The wedding guest then ‘sat on a stone’ and ‘he cannot chose but hear’ the mariner’s tale. Again, this implies that the mariner is forcing or compelling the wedding guest to sit and listen involuntarily. Coleridge creates a mesmeric feel when the poem is read through his use of a steady rhythm and rhyme scheme, with some internal rhyme too. The internal also serves to add a dramatic emphasis and quicken the pace of the poem. There is another reference to the mariner being ‘bright-eyed,’ which brings the concept of hypnosis back once again, and then we are launched into the ship’s voyage.
Coleridge focuses on the ship’s departure from the harbour in stanza six, ‘The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared…’ and then conveys the sense of days passing by commenting on the sun rising and setting, ‘The sun came up upon the left, / Out of the sea came he! / …and on the right / Went down into the sea.’ Here, the sun is personified, and for the first of many times in the poem, nature is given human characteristics. The narrative of the voyage is interrupted after that by the wedding guest ‘[beating] his breast,’ as he hears the bassoon and the ‘merry minstrelsy,’ which indicates that ‘The bride hath paced into the hall.’ Despite this sense of urgency, the wedding guest ‘cannot choose but hear,’ the mariner’s tale. Again, this is reminding us that the mariner has some kind of powerful hold over him. This is almost a complete copy of stanza five. Since his captive audience is listening attentively, ‘thus spake on that ancient man / The bright-eyed Mariner.’
Next we hear of the ‘storm-blast’ the mariner and his crew endured. Again, an aspect of nature is personified, ‘And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he / Was tyrannous and strong.’ The diction used here – the choice of the word ‘tyrannous’ – suggests that the storm is threatening and powerful. Coleridge refers to ‘[the storm’s] o’ertaking wings’ and thus metaphorically portrays the storm as some kind of bird. The storm ‘chased [the ship] south along.’ This adds to the sense of the predatory storm pursuing the vessel.
In stanza 12, the number of lines is increased to six, seemingly in order to add a dramatic feel. The internal rhyme helps to quicken the pace of the line where it is used, and add emphasis. As Coleridge personifies the ship as someone being chased, ‘As who pursued by yell and blow,’ there is a sense of urgency. By using ‘As who,’ instead of naming the ship, it appears that Coleridge wanted the reader to focus on the pursuit (i.e. the narrative content and imagery in the poem) instead of focussing on the ship itself. This enables us to carry the image of a man being pursued, uninterrupted by the fact that it is in fact a ship being chased. With the following phrase, ‘Still treads the shadow of his foe,’ we get the impression that the storm must be very close behind the ship if it is overshadowing it. This also creates a sinister feel. The onomatopoeia of ‘roared’ when referring to the storm implies that the storm is ferocious and gives us a sense of thunder.
The representation of the chase is open to individual interpretation. It could be a reference to running from a feeling of guilt and thus be a take on morality, or perhaps it is about trying to escape imminent death.
The next stanza indulges in lots of repetition of ‘and’ at the start of lines, which builds tension and helps to move the narrative on. The ice which is described as being ‘as green as emerald’ seems a bit of a strange concept, which could be due to reflections on the ice. However, it appears to be out of the ordinary, and helps to set the scene of somewhere unnerving. The mariners tells of how ‘the snowy cliffs / Did send a dismal sheen.’ This paradox could refer to the depressing nature of being surrounded by the ice which sheens. We are made aware that there is ‘Nor shapes of men nor beasts’ visible to the ship’s crew, and that ‘The ice was here, the ice was there / The ice was all around.’ A feeling of isolation and being trapped is created through this, not only in a literal way as the ship is surrounded by cliffs of ice and there are no other life forms in sight, but also isolation and imprisonment in a psychological sense. The surroundings seem eerie and strange, plus the repetition of ‘the ice…’ enforces that it really was everywhere around the ship. Coleridge uses extensive onomatopoeia to communicate the sound of the ice as it ‘crackled and growled, and roared and howled.’ He also employs internal rhyme to seemingly emphasize the words.
An albatross appears ‘thorough the fog,’ and as it was the first form of life the crew had seen in a while, ‘As if it had been a Christian soul / [They] hailed it in God’s name.’ Fog normally represents confusion and disorientation, so perhaps the bird flying into sight through it is symbolic of hope, clarification or guidance. With the religious subtext, it seems as though the albatross is seen as a form of salvation, and the crew believe it is a good, possibly God-given, omen. In stanza seventeen, they feed the bird and following that, the ‘ice did split with a thunder-fit,’ which enabled the helmsman to steer the ship through. It would appear as though as soon as they showed hospitality towards the albatross, they benefited (like through some act of karma). Not only did the ice split, but ‘a good south wind sprung up behind’ too.
Again, the narrative is broken by the speech of the wedding guest, whose diction of ‘the fiends, that plague thee thus’ seems to echo the earlier mention of the tyrannous storm, but could also be a reference to the mariner’s psychological anxieties. We snap back to the narrative to find that ‘With [his] cross-bow / [the mariner] shot the albatross.’ This seems completely irrational considering that the bird was supposedly a good omen. The killing of the albatross could be seen as a wicked sin against nature.
To conclude, Coleridge uses a variety of techniques both linguistically and structurally to give this part of the poem a strange, mesmeric feel. The steady rhythm and rhyme, plus some occasional internal rhyme, seems to give the poem a hypnotic feel when you read it. Some of the strange references such as the emerald-green ice, the mariner’s glittering eye and hold over the wedding guest, and the unfounded killing of the albatross make the poem seem a bit strange, plus the fact that some things are left ambiguous or just unexplained (such as why the ice is green or why the mariner killed the ‘good omen’) strikes me as a bit weird.
