The Sinful Seas: Morality and the Ocean in “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” Josie Reynolds College

The ocean has provided a landscape for the unknown for centuries. Prior to the mapping of the world at the end of the 1700s, little was known of its vastness and conditions. Coleridge capitalizes on this notion of the ocean as a treacherous, mysterious place in order to construct a fantastical commentary on human morality. By imposing a sort of divine will in the oceanic conditions, Coleridge uses the sea to address the sinful behavior of the men exploring it. Coleridge sets the tale in the past in order to call upon previous eras in which the sea was an endless mystery, and in many ways, similar to the human condition. In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Samuel Coleridge uses navigation of the vast oceans as a metaphor for the trials of the human soul.

Coleridge’s use of archaic form and language recalls a time in literature when the sea was merely understood as an endless void where one could face unknown consequences. Through the purposeful use of archaic language, such as the spellings of rime, ancient, and mariner in the title. These archaic spellings and turns of phrase serve to connect the poem with a distinctly bygone era, one in which little was known about the ocean, and it represented a sort of final frontier for...