The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Is Simply a Tale of Crime and Punishment. How Do You Respond to This View?

Although Coleridge’s protagonist in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ commits a ‘crime’ of sorts and faces a series of ‘punishments,’ it is debateable whether it can simply be considered a ‘tale of crime and punishment’. As a phrase, ‘crime and punishment’ refers to a specific crime fitting a specific punishment, usually adjudicated by a governing body but could extend to the judgement of God if the historical context of the text is to be considered.

The adjudicators of Mariner’s punishment are certainly described as possessing powerful supernatural qualities which might surfacely infer a parallel with God, however Coleridge warps some of the ‘God’ connotations, weakening the allegory and suggesting the poem is not simply a ‘tale of crime and punishment’ as the ‘crime’ is primarily a symbolic Christian sin. The fact Coleridge presents two figures, “death” and “life in death” certainly distorts the Christian teaching of only worshiping one god, not multiple idols, and their mortal form, (“skin white as leprosy”) defies the fact that ‘God’ is never believed to have directly entered the natural world, certainly in the orthodox teachings prevalent at the time. Both these elements suggest that despite the figures being of the supernatural, Coleridge presents them not as representations of the Christian God which would be responsible for administering the punishment for the Mariner’s killing of the Albatross, a “christian soul” and therefore it cannot be considered a simple ‘tale of crime and punishment’. However it could be interpreted that despite the physical manifestation Coleridge still presents the figures as representative of God, albeit in a more abstract manner perhaps attributed to his opiate addictions or alternatively he could have been drawing on a more literal interpretation of God manifesting himself through Jesus rather than simply being his son. This would suggest that Coleridge perhaps did intend for his poem to have a moral teaching though the...