mn the act” (E, 28). They have made man’s expediency the primary concern. By doing so, the crewmembers isolate themselves from nature and thereby, from god since nature is the work of god. While in its context the poem makes sense, under closer review flaws in the cause and effect sequence began to appear according to James D. Bougler in, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”- Introduction (F, 13-14). To assume that the poem follows the ordinary chain of cause and effect would be to not understand the poem (F, 13). The only way to understand the ballad is to have recognized that during the voyage, the cause and effect sequence is not in place. Unlike real life, the poem followed no true set of governing rules. For example, in real life, one would expect that by working hard, success would come (F, 13). While in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, the logic is more on par with “If I feed an Albatross, an ice-flow will break up” (F, 13). This logic, or lack thereof, can be attributed to a host of things. According to Bougler, David Hume’s theory of causation could be a possible explanation. The theory of Causation says that, “things happen in this or that way, and men call cause-effect that which habitually happens in the same way. Thus cause-effect and if-then sequences are habits, and logic a statement of known custom or convention in the world” (E, 14). The sun and the moon play a symbolic role in the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. Robert Penn Warren states in A Poem of Pure Imagination: An Experiment in Reading, “There is a constant contrast between moonlight and sunlight, and the main events of the poem can be sorted out according to the kinds of light in which they occur” (E, 29). In the poem, the good events correlate with the moon, and the bad events take place while under the sun. Coleridge underscores the importance of the distinction between...
