ll of his sin until the Second Coming of Christ. Coleridge used the story again in "The Wanderings of Cain." Maud Bodkin writes that another great poet, William Wordsworth once said that the Mariner has no character (22-3). But Charles Lamb, another contemporary of Coleridge, said the ancient Mariner as a character with feelings, faced with such happenings as the poem tells about, "dragged [him] along like Tom Piper's magic whistle" (House 107). John Livingston Lowes in more recent times spoke of the real protagonists in the poem as the elements, Earth, Air, Fire, and Water (Bodkin 20). Irving Babbit echoed Wordsworth's criticism in saying that the Mariner does not do anything in the poem beyond shooting the Albatross, that the Mariner does not really act, but is acted upon only, and that the Mariner is an incarnation of the Romantic concern with the solitary (House 104-5). And a critic named George Herbert Clarke has interpreted the ancient Mariner to be at one and the same time himself as a real character in the poem, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and all men; the Mariner is Representative Man, sinning, being punished, being redeemed (Beer 31). I imagine that one possibility, perhaps the best one, is to consider the Mariner as a poet more than a character in the sense in which we associate "personality" with characters in literature. As a poet who speaks ("I have strange power of speech. . . ."), he does not have the obligation of a character to act. The poem should not be read really with the expectation with which one reads a novel. The Mariner is not what he is because he is involved with other human beings - but because he is alone.Evidently, another much debated question is about the role of the Albatross. One critic, George Whalley, discusses the Albatross as a symbol of the creative imagination, and he makes this interpretation by way of associating the Albatross with the wind, because the Mariner "killed the bird/ That m...
