296 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
to tell his story to keep it alive for his listeners, who
themselves will reiterate his tale.
Jennie MacDonald
Fate in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner,” the mariner’s shooting of the
albatross stands as the pivotal image around which
revolve both the internal narrative of the Ancient
Mariner’s journey and the frame narrative of his
telling the tale to the Wedding-Guest. The bird’s
appearance heralds the salvation of the ship from
the ice, befriending the mariner, but without warn-
ing or apparent motivation, the mariner shoots the
albatross. The remainder of his narrative recounts
his ultimately solitary journey toward redemption
for committing an action that can be interpreted not
only as murder and a sin against nature but also as
a refiguring of the death of Christ. But why did the
mariner kill the albatross?
The question of motivation surrounding this
action of the internal narrative has a parallel in the
frame narrative. Both involve the role of fate and
are interdependent. The mariner’s shooting of the
albatross was meant to happen; his choice of the
Wedding-Guest for listener was meant to be. Fate
decrees an action and is irresistible.
At the beginning, the frame narrative appears
to simply relate the event of an old man telling
a story to a younger one. As the wedding guests
arrive, the Ancient Mariner “stoppeth one of three”
(l. 2). The young man asks, “Now wherefore stopp’st
thou me?” (l. 4). He means to go on by, but he is
also asking a question with deeper implications—
“Why do you choose me for your attention?” This
question, though, will not be answered until the end
of the Ancient Mariner’s story, when the old sailor
details the nature of his penance: “Since then, at an
uncertain hour, / That agony returns: / And till my
ghastly tale is told, / This heart within me burns” (ll.
582–585). But he cannot tell the tale to just anyone.
He must wander until “That moment that his face I
see, / I know the man that must hear me: / To him
my tale I teach” (ll. 588–590). The Wedding-Guest
on this occasion is that particular man, that par-
ticular listener. He is fated to hear the mariner’s tale,
to learn its lesson of unthinking crime and painful
repentance, so that he, too, is alerted to the magni-
tude of love and God’s grace.
This story has such magnitude because of the
bird’s significance. The sailors’ response to the appear-
ance of the albatross signals this is no ordinary bird:
“As if it had been a Christian soul, / We hailed it in
God’s name” (ll. 65–66). Linguistically aligned with
God, the albatross resembles Christ, the friend of
humankind whom humankind crucifies. It is thus sig-
nificant that the mariner shoots the bird with a cross-
bow rather than an ordinary bow. Shortly after, the
image of the cross becomes conflated with not only
the albatross—which, “Instead of the cross... About
my neck was hung” (ll. 141–142)—but also with the
mariner himself. The albatross takes the place of the
cross around the mariner’s neck, and the mariner
takes the place of the cross on which Christ was
hung. The appearance of Christ on earth is necessary
to make flesh God’s friendship to mankind. His cru-
cifixion also must occur—is fated to occur—to teach
mankind of the possibility of salvation, of life after
death, which makes living rightly on earth imperative.
In teaching others through telling his tale, the
Ancient Mariner is fulfilling his fate. The shooting
of the albatross and the events that follow provide
him with a story to tell and suggest the circular
nature of fate. The mariner must tell his story, and
the Wedding-Guest must listen to it. But without
the mariner’s fateful action of killing the albatross,
there would be no story to tell. He has no choice
in this action, only the committing of it. It seems
a random action, but it brings about the rest of the
events, including the fact that he is fated to tell it.
The idea of randomness literally appears in the
scene in which Death and Life-in-Death are casting
dice for the ship’s crew. All drop down dead except
for the mariner, whom Life-in-Death wins appar-
ently by luck of the dice. But even this random event
appears governed by fate, for none but the mariner
could tell the whole of the story from the perspec-
tive of the individual who set the horrifying and
later mystical events in motion. None but he is in a
position to relay that story in all its terror and awe
and thereby effectively impress its meaning upon the
Wedding-Guest and the reader.
Jennie MacDonald