circumstances surrounding Life-in-Death’s providence towards the Mariner make it difficult to see what this dice game depicts: the mysterious and, from the standpoint of human perception, arbitrary bestowal of grace upon the sinner.  For what better way to show that man cannot merit grace and cannot know exactly if he has been given grace than to show the bestowal of grace as the result of a dice game?

The ambiguous appearance of Life-in-Death also contributes to the epistemological discomfort felt by the Mariner upon seeing her.  Is she good or evil?  Her looks are alarming: “Her skin was as white as leprosy” (192) — but she is attractive: “Her lips were red, her looks were free” (190).  It is only in another poem by Coleridge, “Epitaph” in which one finds that Life-in-Death is actually good.[37]  But here, in the middle of the Mariner’s experience on the frozen sea, as his fellow sailors fall dead and he endures seven days and seven nights of suffering, being alone, thirsty, and feeling like one of the “thousand thousand slimy things” (238), he does not know whether he has grace.  More importantly, he should not know.  For such a certainty would only recreate the fixed, solipsistic, and ultimately dead perception which got him in this situation in the first place.

            Thus, it is appropriate that when grace does work upon the Mariner such that he becomes epistemologically open, he blesses the water-snakes “unaware” (285).  It is not his prior perception, which saw the water-snakes as one of the slimy things, which does the blessing.  But it is a wavering, dynamic perception, i.e., the Mariner’s imagination, which has been prepared by his suffering and is spurred by unknowable grace, which   begins to see the water-snakes as beautiful and pleasurable.  No words, no rational constructions, and no previous notions can explain what the imagination perceives: “no tongue / Their beauty might declare” (282-83).  There is no understanding of the water snakes, but for the first time, the Mariner actually sees, or, to use Coleridge’s term, the Mariner actually loves: “Love is not, like hunger, a mere selfish appetite: it is an associative quality….  It gives to every object in nature a power of the heart, without which it would indeed be spiritless.”[38]

            So, in order to continue the process of uprooting his dead perception for a dynamic, unfixed imagination, the Mariner’s previous world must die for his new life.  Mariner must remain protected from false complacency and repose with a paradoxical life of restlessness, of travelling, of wavering, just like his new-found imagination, which manifests itself as “his glittering eye” (13), his “strange power of speech” (587), and his instant – read nonrational, non-fanciful – knowledge of his next student, just by looking at him (588-90).  It is a life that no common man would know as good and blessed, a life which no common man would choose.  But the common man, as the Mariner has discovered through his epistemological crises, does not really know what is good and blessed.  For the common man that he used to be, his present life as teacher and example for others is not done by rational choice but by a calling, mysteriously orchestrated by natural and supernatural means.  It is a calling for a life-long mission of imagination and restlessness, which would have been death, i.e., a return to his prior perception, if he were to refuse.

            As implied above, the relation between the Mariner and the Wedding Guest, then, is teacher and student.  The Mariner becomes the natural (he is a human being) and supernatural (his imagination) means which will re-orient the Wedding Guest’s erroneous perception.  That the Wedding Guest’s perception is erroneous is clear, as seen in his curt and then violent response to the Mariner in the beginning: “Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?” and “Hold off! Unhand me, grey-beard loon!” (4, 11).  His common perception does not include this strange, old man into his community of immediate family and merry-making.  That the Mariner holds the Wedding Guest against his will is clear – “He cannot choose but hear” (18) – which indicates the great danger in which resides the Wedding Guest.  Unlike the Mariner, he is not given a friendly albatross; one can only wonder what this young man, who obviously rejects the Mariner, a fellow human being, would do if confronted with the choice of including a mere bird in his perceived community.  That the Wedding Guest’s perception is immature is also clear: “And listens like a three years’ child” (15).  Throughout the poem, one finds the Wedding Guest torn between his desire to join the Wedding Feast and the Mariner’s imagination, which forces him to listen and learn from the Mariner’s tale.  The tale makes the Wedding Guest fearful because he does not know who this man is:  Is he a man plagued by fiends (80)?  Is he a ghost (224-29)?  The Mariner addresses the Wedding Guest’s concerns, but one is never certain if this reassures the Wedding Guest or not.

The awful mystery of the Mariner and his tale ends with a moral that sounds jarring in contrast with the events that has preceded it:

Farewell, farewell! but this I tell

To thee, thou Wedding Guest!

He prayeth well, who loveth well

Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth best

All things both great and small;

For the dear God who loveth us,

He made and loveth all.

(610-17)

Taken out of context, the concluding moral sounds like a platitude.  But taken in context – the extraordinary tale of the Mariner’s unusual conversion before it and the Wedding Guest’s sad and forlorn response, done in silence, after it – the moral takes on the character of a warning.  Says Davidson,

If the Guest will not join the Mariner in prayer, can he pray at all?  If he cannot love the Mariner, can God love him?  As the narrator implies, if God is present in communion, the communion must be complete; must include “man and bird and beast,” albatross and Mariner.[39]

The tension between the apparent platitude and the powerful meaning hidden in the apparent platitude remains; and the position of the apparent platitude forces one to re-think the meaning of the moral, not with ordinary perception but with eyes unveiled.  It is with unveiled eyes that the Wedding Guest sees the moral.  But, like the Mariner before him who really saw for the first time, it is a sight that is nonrational, nonfanciful: The Wedding Guest speaks no words.  He does not go to the Wedding Feast to say to his kin, “Hey, I was held up by this weird guy with this bizarre story.”  His previous, smug worldview has been torn, and he has become unmoored, like the Mariner himself.  To borrow Wordsworth’s phrase, the Wedding Guest has learned the “still, sad music of humanity.”[40]

            The ballad, which consists of the Mariner’s experience and the dialogue between the Mariner and the Wedding Guest, more than anything else points to the danger of imposing a pre-conceived, fixed  perception upon a dynamic, epistemologically complex reality.  The Gloss, on the other hand, runs along the text of the ballad like a remora on a shark; it is only concerned with the easily digestible parts of what the ballad leaves, i.e., the overt Christian pattern and the plot.  As Ferguson succinctly states, “The Gloss, in assuming that things must be significant and interpretable, finds significance and interpretability, but only by reading ahead of – or beyond – the main text.”[41]  As critic Sarah Dyck puts it, “It is the [Gloss] editor who introduces, articulates, and stresses throughout the theme of crime and punishment.  Only rarely does he see anything else.”[42] Similarly the Argument (which Coleridge omits after 1800) is an overtly moral interpretation, stated in five short lines.[43]  The fact that Coleridge omits the Argument and replaces it with a Gloss, thereby distancing himself by creating a Gloss Editor who is overtly and traditionally Christian, creates a work in which the actual reader, in reading the ballad and becoming baffled by the ambiguities of the story, then turns to the Gloss for clarification.  But the reader only finds in the Gloss a fixed, common perception decried by the Mariner and thus finds himself in an epistemological crisis, a limbo, similar to the situation of the Wedding Guest at the end of the poem.  In wavering between the ballad and the Gloss, the reader stretches his imaginative muscles in trying to reconcile these opposites.  As Wall rightly states, “the systems of truth are processive: the reader is paramount in working through layers of history to find the truth within the interpretations.”[44]  Similarly, in working through the layers of the poem, the reader can find the truth within the layers, in the epistemological limbo, in which he wavers  between and throughout the layers.  In doing so, the reader participates in the imaginative process of the poet Coleridge, not only by anatomizing the parts but also putting the parts back together in a synthesis, akin to the creation of the organic whole.

IV. Conclusion

            Thus, Coleridge intentionally makes “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” ambiguous and frustrating throughout the whole of the poem in order to create “readerly tension” (to use Wall’s phrase”) such that the reader must work to understand the vision which the Mariner tries to relate.  Coleridge imitates layers of epistemological crises of perception in the poem so that the reader will experience the same crisis within the self; and the working out of this crisis, although morally painful, is also intellectually pleasurable[45], such that the reader, through the guidance of the poem itself, will arrive at a truth.   This readerly work-out (to coin a phrase) participates in the poetic process of the imagination and, in doing so, changes the reader’s own perception.  As Coleridge says in the epigraph, “I can easily believe that there are more invisible creatures in the universe than visible ones.”[46]  In working through the epistemological crises in the poem, one comes closer to this belief.

Bibliography

Primary:

Abrams, M.H, et. al., ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature.  5^th ed. New York: Norton,1986.

Aristotle. Aristotle’s Poetics. Trans. S.H. Butcher. New York: Hill and Wang, 1961.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Edition of the Major Works. Ed. H.J. Jackson. Oxford; New York: Oxford Univ Press,1985.

Wordsworth, William. Wordsworth: Complete Poetical Works. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson. Oxford; New York: Oxford Univ Press, 1936.

Secondary:

Boulger, James D. “Christian Skepticism: In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle. Ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom. Oxford; New York: Oxford Univ Press, 1965. 439-52.

Christopher, Joe R. “The Ancient Mariner Baptised: A Study of New Birth in Parts V and VI of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” The South Central Bulletin 42.4 (Winter 1982): 117-19.

Davidson, Arnold E. “The Concluding Moral in Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Philological Quarterly 60.1 (1981): 87-94.

Delson, Abe. “The Symbolism of the Sun and Moon in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 15 (1974): 707-20.

Dyck, Sarah. “Perspective in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 13 (1973): 591-604.

Ferguson, Frances. “Coleridge and the Deluded Reader: ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’.” Georgia Review 31.3 (1977): 617-35.

Gibbons, Edward E. “Point of View and Moral in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’.” University of Review 35 (1969): 257-61.

Kabitoglou, E. Douka. “Ch. 4: ПAΘΗΜΑ and ΠΟΙΗΜA, Being in the Romantic Texts.” In Plato and the English Romantics. London, New York: Routledge, 1990. 205-25.

Modiano, Raimonda. “Words and ‘Languageless’ Meanings: Limits of Expression in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Modern Language Quarterly 38 (1977): 40-61.

Wall, Wendy. “Interpreting Poetic Shadows: The Gloss of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’.” Criticism 29.2 (Spring 1987): 179-95.

© May 8, 2001 Rufel F. Ramos

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