The rime of the ancient mariner: analisi

Saggio in inglese sulla ballata di Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The rime of the ancient mariner: analisi e riassunto (1 pagine formato doc)

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THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER: ANALISI

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834).

Works: he wrote "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". This poem contains many of the features traditionally associated with ballad that are the combination of dialogue and narration, the four-line stanza, frequent repetition, alliteration and internal rhyme, the theme of travel and wandering, supernatural elements and the framework. The poem consists in fact of two narrations: one, which constitutes the framework and introduces the protagonist and his listener; the other, which deals with the extraordinary adventures of the mariner.
Thus there are two narrators. The first is the poet who recites the ballad, the second is the mariner who tells the story of his extraordinary voyage. But the presence of a moral at the end makes The Rime of the Ancient Mariner different from a traditional ballad. Imagination: like Blake and Wordsworth, Coleridge stresses the role of imagination. He distinguishes between "primary" and "secondary" imagination. He describes primary imagination as a fusion of perception and the human individual power to produce images. Primary imagination goes beyond the mere perception of objects and enables man to form concepts and collectes the world of thought with the world of things. Secondary imagination is something more, in fact "It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to recreate…". It is the poetic faculty, which not only gives shape and order to a given world, but builds new worlds. Fancy: imagination is more important than fancy, which, thought on a higher level than mere perception, is based on the power of association.

The rime of the ancient mariner: riassunto e analisi

THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER: ANALISI IN INGLESE

Thus fancy enables the poet to blend various elements into beautiful images. Nature: unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge doesn't view nature as a moral guide or a source of consolation and happiness. His contemplation of nature is always accompanied by awareness of the presence of the ideal in the real. His strong Christian faith, however doesn't allowed him to identify nature with the divine, in that form of pantheism in which Wordsworth believed. He rather sees nature and the material world in a sort of neo-platonic interpretation, as the reflection of the perfect world of "Ideas". In other words, the material world is nothing but the projection of the perfect world of "Ideas". Thus Coleridge believes that natural images carries abstract meanings. Mistery: the atmosphere of the whole poem is charged with irresistible mistery because of the combination of the supernatural and the commonplace. Interpretations: this poem has been interpreted in many ways: 1) It may be the description of a dream, which allows the poet to relate the supernatural to a familiar experience. 2) Coleridge's poem may also be an allegory of the life of the soul in its passage from crime, through punishment, to redemption. 3) It can also be seen as a description of the poetic journey of Romanticism. The mariner is the poet, that derives from guilt. This guit is the regret for a state of lost innocence caused by the Industrial Revolution, or an attempt to rediscover it by telling a symbolic story of its loss.