The premise of sin and redemption is evident in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous ballad “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. The poem focuses on the trials and tribulations of the main character, the mariner. The narrative starts as the mariner and his ship set off to sea. The mariner’s sin is fundamentally unpremeditated and unfounded. Sin, According to the editors of Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, is “A vitiated state of human nature in which the self is estranged from God” (I, 1083). Sin was precisely what happened to the mariner. In a display of utter disregard for one of god’s creatures, the mariner shot the albatross. According to Robert Penn Warren in, A Poem of Pure Imagination: An Experiment in Reading, the murder of the Albatross came abruptly and for no apparent reason. (E, 27) A passage from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, “…With my crossbow I shot the Albatross!” illustrates how motiveless the killing of the albatross really was (A, I, 79 - 82). The idea of a crime against god implements itself through a crime against nature. If the mariner murders a human, the crime is then against man, and thus eclipses the religious significance involved in the murder, rendering the symbolism useless (E –27). The implication of a crime against God progresses when the crewmembers remove the cross from around the mariner’s neck; and replaced it with the albatross (E, 27-28): “Ah, welladay! What evil looks had I from old and young! Instead of the cross, the Albatross about my neck was hung” (A, II, 139-142). This action is an important element in the advancement of the poem. By replacing the mariner’s cross with the albatross, the crewmember’s action symbolically characterized the exodus of the Holy Spirit from the mariner. The death of the creature of God, like the death of Jesus will w...
