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Coleridge's “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is a tale of crime and punishment forced upon a Wedding-Guest, who listens in terror while the Mariner recounts his murder of a gentle albatross and his subsequent experience of thirst, isolation and “rebirth.” At the end of the ballad, the Mariner takes leave of his wiser, sadder listener, aware that he will have to repeat the tale when his “agony returns.”
The poem has such emotional power that the reader, like the Wedding-Guest, is virtually hypnotized by the narrative. Yet, when he too is released at the end of the poem, the reader may feel a certain amount of confusion. What seems to have been the presiding emotion of the ballad? Is it a sense of loneliness and stagnation? Or is the regeneration that occurs late in the poem (Part V) convincing enough to persuade the reader that he has, after all, seen the Mariner through to his salvation?
Foremost among the critics defending the latter interpretation is Robert Penn Warren, who describes “The Ancient Mariner” as “the theme of sacramental vision, or the theme of the ‘One Life.’”1 The Mariner finally rejects his intellectual condition of “utmost abstraction”2 and reenters, through the aid of the Hermit-Priest, the community of men.3 The theme, then, is one of réintégration into the harmony of the universe.
Warren's view is expressed, in altogether different terminology, by Maud Bodkin in her study, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry. According to Miss Bodkin, the movement of the poem is at first downward, “toward disintegration and death.”4