The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope

Analysis: Themes and Form: The Rape of the Lock is a humorous indictment of the vanities and idleness
of 18th-century high society. Basing his poem on a real incident among families of his acquaintance,
Pope intended his verses to cool hot tempers and to encourage his friends to laugh at their own folly.

The poem is perhaps the most outstanding example in the English language of the genre of mock-epic.
The epic had long been considered one of the most serious of literary forms; it had been applied, in the
classical period, to the lofty subject matter of love and war, and, more recently, by Milton, to the
intricacies of the Christian faith. The strategy of Pope’s mock-epic is not to mock the form itself, but to
mock his society in its very failure to rise to epic standards, exposing its pettiness by casting it against
the grandeur of the traditional epic subjects and the bravery and fortitude of epic heroes: Pope’s mock-
heroic treatment in The Rape of the Lock underscores the ridiculousness of a society in which values
have lost all proportion, and the trivial is handled with the gravity and solemnity that ought to be
accorded to truly important issues. The society on display in this poem is one that fails to distinguish
between things that matter and things that do not. The poem mocks the men it portrays by showing
them as unworthy of a form that suited a more heroic culture. Thus the mock-epic resembles the epic in
that its central concerns are serious and often moral, but the fact that the approach must now be
satirical rather than earnest is symptomatic of how far the culture has fallen.

Pope’s use of the mock-epic genre is intricate and exhaustive. The Rape of the Lock is a poem in which
every element of the contemporary scene conjures up some image from epic tradition or the classical
world view, and the pieces are wrought together with a cleverness and expertise that makes the poem
surprising and delightful. Pope’s transformations are numerous, striking, and loaded with moral
implications. The great battles of epic become bouts of gambling and flirtatious tiffs. The great, if
capricious, Greek and Roman gods are converted into a relatively undifferentiated army of basically
ineffectual sprites. Cosmetics, clothing, and jewelry substitute for armor and weapons, and the rituals of
religious sacrifice are transplanted to the dressing room and the altar of love.

The verse form of The Rape of the Lock is the heroic couplet; Pope still reigns as the uncontested master
of the form. The heroic couplet consists of rhymed pairs of iambic pentameter lines (lines of ten
syllables each, alternating stressed and unstressed syllables). Pope’s couplets do not fall into strict
iambs, however, flowering instead with a rich rhythmic variation that keeps the highly regular meter
from becoming heavy or tedious. Pope distributes his sentences, with their resolutely parallel grammar,
across the lines and half-lines of the poem in a way that enhances the judicious quality of his ideas.
Moreover, the inherent balance of the couplet form is strikingly well suited to a subject matter that
draws on comparisons and contrasts: the form invites configurations in which two ideas or
circumstances are balanced, measured, or compared against one another. It is thus perfect for the
evaluative, moralizing premise of the poem, particularly in the hands of this brilliant poet.

Themes: 1. Gender Roles: In The Rape of the Lock, Pope constantly manipulates traditional gender roles
to satiric effect. He portrays Belinda, the poem’s protagonist, alternately as an epic hero preparing for
battle (I.139-44), a cunning military general reviewing his troops (III.45-6), and a Moor bellowing in rage
(V.105-6). The poem thus describes Belinda in specifically male terms: heroism, battle, anger. Other
women in the poem similarly demonstrate masculine characteristics. Thalestris displays her prowess on
the battlefield while Clarissa provides a weapon to the otherwise impotent Baron. By contrast, the men
act with feminine delicacy, fainting during the battle. Pope figures the Baron in mostly feminine terms.
He is a fop, willing to prostrate himself before the altar of Love, and he cannot act on his desire without
the explicit assistance of a woman. When Belinda conquers him in battle, she stands above him in a
position of dominance. Even the poem’s more mechanical elements partake in this reversal of gender
roles. The mythological sprites literally switch genders after they die, transforming from human women
to male spirits. All this gender manipulation calls attention to the perverse behaviors of this fictional
society. The poem certainly alludes to the expected behavior of each gender role: women should act
with modesty while men should embody heroic and chivalric ideals. However, these characters flout the
rules of traditional society.

2. Female Sexuality: Pope frequently focuses on female sexuality and the place of women in society
throughout the corpus of his poetry, and it was a popular topic in the early eighteenth century (just
think of Jonathan Swift’s misogynistic poems). The Rape of the Lock does not, however, feature a
Swiftian tirade concerning the evils of women. It instead makes a considered exploration of society’s
expectations for women. The rules of eighteenth-century society dictate that a woman attract a suitable
husband while preserving her chastity and virtuous reputation. Pope renders this double-standard
dramatically in his depiction of Belinda’s hair, which attracts male admirers, and its petticoat
counterpart, which acts as a barrier to protect her virginity. Of course, a woman who compromised her
virtue—either by deed or reputation—usually lost her place in respectable society. Pope examines the
loss of reputation in the poem’s sexual allegory, i.e., the “rape” of the lock. By figuring the severing of
Belinda’ hair as a sexual violation, Pope delves into implications of sexual transgression. After the Baron
steals her curl, Belinda exiles herself from the party, retiring to a bedchamber to mourn her loss. Pope
thus dramatizes the retreat from society that a sexually-compromised woman would eventually
experience. Though Belinda is ultimately celebrated, not ostracized, by her community, her narrative
provides Pope with the opportunity to explore society’s views on female sexuality.

3. The Deterioration of Heroic Ideals: Pope’s use of the mock epic genre in The Rape of the Lock affords
him the poetic occasion to lament the deterioration of heroic ideals in the modern era. Though he
depicts conventional epic themes such as love and war, his comic tone indicates that the grandeur of
these matters has suffered since the days of Homer and Virgil. The “amorous causes” in Pope’s poem
have little in common with Hector’s love for Andromache or Paris’ theft of Helen in The Iliad or
Penelope’s devotion to Odysseus in The Odyssey (I. 1). By contrast, the love Pope portrays is that of the
Baron for Belinda’s icon (her hair), not Belinda herself. Similarly, the “mighty contests” that once
populated epic poetry now arise “from trivial things” (I.2). Achilles’ rage at Agamemnon for affronting
his honor with the theft of Briseis has diminished to the anger of a young beauty at the theft of her hair,
which will certainly grow back. Pope thus presents a society that is merely a shadow of its heroic past.

4. Religious Piety: The Rape of the Lock demonstrates Pope’s anxieties concerning the state of religious
piety during the early eighteenth century. Pope was Catholic, and in the poem he indicates his concern
that society has embraced objects of worship (beauty, for example) rather than God. His use of religious
imagery reveals this perversion. The rituals he depicts in the first and second cantos equate religion with
secular love. During Belinda’s toilette, the poem imbues the Bibles and billet-doux (love letters) on her
dressing table with equal significance. The Baron’s altar to Love in the second canto echoes this scene.
On the altar—itself an integral part of Christian worship, in particular Catholic Mass—the Baron places
“twelve vast French romances, neatly gilt” to honor Love, rather than gilded Bibles (38). Pope
symbolizes this equation of religious and erotic love in the cross that Belinda wears. This central symbol
of Christianity serves an ornamental, not religious function, adorning Belinda’s “white breast” (7). The
cross remains sufficiently secular that “Jews might kiss” it and “infidels adore” it (8). Of course, Pope
leaves ambiguous the implication that the Jews and infidels are admiring Belinda’s breasts and not the
cross. This subversion of established principles of Christian worship critiques the laxity of early
eighteenth-century attitudes towards religion and morality.
5. Idleness of the Upper Classes: The idleness and ignorance of the upper classes is integral to Pope’s
critique of contemporary society in The Rape of the Lock. His satire focuses largely on the foibles of the
aristocracy and gentry, who he depicts as interested only in trivial matters, such as flirting, gossip, and
card games. Pope’s rendering of ombre as an epic battle demonstrates the frivolity of upper-class
entertainment. In reality an excuse for flirting and gambling, the card game represents the young
aristocrats’ only opportunity to gain heroic recognition. This is not, of course, true heroism, but rather a
skill that serves no purpose in the outside world. Chief among the upper classes’ other pastimes is
gossip, but Pope limits their conversation to the insular world of the aristocratic lifestyle. They care most
about “who gave the ball, or paid the visit last,” the irrelevant structures of upper-class socializing
(III.12). Few discuss the world beyond the society of Hampton Court: “One speaks the glory of the British
Queen, / And one describes a charming Indian screen” (III.13-4). This couplet alludes to the worldly
pursuits of trade and empire that are occurring outside of these aristocrats’ small social world.

6. Ephemeral Nature of Beauty: Beauty’s ephemeral nature reinforces Pope’s critical project in The
Rape of the Lock. His poem attempts to dissuade society from placing excessive value on external
appearances, especially since such things fade over time. Clarissa’s lecture in particular questions the
value that society places on appearances. She notes that men worship female beauty without assessing
moral character. Pope demonstrates that this is essentially a house without foundation: because “frail
beauty must decay,” women must have other qualities to sustain them (V.25). Though Clarissa is
complicit in the general frivolity and pettiness that Pope censures in the poem, her articulated scruples
with regard to appearances serve his social critique.

7. Man’s Place and Purpose in the Universe: In his prefatory address to the reader of An Essay on Man,
Pope describes his intention to consider “man in the abstract, his Nature and his State, since, to prove
any moral duty, to enforce any moral precept, or to examine the perfection of imperfection of any
creature whatsoever, it is necessary first to know what condition and relation it is placed in, and what is
the proper end and purpose of its being.” Pope explores man’s nature and his place in the world
throughout the poem. The first epistle explains man’s relation to the universe. Pope explains that man’s
place in the “Vast chain of being” is in a middle state, below the angels but above beasts and fowl
(I.237). Because man is an integral part of God’s creation, he cannot and should not try to comprehend
God’s design. The second epistle depicts man’s relation to the individual. Pope argues that man is
governed by the principles of self-love and reason. Self-love and the passions are the origins of human
action while reason regulates human behavior. The third epistle examines man’s relation to society. The
bonds that unite man to others are governed by instinct or reason. Man’s relationship with nature is
largely instinctual, based on a primordial knowledge of the things necessary to survival (nourishment,
sex, etc.). By contrast, man’s relationship to other men and to God is based on reason, and
consequently, man established the institutions of government and religion. The former proves his love
for other men and the second his love for God. The fourth epistle investigates man’s relation to
happiness, which, Pope argues, is man’s ultimate aim. Though Pope does not provide a universal
solution to “the proper end and purpose” of man, he does reveal one of the defining characteristics of
humanity: man will always seek to understand his purpose in the world.

Pope's Poems and Prose Augustan Satire: Known as the “Augustan age,” the first half of the eighteenth
century saw an explosive rise in literary production. Due to the influence of Enlightenment thought,
literary works during this period often focused on explicitly political and social themes, allowing for an
increase in the production of political writings of all genres. Among the most popular genres were both
moral works (sermons, essays, dialogues, etc.) and satire. Satire in particular flourished in a variety of
forms: prose, poetry, drama. Some of the satires produced during this period commented on the
general flaws of the human condition while others specifically critiqued certain individuals and policies.
All, however, were transparent statements about the greater political and social environment of the
eighteenth century.

Drawing on the neoclassical impulse of the period, eighteenth-century satirists described themselves as
the heirs of the Roman poets Horace and Juvenal. Horatian satire tends to take a gentle and more
sympathetic approach towards the satiric subject, which it identifies as folly. Augustan examples of
Horatian satire include Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1714) and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s
Travels (1726). By contrast Juvenalian satire identified the object of its satire as evil, launching a
contemptuous invective to ridicule it. Characterized by irony and sarcasm, this satiric mode rejected
humor in favor of moral outrage. Eighteenth-century examples of Juvenalian satire include Swift’s A
Modest Proposal (1729) and his misogynist poems such as “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed”
(1731), “The Progress of Beauty” (1719-20), and “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1732).

One of the most popular satiric modes during the Augustan period was the mock epic, a literary form
that creates a burlesque of the classical epic. The satirist imports the formula characteristic of the epic—
the invocation of a deity, supernatural machinery, etc.—to discuss a trivial subject. The use of classical
epic devices thereby establishes an ironic contrast between the work’s structure and its content,
exposing the triviality of the satirical subject. The best-known mock epics in the English language are
John Dryden’s MacFlecknoe (1676), an attack on Thomas Shadwell and Pope’s The Rape of the Lock.
Pope’s The Dunciad (1728, 1742) also took mock-heroic form and drew on Dryden’s satire on Shadwell
to attack Lewis Theobald (1728) and, later, Colley Cibber (1742).

Several like-minded Augustan satirists formed the Scriblerus Club, founded in 1712. Its members
included Jonathan Swift; Alexander Pope; John Gay; John Arbuthnot; Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke;
and Thomas Parnell. Their professed object was to satirize the abuses of learning, which led to the
publication of The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (1741). Both Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Pope’s The
Dunciad grew out of projects for this group.

1. Discuss two mock-heroic elements of the poem.

One epic element of the poem is the involvement of capricious divinities in the lives of mortals. All of the
following classic conventions appear in Pope’s poem as well: the ambiguous dream-warning that goes
unheeded; prayers that are answered only in part, or with different outcomes than anticipated; a
heavenly being’s renunciation of a human after pledging to protect her; mischievous plotting by deities
to exacerbate situations on earth. All of the manifestations of these in Pope’s poem evoke the world of
Greek and Roman gods who displayed malice as often as benevolence, and a susceptibility to flattery
and favoritism. A second mock-heroic element is the description of games and trivial altercations in
terms of warfare. First the card game, then the cutting of the lock, and finally the scuffle at the end, are
all described with the high drama attending serious battles. Pope’s displays his creative genius in the
dexterity with which he makes every element of the scene correspond to some recognizable epic
convention. He turns everyday objects—a petticoat, a curl, a pair of scissors, and a hairpin—into armor
and weapons, and the allegory reflects on their real social significance in new and interesting ways.

2. What are some of the images that recur through the poem, and what significance do they have?

One of Pope’s primary images is the sun. By comparing Belinda’s radiance to solar radiance, he makes
fun of her vanity and her pretensions. The sun marks the passing of time in the poem and emphasizes
the dramatic unity of the story, which takes place all within a single day. Further, it forms part of the
celestial framework of heavenly actions with which Pope surrounds the parallel earthly action, and the
early allusions to the sun balance the ending in which the lock of hair ascends into the heavens as a
constellation. Another image that recurs in the poem is that of china. Delicate dishes that are beautiful,
fragile, and purely luxurious form a fitting physical counterpart to a world that is, in Pope’s depiction,
almost entirely ornamental. The danger of broken china also stands for the fragility of female chastity,
or of a person’s reputation. Pope also draws heavily on images of silver and gold (sometimes in solid
form, sometimes as a gilded surface to another element), as appropriate to a poem that asks us to
consider the real value underlying glittery and mesmerizing surfaces.

3. Choose a self-contained section of The Rape of the Lock (such as Belinda’s morning ritual or
Umbriel’s descent into the Cave of Spleen) and discuss its function within the poem as a whole.

With Belinda’s morning routine, Pope establishes the mock-heroic motifs that occur throughout the
poem. He figures her toilette as the preparation of an epic hero before battle. The scene begins as a
religious sacrament. Belinda’s reflection in the mirror is the image of the goddess while Belinda herself
presides over the ritual (I.127). The “sacred rites” that she performs—in reality the simple act of
dressing herself—act within Pope’s epic paradigm as a prayer to the goddess for success on the
battlefield (I.128). In this case, of course, Belinda’s battlefield is the courtly party at Hampton Court
Palace. Once the sacraments are performed, Pope depicts Belinda’s toilette as the ritual of arming the
hero. Pope refigures the combs, pins, “puffs, powders, patches” that Belinda uses to prepare herself as
the arms and armor of the epic hero (I.138). Belinda is not, however, a fearsome warrior such as Achilles
or Hector but rather a beautiful coquette. By replacing the martial hero with a charming lady and the
battlefield with a palace, Pope demonstrates the diminishing of epic subject matter, a central concern of
his social critique. The energies once expended on religious devotion and “mighty contests” are now
wasted on the vanities and trivial entertainments of the upper classes (I.2).

4. How does Pope use the reversal of gender roles to advance his parody of the epic in The Rape of
the Lock?

Pope reverses traditional gender roles to emphasize the comic absurdity of his subjects’ behavior.
Throughout The Rape of the Lock, Pope focuses on the poem’s heroine, imbuing her with the masculine
characteristics of the traditional epic hero. At the outset of the card game in the third canto, Belinda
desires the recognition that battle will bring her: “Belinda now, whom thirst of fame invites, / Burns to
encounter two adventurous knights” (III.25-6). Belinda’s behavior is likewise less than lady-like. After she
wins the game she celebrates her victory: “The nymph exulting fills with shouts the sky” (III.99). The
other women in the poem demonstrate similar behavior. Thalestris easily overcomes many of the men
during the fight over the lock, in which the women are the aggressors. The men, by contrast, are mostly
foppish and weak. Even the poem’s nominal hero, the Baron, assumes subservient postures and has to
be provided with a weapon by Clarissa. The reversal of traditional gender roles exposes the degree to
which eighteenth-century society has fallen from epic ideals. Women seemingly overreact to the
smallest slights while the men are pathetic fops with no courage. Instead they waste their time gossiping
and pursuing frivolous amusements.

5. Which elements of society does Pope satirize in The Rape of the Lock? Be sure to consider his
use of the mock-heroic genre.

In The Rape of the Lock, Pope’s satire focuses on the foibles of the upper classes. According to Pope’s
poem, these members of society are only interested in trivial matters, a point which he punctuates in his
depiction of the card game as an epic battle. In reality an excuse for gambling and flirting, the
“battlefield” of ombre becomes the only opportunity for these young aristocrats to gain heroic
recognition. Pope reinforces this impotence of the upper classes by demonstrating their ignorance of
the world outside of Hampton Court Palace. He makes numerous allusions to the British Empire and
trade: “One speaks the glory of the British Queen, / And one describes a charming Indian screen” (III.13-
4). The nobles seem content to drink coffee—an obvious import from the British trade networks—while
discussing irrelevant matters such as “who gave the ball, or paid the visit last” (III.12). Pope thus exposes
the ignorance and idleness of the upper classes.

6. What is the sexual allegory in The Rape of the Lock?

As the title of the poem suggests, the cutting of Belinda’s hair has a sexually explicit connotation. In his
description of the Baron’s schemes to steal Belinda’s hair, Pope uses the words “force” and “ravish”
which reinforce the theme of violation that the poem’s title introduces. The Baron also expresses his
willingness to acquire the lock “by fraud betray,” suggesting his comfort with taking advantage of
Belinda’s innocence (II.32). Ariel’s suspicion that the foretold “dire disaster” will be a sexual assault
further advances the sexual allegory. He worries that Belinda will “stain her honor or her new brocade”
(II.107). The staining of Belinda’s honor has explicit sexual implications while the staining of her dress
implies both sexual maturity and the loss of virginity. Even the hair itself has sexual connotations. Pope
allows for a secondary reading of Belinda’s curls as pubic hairs, which emphasizes the theme of sexual
violation. According to Pope’s sexual allegory, Belinda’s virtue is in greater danger than the simple act of
stealing her ringlet suggests.

7. Discuss Pope’s critique of the sexual double-standard for women in The Rape of the Lock.

During the eighteenth century, a woman was expected to attract the attentions of men in order to find a
suitable husband. Of course, society also demanded that a woman also remain a virgin until she married.
A woman who compromised her virtue in the pursuit of a husband was usually ostracized by her
acquaintances and lost her place in respectable society. Pope dramatizes this double-standard in his
description of Belinda’s petticoat, which essentially serves as a fortification to protect her chastity while
her curls attract male admirers.

8. What is the role of the supernatural forces (Sylphs, Gnomes, etc.) in The Rape of the Lock?

The supernatural forces that feature in The Rape of the Lock perform a role similar to that of the gods
and goddesses in traditional epic poems, such as The Iliad. Just as the gods change the tide of the Trojan
War in The Iliad, Pope’s mythic creatures affect the action of the poem. Ariel acts as Belinda’s
otherworldly guardian, warning her of threats and protecting her throughout her adventures. It seems,
however, that Ariel has limited power to protect Belinda. In the first canto, a love letter distracts Belinda
from Ariel’s warning of impending danger. Similarly, when he sees Belinda’s attraction to the Baron in
“the close recesses of the virgin’s thought,” he retreats, powerless to defend her (140). Though his duty
is to guard Belinda’s virtue, Ariel apparently cannot fully protect her from the perils of love. While Ariel’s
role resembles that of a godly guardian—much like Athena’s guidance of Diomedes—Umbriel acts as a
threat to Belinda, exacerbating her pain. His role is thus similar to Aphrodite’s attempts to sabotage the
Greeks.

9. Discuss Pope’s attitude towards religion in The Rape of the Lock. What are its implications for his
social critique?

In The Rape of the Lock, Pope depicts a society all-too-willing to worship beauty, which he depicts as
religious perversion. His description of the cross that Belinda wears encapsulates this sacrilege. Although
the cross is an obvious Christian symbol, it serves an ornamental, not religious, function. It remains so
secular, in fact, that “Jews might kiss” and “infidels adore” it (II.8). Pope even sexualizes the cross,
locating it on Belinda’s “white breast,” suggesting that her breasts are the objects of worship, not the
cross (II.7). Pope’s subversion of religious worship critiques the value society places on appearances
rather than morality.

10. What are the implications of Clarissa’s moralizing speech in the fifth canto of The Rape of the
Lock? Be sure to discuss some of the interpretive problems associated with it.

Clarissa’s speech questions the value society places on appearances, in particular female beauty. She
observes that men worship women as angels without assessing their moral character and that the
beauty these men revere is ephemeral: “frail beauty must decay” (V.25). She declares that because
beauty cannot last, women must have other qualities to sustain them after they lose their looks.
Although Clarissa’s conclusions reflect part of Pope’s critical agenda, reading Clarissa’s speech as Pope’s
central moral oversimplifies the poem. Her actions in the poem further problematize the moral
superiority she attempts to claim in this speech. Clarissa’s complicity in the “rape” of Belinda’s hair
taints her self-righteousness. Furthermore, Pope’s conclusion directly contradicts her central argument
that beauty is ephemeral. Pope turns Belinda’s severed hair into a star that people can admire for all
eternity while his poem immortalizes her beauty.

11. According to Pope’s argument in the fourth epistle of An Essay on Man, from what does man’s
happiness derive?

In the fourth epistle of An Essay on Man, Pope depicts the source of man’s happiness as virtuous
behavior. In return for his virtuousness, man is reward with “what nothing earthly gives, or can destroy,
/ The soul’s calm sunshine, and the heart-felt joy, / Is virtue’s prize: a better would you fix? / Then give
humility a coach and six” (IV.167-70). Though “the soul’s calm sunshine” is not earthly riches, this
reward is the ultimate realization of wise self-love, which awakens the “virtuous mind” (IV.263). The
serenity that man achieves through virtue allows him to perceive that he is a part of God’s design and to
accept his place in it. This blind faith in God emphasizes Pope’s goal in writing the poem, specifically to
“vindicate the ways of God to man” (I.16).

12. Consider one of the interpretive problems presented by An Essay on Man and explain how it
undermines Pope’s attempt to “vindicate the ways of God to man” (I.16)?

The greatest hurdle that Pope faces in writing An Essay on Man is that he is a man and therefore cannot
know the ways of God, let alone justify God’s ways to other men. In the poem’s prefatory address to the
reader, Pope states his intention to consider “man in the abstract, his Nature and his State, since, to
prove any moral duty, to enforce any moral precept, or to examine the perfection of imperfection of any
creature whatsoever, it is necessary first to know what condition and relation it is placed in, and what is
the proper end and purpose of its being.” According to Pope’s conclusions about the nature of the
universe, God’s creation is an ordered hierarchy in which man has his ordained place. Since man is
merely a part in the whole of creation and further exists in a middle state of the hierarchy, man can only
perceive a small portion of God’s order. As a man, Pope cannot fully perceive the “proper end and
purpose” of mankind.

Critical Evaluation: The Rape of the Lock, generally considered the most popular of Alexander Pope’s
writings and the finest satirical poem in the English language, was written at the suggestion of John
Caryll, Pope’s friend, ostensibly to heal a family quarrel that resulted when an acquaintance of Pope,
Lord Petre, playfully clipped a lock of hair from the head of Miss Arabella Fermor. Pope’s larger purpose
in writing the poem, however, was to ridicule the social vanity of his day and the importance attached to
trifles.
When Robert Lord Petre cut off a lock of Arabella Fermor’s hair one fateful day early in the eighteenth
century, he did not know that the deed would gain fame, attracting attention over several centuries.
What began as a trivial event in history turned, under the masterly guidance of Pope’s literary hand, into
one of the most famous poems in the English language and perhaps the most perfect example of
burlesque in English. The Rape of the Lock was begun at Caryll’s behest (“This verse, to Caryll, Muse! is
due”) in 1711; Pope spent about two weeks on it and produced a much shorter version than the one he
wrote two years later; more additions were made in 1717, when Pope developed the final draft of the
poem as it now stands.

The poem uses the essentially trivial story of the stolen lock of hair as a vehicle for making some
thoroughly mature and sophisticated comments on society and on women and men. Pope drew on his
own classical background—he had translated Homer’s Iliad (c. 750 b.c.e.; first English translation, 1611;
Pope’s translation, 1715-1720) and Odyssey (c. 725 b.c.e.; first English translation, 1614; Pope’s
translation, 1725-1726)—to combine epic literary conventions with his own keen, ironic sense of the
values and societal structures shaping his age. The entire poem, divided into five cantos, is written in
heroic couplets (pairs of rhymed iambic pentameter lines). Pope makes the most of this popular
eighteenth century verse form, filling each line with balance, antithesis, bathos, allusions to serious epic
poetry, and puns.

The literary genre of burlesque typically takes trivial subjects and elevates them to seemingly great
importance; the effect is comic, and Pope manages an unbroken sense of amusement as he relates
“What dire offense from amorous causes springs,/ What mighty contests rise from trivial things.”

From the opening lines of the poem, suggestions of the epic tradition are clear. Pope knew well not only
the Iliad and the Odyssey but also John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674). The narrator of The Rape of
the Lock speaks like Homer, raising the epic question early in the poem: “Say what strange motive,
goddess! could compel/ A well-bred lord t’ assault a gentle belle?” Pope’s elaborate description of
Belinda’s grooming rituals in canto 1 furthers comparison with the epic; it parodies the traditional epic
passage describing a warrior’s shield. Belinda’s makeup routine is compared to the putting on of armor:
“From each she nicely culls with curious toil,/ And decks the goddess with the glittering spoil.”

The effect of Pope’s use of epic conventions is humorous, but it also helps establish a double set of
values in the poem, making the world of Belinda and Sir Plume at the same time trivial and significant.
The poem rewards a reading that focuses on the seriousness of Belinda’s activities and experience. The
truth is, for a woman of her place and time, the unwanted cutting of a lock of hair was a serious matter.
Epic conventions contribute to this double sense in each canto. The first canto is the epic dedication and
invocation. The second is the conference of protective gods. The third details the games and the
banquet. The fourth tells of the descent into the underworld. The fifth tells of heroic encounters and
apotheosis. The overall result is that, although readers are presented with a basically silly situation, the
poem has characters, such as Clarissa, who utter the always sensible virtues of the eighteenth century:

Oh! if to dance all night, and dress all day, Charmed the smallpox, or chased old age away; Who would
not scorn what housewife’s cares produce, Or who would learn one earthly thing of use? . . .But since,
alas, frail beauty must decay. . . .And she who scorns a man, must die a maid; What then remains but
well our power to use, And keep good humor still what’er we lose?

Clarissa, in these lines from canto 5, expresses the norm of Pope’s satire: the intelligent use of reason to
control one’s temperamental passions.
The heroic couplet merges perfectly with the epic devices in the poem, for as a verse form the heroic
couplet naturally seems to express larger-than-life situations. It is, therefore, profoundly to Pope’s credit
that he successfully applies such a verse form to a subject that is anything but larger than life. Perhaps
more than anyone else writing poetry in the eighteenth century, Pope demonstrates the flexibility of the
heroic couplet. Shaped by his pen, it contains pithy aphorisms, social commentary, challenging puns,
and delightful bathos (that is, the juxtaposition of the serious with the small, as in the line “wrapped in a
gown for sickness and for show”). The key, if there is a key, to the classic popularity of The Rape of the
Lock is the use of the heroic couplet to include—sometimes in great cataloged lists—those little, precise,
and most revealing details about the age and the characters that peopled it. The opening lines of canto 3
illustrate Pope’s expert use of detail. The passage describes court life at Hampton Court, outside
London, and is a shrewd comment on the superficiality of the people there:

Hither the heroes and the nymphs resort, To taste awhile the pleasures of a court; In various talks th’
instructive hours they passed, Who gave the ball, or paid the visit last; One speaks the glory of the
British queen, And one describes a charming Indian screen; A third interprets motions, looks, and eyes;
At every word a reputation dies. Snuff, or the fan, supply each pause of chat, With singing, laughing,
ogling, and all that.

The poet’s criticism of such life is clear by the swift juxtaposition of Hampton Court life with a less pretty
reality in the following lines:

Meanwhile, declining from the noon of day, The sun obliquely shoots his burning ray; The hungry judges
soon the sentence sign, And wretches hang that jurymen may dine.

Pope had a keen interest in the life of London’s aristocracy, though he was always a critic of that life. A
Catholic by birth, he was not always in favor with the Crown, but before the death of Queen Anne in
1714, he enjoyed meeting with a group of influential Tories. Sir Richard Steele and Joseph Addison,
England’s first newspaper editors, courted him on behalf of the Whig Party, but he refused to become
its advocate.

Forbidden by law from living within several miles of London, Pope lived much of his adult life at
Twickenham, a village on the Thames not too far from London but far enough. He transformed his
dwelling there into an eighteenth century symbol with gardening and landscaping; he included
vineyards, and the house had a temple and an obelisk to his mother’s memory. During the 1720’s he
built his grotto, an underpass connecting the parts of his property under a dividing road. The grotto was
a conversation piece; according to one contemporary, it had bits of mirror on the walls that reflected
“all objects of the river, hills, woods, and boats, forming a moving picture in their visible radiations.” For
Pope, four feet, six inches tall and sick all his life, it was a symbol of the philosophical life and mind.
Although he never married, his biographers have written that he felt a warm, if not always happy,
affection for Martha and Teresa Blount, neighbors during his youth. Pope enjoyed great literary fame
during his lifetime, and near the end of his life, when he entered a room, whispers of “Mr. Pope, Mr.
Pope” would buzz among the occupants.

The Rape of the Lock (CRITICAL SURVEY OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION): As the beauteous Belinda sleeps
toward noon, a guardian sylph warns her in her dreams of a dire event to occur that day. Undeterred,
she rises to her makeup table as usual, then sails off down the Thames for a tea party at Hampton Court.
Here the world quite properly admires her, but then the “rape” occurs: An amorous young lord (the
Baron) snips off one of the two curls carefully trained to dangle just so down the back of Belinda’s lovely
neck.
Belinda screams in horror, and a loud scene ensues. The party chooses sides; women slay men with
frowns and revive them with smiles. Meanwhile, the lock of hair is lost in the scuffle, but the invisible
sylphs observe it as it mounts heavenward to take its shining place among the stars.

Pope gives this fluffy action epic proportions: the Invocation, the Argument, the supernatural
interventions, the epic similes, the epic combat, the set descriptive pieces--Belinda’s makeup to do
battle, the voyage down the Thames, a card game, the tea service--recall the epics of Homer, Virgil, and
Milton, especially Milton’s PARADISE LOST. (Pope at the time was also translating Homer’s ILIAD.) An
epic sums up a culture: To the fashionable English world, Belinda is a cultural heroine, the loss of her
lock a significant action. (THE RAPE OF THE LOCK was based on an actual event which caused two
families to fall out.)

Pope makes the comedy abundantly clear through his heroic couplets (rhyming iambic pentameter
lines). As delicate, balanced, and carefully trained as Belinda’s two bouncing curls, Pope’s urbane verse
likewise sums up his age

Introduction: The following entry presents criticism of Pope's poem The Rape of the Lock (written in two
cantos in 1712, later expanded to five cantos in 1714, and slightly revised in 1717). Modern critics
consider The Rape of the Lock to be the supreme example of mock-heroic verse in the English language.
Written in heroic couplets, the poem was most likely composed during the late summer of 1711 and
first published in the May edition of Lintot's Miscellany in 1712. The original version of the poem
contained 334 lines in two cantos. A more elaborate version appeared two years later, extending the
poem to 794 lines in five cantos; a slight final revision was completed for the poem's inclusion in
Pope's Works (1717). Inspired by an actual event, The Rape of the Lock recounts the circumstances
surrounding the theft of a lock of a young woman's hair by an impassioned male admirer, which caused
a rift between the families involved. The poem was intended to restore harmonious relations between
the estranged families. Subtitled “an heroi-comical poem,” The Rape of the Lock treats the petty matter
in full-blown epic style, which results in a great deal of humor. It uses the elevated heroic language that
John Dryden, Pope's literary forebear, had perfected in his translation of Virgil and incorporates amusing
parodies of passages from John Milton's Paradise Lost, Vergil's Aeneid, and Homer's Iliad, which Pope
was translating at the time. Celebrated as a masterstroke of English originality, The Rape of the
Lock established Pope as a master of metrics and a sophisticated satirist.

Plot and Major Characters: Although the precise time and place of the incident that occasioned The
Rape of the Lock have been lost to history, the depilatory theft and ensuing feud between two
prominent Catholic families certainly happened, the standard account of which is documented in the
Twickenham edition of Pope's complete works. Briefly stated, the poem elaborates upon the events of a
day, most likely during the summer of 1711, when Robert, Lord Petre, brazenly snipped off a curl of
Arabella Fermor's hair, an act which estranged their families. Pope's friend John Caryll, to whom the
poem is addressed, suggested that Pope write it in order to “laugh them together again.” The poem's
epigraph (translated by Aubrey Williams as “I was unwilling, Belinda, to ravish your locks; but I rejoice to
have conceded this to your prayers”) is a slightly altered passage from Martial's Epigrams, in which Pope
substitutes Belinda for Martial's heroine, Polytimus, with the implication that the original poem was
published with Arabella's consent. Pope set the central action of his poem at Hampton Court—the
traditional home of royalty—which, though a possible site, is a highly unlikely one, since both families
were mere gentry as well as members of an ostracized religion. In the original two-canto poem the
“gentle belle,” Belinda, awakens one morning and joins friends on a river trip up the Thames to play
cards and drink coffee at Hampton. As the afternoon wanes, the Baron snips one of Belinda's favorite
locks of hair with scissors provided by Clarissa. Great dismay ensues among the guests, devastating
Belinda and scandalizing the company. Her angry demands for the return of her purloined lock are futile,
since the destined lock of hair floats away as a new star to adorn the night skies.

As in his later satires, Pope substitutes fictional or type names for the specific personalities he has in
mind, so that the character of Belinda is based on Arabella, that of the Baron on Lord Petre, and that of
Sir Plume, a blithering guest at Hampton, on Sir George Browne, a relative of Arabella's mother. Pope
significantly expanded the straightforward story in subsequent editions by simply adding conventional
features of epic verse, then called the “machinery,” or supernatural dimension, of the poem. Adapted
from the light erotic work Le Comte de Gabalis and Rosicrucian lore, the “machinery” of the five-canto
version of the poem introduces such supernatural creatures as the earthy gnome Umbriel—a
reincarnation of a prude—and the ethereal sylphs—the spirits of dead coquettes. In addition, Pope
inserted a detailed account of Belinda's daily routine at her dressing table, a description of the social
rituals involved with a lively game of ombre, and an otherworldly visit to the Cave of Spleen. Clarissa's
speech on “good Humor,” or common sense, first appeared in the last revision of the poem, which Pope
added “to open more clearly the MORAL of the Poem.” In the 1712 and 1714 versions of the poem,
Clarissa makes a brief appearance as the one who hands the scissors to the Baron.

Major Themes: Fusing high humor and moralization, The Rape of the Lock offers an ironic perspective on
contemporary manners combined with a deep appreciation for the vitality of the eighteenth-
century beau monde. With sensitivity, exquisite taste, high-spirited wit, and gentle satire, the poem
forces a continuous comparison between insignificant and significant things, between the mundane and
the exotic. In his mock epic, Pope exploits the difference between the grandeur of “heroic” moments
depicted in traditional epics and the consciously trivial events in his poem. By treating the latter
incidents as matters of great import, their inconsequence is made obvious. The poem features the
devices of traditional epic poetry in abundant allusions to and parodies of incidents, characters, and
themes from a range of classical and modern epics, but these themes are proportionately scaled down.
In The Rape of the Lock, ladies and gentlemen are the heroines and heroes, exchanging repartee with
the opposite sex in salons instead of waging war against noble enemies on fields of combat. Rather than
gods and goddesses intruding in human affairs, sylphs and gnomes intervene, with tasks appropriate to
their natures. The epic game is ombre played on the “velvet plain” of a card table, the victors feast on
gossip between sips of coffee instead of ambrosia and wine, and the epic struggle is determined by
clever quips and innuendo, by winks, nods, and frowns, not weapons. The traditional epic journey to the
underworld is evoked by a visit to the Cave of Spleen, an emblem of the petty temperaments of
privileged women. These actions unfold against an elegantly appointed backdrop of beautiful objects:
rich brocades, glowing diamonds, tortoise shell and ivory combs, cosmetics and hair dressings, varnished
furniture, silver coffeepots, and dainty china. Yet for all the evident beauty, charm, and allure this active,
shimmering world exhibits, lighthearted raillery pulses throughout its civilized veneer, a reminder of its
trite values and the vanities of its inhabitants.

Critical Reception: The original version of The Rape of the Lock accomplished its task—since the Fermors
and Petres were reconciled—and it immediately received an enthusiastic response from the public and
the critics alike. Joseph Addison, who considered the poem perfect as it was first written, advised Pope
against revision, but with the addition of the “machinery” and other material, the poem soon was
deemed Pope's most brilliant performance as well as one of his most popular and lucrative, going
through seven printings by 1723. Throughout the eighteenth century the poem remained a perennial
favorite. Samuel Johnson pronounced it “the most attractive of ludicrous compositions,” in which “New
things are made familiar and familiar things are made new.” Although appreciation of Pope's poetry
generally declined throughout the nineteenth century, Victorian readers and critics continued to delight
in the ethereal qualities of The Rape of the Lock. James Russell Lowell declared, “For wit, fancy,
invention, and keeping, it has never been surpassed,” and Leslie Stephen observed that Pope's poem “is
allowed, even by his bitterest critics, to be a masterpiece of delicate fancy.”

Twentieth-century critics have interpreted the poem in a diverse range of contexts, from character
analyses and examinations of the poem's extensive allusions to both literary and folklore traditions, to
investigations into Pope's political motivations and his understanding of the commercial aspects of the
burgeoning publishing industry. A common thread in much twentieth-century criticism of The Rape of
the Lock has acknowledged the way in which a deep appreciation for English high society meshes with
Pope's critique of its weaknesses. Since the 1980s a number of critics have delved into other areas of
Pope's career in relation to the poem, including the nature of Pope's habit of revision and its effect on
the poem's meaning as well as the connections between mercantile discourse and Popean aesthetics. In
addition, feminist critics have approached the poem in terms of ideological and cultural assumptions
about women and their status in Pope's society, uncovering a significant response to the poem by
women readers since its publication. Inarguably, Pope's most popularly cherished poem, The Rape of the
Lock, also is his most conceptually imaginative work.

Principal Works (LITERARY CRITICISM (1400-1800)): An Essay on Criticism (poetry) 1711 The Rape of the
Lock (poetry) 1712; enlarged edition, 1714; revised 1717... The Dunciad, in Four Books (poetry) 1743

Coleridge's Poems
Themes: 1. The Transformative Power of the Imagination: Many of his poems are powered exclusively
by imaginative flights, wherein the Speaker temporarily abandons his immediate surroundings,
exchanging them for an entirely new and completely fabricated experience. Using the imagination in this
way is both empowering and surprising because it encourages a total and complete disrespect for the
confines of time and place. These mental and emotional jumps are often well rewarded. The power of
the imagination is a familiar motif in several of Coleridge’s poems. In “Kubla Khan,” Coleridge explores
the fantastical creations of the imagination. In “Dejection: An Ode,” Coleridge laments on the pain an
artist suffers when his imagination and creativity are stifled by depression. Kubla Khan's "stately
pleasure dome" is a thing of imagination, but the reader knows this primarily because it is an
inconceivable juxtaposition of natural elements (caves of ice over an underground sunless sea).

2. The Interplay of Philosophy, Piety, and Poetry: Coleridge used his poetry to explore conflicting issues
in philosophy and religious piety. Some critics argue that Coleridge’s interest in philosophy was simply
his attempt to understand the imaginative and intellectual impulses that fueled his poetry.

3. Nature and the Development of the Individual/ Man's relationship with nature: An appreciation of
the marvels of nature is a constant theme that runs throughout Coleridge’s poetry. In poem “Dejection:
An Ode,” Coleridge conveys his understanding that man and nature are separate entities, thus people
should not project their own qualities onto their interpretation of nature’s qualities. Nature cannot give
him anything that does not originate within his own soul.

4. Childhood: Coleridge’s focus on childhood revolves around an idealization of the carefree nature and
innocence of childhood. For Coleridge, childhood is the shaper of adult destiny. He finds that his own
upbringing was marred by life in the city.

5. Innocence: In “Christabel,” Coleridge explores the vulnerability of innocence and purity. In Coleridge's
works, innocence is not the same as ignorance, nor is it a sort of bland simplicity. His innocence is the
state of being pure in one's relationship to nature and to others--to have no artificial barriers or societal
constructs barring one's appreciation of the natural world. Innocence is a deep state of being, in which
one's thought and emotions are unified and without the conflicts experienced by the majority of
"experienced" humanity.

6. Happiness: Several of Coleridge’s poems explore the sources of happiness. In “Dejection: An Ode,”
Coleridge acknowledges that he cannot solely rely on his external surroundings in nature to bring him
happiness and that he must take responsibility for his emotional state. Coleridge describes having an
intimate relationship with nature can have a positive effect on one’s happiness. Happiness is also to be
found in returning to a state of childlike innocence.

7. Evening/Night: In the essay “Coleridge and the Scene of Lyric Description,” Christopher R. Miller
notes that “Coleridge’s major lyrics are evening poems that usually mark the changes from sunset to
twilight to darkness or frame themselves as solitary nocturnal vigils” (521). The poem “Dejection: An
Ode” exemplify Miller’s observation. In this poem, Coleridge observes the features of the evening or the
night, while mediating on subjects such as man’s relationship with nature and the true sources of
happiness. Night time is the time of inner stillness and, contrary to many presentations as evil and
dangerous by other poets, is a time of peace and tranquility in Coleridge's works.

Motifs: 1. Conversation Poems: Coleridge wanted to mimic the patterns and cadences of everyday
speech in his poetry. Many of his poems openly address a single figure—the speaker’s wife, son, friend,
and so on—who listens silently to the simple, straightforward language of the speaker

2. Delight in the Natural World: Like the other romantics, Coleridge worshiped nature and recognized
poetry’s capacity to describe the beauty of the natural world. “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner,” derive some symbols and images from nature. Nevertheless, Coleridge guarded
against the Pathetic Fallacy, or the attribution of human feeling to the natural world. To Coleridge,
nature contained an innate, constant joyousness wholly separate from the ups and downs of human
experience.

3. Prayer: Although Coleridge’s prose reveals more of his religious philosophizing than his poetry, God,
Christianity, and the act of prayer appear in some form in nearly all of his poems. In “The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner,” the mariner is stripped of his ability to speak as part of his extreme punishment and,
consequently, left incapable of praying.

Symbols: 1. The Sun: Coleridge believed that symbolic language was the only acceptable way of
expressing deep religious truths and consistently employed the sun as a symbol of God. In “The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner,” Coleridge compares the sun to “God’s own head” (97) and, later, attributes the
first phase of the mariner’s punishment to the sun, as it dehydrates the crew. All told, this poem
contains eleven references to the sun, many of which signify the Christian conception of a wrathful,
vengeful God. Bad, troubling things happen to the crew during the day, while smooth sailing and calm
weather occur at night, by the light of the moon. Frequently, the sun stands in for God’s influence and
power, as well as a symbol of his authority. The setting sun spurs philosophical musings, as in “The
Eolian Harp”

2. The Moon: Like the sun, the moon often symbolizes God, but the moon has more positive
connotations than the sun. In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the sun and the moon represent two
sides of the Christian God: the sun represents the angry, wrathful God, whereas the moon represents
the benevolent, repentant God. All told, the moon appears fourteen times in “The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner,” and generally favorable things occur during night, in contrast to the horrors that occur during
the day. For example, the mariner’s curse lifts and he returns home by moonlight. “Dejection: An Ode”
(1802) begins with an epitaph about the new moon and goes on to describe the beauty of a moonlit
night, contrasting its beauty with the speaker’s sorrowful soul.

3. Dreams and Dreaming/Sleep: Coleridge explores dreams and dreaming in his poetry to communicate
the power of the imagination, as well as the inaccessible clarity of vision. “Kubla Khan” is subtitled “A
Vision in a Dream.” According to Coleridge, he fell asleep while reading and dreamed of a marvelous
pleasure palace for the next few hours. Upon awakening, he began transcribing the dream-vision but
was soon called away; when he returned, he wrote out the fragments that now comprise “Kubla Khan.”
In Coleridge’s poems, sleep and dreams offer a portal to experiencing happiness and ecstasy. In
“Christabel,” the title character dreams at night and has “a vision sweet” about the knight whom she will
marry. In “Kubla Khan,” the dream-world of Xanadu offers fantastical features of nature such as a
“sunny pleasure-dome.”

Coleridge's Poems Essay Questions

1. How do Coleridge's poems reflect the ideals of the Romanticism?

Along with William Wordsworth, Coleridge ushered in the Romantic age in England with his published
poetry and literary criticism. Coleridge believed that poetry should be written in everyday language
(although he harked back to archaic romances in both "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Christabel")
and wrote much of his poetry in a conversational tone. Coleridge also eschewed rigid rhyme scheme and
formalism, while still availing himself of the popular poetic forms such as the sonnet and the ode.
Coleridge also focused heavily on nature as a source of inspiration and beauty, a focus that would
become one of the central tenets of Romantic thought.

2. What dreamlike qualities are found in "Kubla Khan"?

"Kubla Khan" is set in mythical Xanadu, where runs a sacred (and nonexistent) river named the Alph.
This river flows to a "sunless sea" and nearby is a "romantic chasm" which may be haunted by a "woman
wailing for her demon-lover." From this chasm issues a geyser spewing forth either rocks or hailstones,
which dance in the spray. Within this pleasure dome, under the sunny sky and beneath the greenery,
are caves of ice. Taken together, these images seem contradictory, but as individual elements in the
dreamscape of Xanadu, they fit into a phantasmagoric panorama of the supernatural and natural
combined.

3. Coleridge writes frequently about children, but, unlike other Romantic poets, he writes about
his own children more often than he writes about himself as a child. How does this attitude
relate to his larger ideas of nature and the imagination?

Like Wordsworth, Coleridge is wholly convinced of the beauty and desirability of the individual’s
connection with nature. Unlike Wordsworth, however, Coleridge does not seem to believe that the child
automatically enjoys this privileged connection. The child’s unity with the natural world is not innate; it
is fragile and can be stunted or destroyed; for example, if a child grows up in the city, as Coleridge did,
his idea of natural loveliness will be quite limited (in Coleridge’s case, it is limited to the night sky, as he
describes in “Frost at Midnight”). Coleridge fervently hopes that his children will enjoy a childhood
among the beauties of nature, which will nurture their imaginations (by giving to their spirits, it will
make their spirits ask for more) and shape their souls.
 4. Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode”—achieve their effect through the evocation of a dramatic scene
in which the speaker himself is situated. How does Coleridge describe a scene simply by tracing
his speaker’s thoughts? How does he imbue the scene with a sense of immediacy?

Coleridge utilizes simple and efficient methods to sketch his scenes—in “Frost at Midnight,” for instance,
he opens his poem with his speaker explicitly contemplating the scenery outside. the natural objects
that the speaker describes prompt his thoughts in other directions. Coleridge maintains his scenes’
sense of immediacy by having his speakers be interrupted or startled by something happening around
them; this technique serves to wrench the reader back from the speaker’s abstract thoughts to the
living, physical world of the poem. The startling or disruptive elements often take the form of sounds.

Themes and Meanings (CRITICAL GUIDE TO POETRY FOR STUDENTS): Much of the commentary on
“Kubla Khan” has focused on the influence of Coleridge’s addiction to opium, on its dreamlike qualities,
the “anodyne” he refers to in his preface, but no conclusive connection between the two can be proved.
Considerable criticism has also dealt with whether the poem is truly, as Coleridge claimed, a fragment of
a spontaneous creation. The poet’s account of the unusual origin of his poem is probably only one of
numerous instances in which one of the Romantic poets proclaimed the spontaneity or naturalness of
their art. Most critics of “Kubla Khan” believe that its language and meter are too intricate for it to have
been created by the fevered mind of a sleeping poet. Others say that its ending is too fitting for the
poem to be a fragment.

Other contentions about “Kubla Khan” revolve around its meanings (or lack thereof). Some critics,
including T. S. Eliot in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), have claimed the poem has no
veritable meaning. Such analysts say its method and meaning are inseparable: The poem’s form is its
only meaning. For other commentators, “Kubla Khan” is clearly an allegory about the creation of art. As
the artist decided to create his work of art, so does Kubla Khan decide to have his pleasure-dome
constructed. The poem’s structure refutes Coleridge’s claim about its origins, since the first thirty-six
lines describe what Kubla has ordered built, and the last eighteen lines deal with the narrator’s desire to
approximate the creation of the pleasure-dome.

Xanadu is an example of humanity imposing its will upon nature to create a vision of paradise, since the
palace is surrounded by an elaborate park. That the forests are “ancient as the hills” makes the imposing
of order upon them more of a challenge. Like a work of art, Xanadu results from an act of inspiration
and is a “holy and enchanted” place. Within this man-decreed creation are natural creations such as the
river that bursts from the earth. The origin of Alph is depicted almost in sexual terms, with the earth
breathing “in fast thick pants” before ejaculating the river, a “mighty fountain,” in an explosion of rocks.
The sexual imagery helps reinforce the creation theme of “Kubla Khan.”

Like Kubla’s pleasure-dome, a work of art is a “miracle of rare device,” and the last paragraph of the
poem depicts the narrator’s desire to emulate Kubla’s act through music. As with Kubla, the narrator
wants to impose order on a tumultuous world. Like Xanadu, art offers a refuge from the chaos. The
narrator, as with a poet, is inspired by a muse, the Abyssinian maid, and wants to re-create her song.
The resulting music would be the equivalent “in air” of the pleasure-dome. As an artist, the narrator
would then stand apart from a society that fears those who create, those who have “drunk the milk of
Paradise.”

Introduction “Kubla Khan” Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The following entry presents criticism of
Coleridge's poem “Kubla Khan” (1816). Along with “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798) and
“Christabel” (1816), “Kubla Khan” (1816) has been widely acclaimed as one of Coleridge's most
significant works. While Coleridge himself referred to “Kubla Khan” as a fragment, the vivid images
contained in the work have garnered extensive critical attention through the years, and it has long been
acknowledged as a poetic representation of Coleridge's theories of the imagination and creation.
Although it was not published until 1816, scholars agree that the work was composed between 1797
and 1800. At the time of its publication, Coleridge subtitled it “A Vision in A Dream: A Fragment,” and
added a prefatory note explaining the unusual origin of the work. The poet explained that after taking
some opium for medication, he grew drowsy while reading a passage about the court of Kubla Khan
from Samuel Purchas's Pilgrimage. In this dreamlike state, Coleridge related, he composed a few
hundred lines of poetry and when he awoke, immediately began writing the verses down.
Unfortunately, a visitor interrupted him, and when the poet had a chance to return to his writing, the
images had fled, leaving him with only vague recollections and the remaining 54 lines of this
fragmentary poem. Although many critics have since challenged Coleridge's version of the poem's
composition, critical scholarship on the work has focused equally on its fragmentary nature and on its
place in Romantic writing as a representative work of poetic theory.

Plot and Major Characters: The poem begins with a description of a magnificent palace built by
Mongolian ruler Kubla Khan during the thirteenth century. The “pleasure dome” described in the first
few lines of the poem is reflective of Kubla's power, and the description of the palace and its
surroundings also help convey the character and nature of Kubla, the poem's main character. In contrast
to the palace and its planned gardens, the space outside Kubla's domain is characterized by ancient
forests and rivers, providing a majestic backdrop to Kubla's creation. It initially appears that there is
harmony between the two worlds, but the narrator then describes a deep crack in the earth, hidden
under a grove of dense trees. The tenor of the poem then changes from the sense of calm and balance
described in the first few lines, to an uneasy sense of the pagan and the supernatural. There is a vast
distance between the ordered world of Kubla's palace and this wild, untamed place, the source of the
fountain that feeds the river flowing through the rocks, forests, and ultimately, the stately garden of
Kubla Khan. As the river moves from the deep, uncontrolled chasm described in earlier lines back to
Kubla's world, the narrative shifts from third person to first person; the poet then describes his own
vision and his own sense of power that comes from successful poetic creation.

Major Themes: Despite the controversy surrounding the origin of “Kubla Khan,” most critics
acknowledge that the images, motifs and ideas explored in the work are representative of Romantic
poetry. The emphasis on the Oriental setting of “Kubla Khan” in contrast to the description of the sacred
world of the river is interpreted by critics as commonplace understanding of orthodox Christianity at the
turn of the century, when the Orient was seen as the initial step towards Western Christianity. Also
typical of other Romantic poems is Coleridge's lyrical representation of the landscape, which is both the
source and keeper of the poetic imagination. Detailed readings of “Kubla Khan” indicate the use of
intricate metric and poetic devices in the work. Coleridge himself explained that while any work with
rhyme and rhythm may be described as a poem, for the work to be “legitimate” each part must mutually
support and enhance the other, coming together as a harmonious whole. In “Kubla Khan” he uses this
complex rhyming structure to guide the reader through its themes—the ordered rhymes of the first half
describe the ordered world of Kubla Khan, while the abrupt change in meter and rhyme immediately
following, describe the nature around Kubla Khan—the world that he cannot control. This pattern and
contrast between worlds continues through the poem, and the conflict is reflected in the way Coleridge
uses rhythm and order in his poem. Critics agree that “Kubla Khan” is a complex work with purpose and
structure, and that it is representative of Coleridge's poetic ideal of a harmonious blend of meaning and
form, resulting in a “graceful and intelligent whole.” “Kubla Khan” is thought to be principally concerned
with the nature and dialectical process of poetic creation.
Critical Reception: When Coleridge first issued “Kubla Khan” in 1816, it is believed that he did so for
financial reasons and as an appendage to the more substantial “Christabel.” The work had previously
been excluded by Wordsworth from the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads and there is little evidence
that Coleridge himself claimed it as one of his more significant works. In fact, when first published, many
contemporary reviewers regarded the poem as “nonsense,” especially because of its fragmentary
nature. In the years since, the poem, as well as the story of its creation, has been widely analyzed by
critics, and much critical scholarship has focused on the sources for this work as well as the images
included in it. Recent studies of the poem have explored the fragmentary nature of the poem versus the
harmonious vision of poetic theory it proposes. Pivotal among these works of criticism is John Livingston
Lowes's pioneering The Road to Xanadu. For example, in an essay analyzing the fragmentary nature of
“Kubla Khan,” Timothy Bahti proposes that the poet uses the symbol of the chasm to represent the act
of creation, and that the struggle between the fragment and division that generates the sacred river is
representative of the act of creative continuity. Other critics have focused on “Kubla Khan” as a poem
that relates the account of its own creation, thus stressing its importance as a work that defines
Coleridge's theories of poetic creation. It is now widely acknowledged that “Kubla Khan” is a technically
complex poem that reflects many of its creator's poetic and creative philosophies and that the thematic
repetition, the intricate rhymes, and carefully juxtaposed images in the work come together as a
harmonious whole that is representative of Coleridge's ideas of poetic creation.

Principal Works (NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERARY CRITICISM): Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other
Poems [with William Wordsworth] (poetry) 1798

Forms and Devices: The most striking of the many poetic devices in “Kubla Khan” are its sounds and
images. One of the most musical of poems, it is full of assonance and alliteration, as can be seen in the
opening five lines:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through
caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.

This repetition of a, e, and u sounds continues throughout the poem with the a sounds dominating,
creating a vivid yet mournful song appropriate for one intended to inspire its listeners to cry “Beware!
Beware!” in their awe of the poet. The halting assonance in the line “As if this earth in fast thick pants
were breathing” creates the effect of breathing.

The alliteration is especially prevalent in the opening lines, as each line closes with it: “Kubla Khan,”
“pleasure-dome decree,” “river, ran,” “measureless to man,” and “sunless sea.” The effect is almost to
hypnotize the reader or listener into being receptive to the marvelous visions about to appear. Other
notable uses of alliteration include the juxtaposition of “waning” and “woman wailing” to create a
wailing sound. “Five miles meandering with a mazy motion” sounds like the movement it describes. The
repetition of the initial h and d sounds in the closing lines creates an image of the narrator as haunted
and doomed:

His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.

The assonance and alliteration soften the impact of the terminal rhyme and establish a sensation of
movement to reinforce the image of the flowing river with the shadow of the pleasure dome floating
upon it.
The imagery of “Kubla Khan” is evocative without being so specific that it negates the magical, dreamlike
effect for which Coleridge is striving. The “gardens bright with sinuous rills,” “incense-bearing tree,”
“forests ancient as the hills,” and “sunny spots of greenery” are deliberately vague, as if recalled from a
dream. Such images stimulate a vision of Xanadu bound only by the reader’s imagination.

Kubla Khan (CRITICAL SURVEY OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION): Coleridge has described how as a young
man in poor health he took a prescribed drug. While reading a popular travel book, he fell into a deep
slumber and “dreamed” the poem in which a Mongol emperor orders a “stately pleasure dome” near a
sacred river that has cut a deep chasm into the earth on its way to the sea.

Two thirds of the poem’s 54 lines describe this strange setting. Then follows a vision of “an Abyssinian
maid” whose song would serve the speaker--if only he could revive it--to reconstruct the exotic scene.

One theme of the poem is the nature of poetic inspiration. Coleridge makes use of the ancient tradition
that poets are literally not themselves when composing but are possessed by a daemon or guiding spirit.
The poet cannot control the daemon, only try to take advantage of it when it comes. This poem
paradoxically voices the frustration of a poet whose daemon has departed.

“KUBLA KHAN” has attracted much criticism, including a classic study by John Livingston Lowes, THE
ROAD TO XANADU. Some critics have accepted Coleridge’s explanation of an unconscious or
semiconscious origin, while others have pointed to the poet’s extraordinary command of meter and
other sound patterns and even have discerned a logical structure that only a conscious and disciplined
artist could achieve. To such critics, Coleridge is providing a carefully crafted picture of a wild creator
with “flashing eyes” and “floating hair.”

Whether the poem displays or only simulates wild inspiration, whether the poet is out of his mind or
fully in control, “KUBLA KHAN” is a magical poem with a verbal richness approached only a few times by
Coleridge and not often by any poet.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Coleridge

Theme Analysis: 1. The Natural and the Spiritual: Coleridge was one of the founders of the Romantic
movement, a literary movement that developed in the early 19th century in response to the Age of
Enlightenment. Enlightenment philosophy esteemed reason above all else, and flourished in the 18th
century, as well as contributed to the budding Industrial Revolution and the ways that growing industry
and technology seemed to shift the balance in man’s relationship with nature. Romantics valued
emotion over reason, and they glorified and appreciated nature. Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner fits into the Romantic tradition. The poem begins at the wedding feast, with the Wedding
Guest observing and enjoying a quintessentially civilized setting in which nature is subdued. But when
the Ancient Mariner imposes himself on the Wedding Guest and tells his story, the scene (and the
Wedding Guest as audience) shift from comfortable civilization into nature, in this case aboard a ship
sailing across the globe. Cast into the world, the Mariner must contend with nature in the form of
violent storms and the dangerous sea, and he must survive the perils of the natural world. In this light,
the Mariner’s killing of the albatross can be seen as an attempt to master nature, to assert the power of
man over the power of nature.

But the poem presents nature as more powerful, awe inspiring, and terrifying than man can
comprehend. And, further, the poem depicts any attempt to master nature as pointless. Nature is simply
too powerful, as is evident when the sudden lack of wind strands the ship in desolate waters, and the
Mariner and sailors begin to die of thirst. The poem demonstrates that contending with, merely
surviving, or attempting to master nature are the wrong ways for humankind to approach the natural
world.

The poem, though, does not only portray nature as a kind of passive elemental force that is too
powerful for men to conquer. Instead, the poem conceives of nature as being an expression of the
spiritual world. This relationship between nature and the spiritual world explains the terrible and
supernatural reaction that the Mariner and his shipmates must face after he kills the albatross. Nature,
as the poem has it, is God’s creation, and therefore when a person interacts with nature they also
interact with the spiritual world. And so, when the Mariner attempts to master or control nature (such
as by killing the albatross), it is an affront not just to nature, but to the spiritual world and to God as
well. Harming nature, then, is a moral failing. It is a sin. Such sins lead to punishment, and the
punishment comes as a combination of the natural and the spiritual: it is supernatural. This supernatural
punishment is expressed when elemental spirits arise and drag or halt the Mariner’s ship, and by the
haunting Death and Life-In-Death who harvest human souls.

It is only when the Mariner learns to live with and value the natural world, as he does when he sees the
beauty in the Water Snakes that, it seems likely, he previously would have despised, does the
punishment against him ease. The poem, then, casts the appreciation and valuing of nature, the act of
embracing Romanticism, not just as important in and of itself, but as above all a spiritual, religious
necessity.

2. The Mundane and the Sublime: The idea of the sublime is an important Romantic idea. In modern
times, the word “sublime” usually refers to something especially breathtaking or beautiful. But as
demonstrated by the strange beauty – both terrible and wonderful – that Coleridge presents in the Rime
of the Ancient Mariner, the Romantic idea of the sublime isn’t confined to just beauty, but rather
suggests an overwhelming awe, and is often connected to nature. In the poem, for instance, the natural
world is filled with beautiful yet horrible sights and events. The storm, which drives the ship to the pole,
is incredibly powerful and majestic at once. The ice, snow, and giant, ship-high glaciers that
the Mariner encounters in the pole are at once incredibly beautiful, eerie, and dangerous. The sublime
then can be seen as the intersection of beauty and terror, awe and horror. Thus the sublime, like nature,
must be approached with the right attitude. If we approach it and only appreciate its beauty, we risk
falling prey to its danger, and if we approach the sublime only with fear of its horror, we mistakenly
forget the awe that God’s creations should rightly inspire. And the poem makes it clear that
experiencing the sublime can transform, just as it transforms both the Mariner and the Wedding
Guest through the Mariner’s story.

The poem does not only find the sublime in nature, however. As described by the Mariner, it is also
possible to see the act of prayer as sublime, as a spiritual, powerful act within a bounded, mundane
civilization. In this view, both praying and appreciating nature involve both the beauty and
overwhelming awe of connecting to God, of seeing past the mundane moments of daily life in
civilization to the sublime.

In contrast, it is possible to see the Mariner’s killing of the Albatross as an attempt to assert the
mundane over the sublime, or to force what is sublime (an uncanny, flying animal appearing out of the
fog) to become mundane (a dead bird).

3. Sin and Penance : In the context of the spirituality that pervades the poem, the Mariner’s story can be
seen as one of Sin and Penance. In shooting the innocent albatross he commits a sin (against both
nature and God, since one is the expression of the other). The Mariner is then punished: he suffers
deprivations and horrors until he learns to appreciate and love the natural and supernatural world that
the albatross symbolized, and then he is absolved of his crime. Such a story of sin and penance, of
punishment and absolution is common across many cultures and belief systems, including Christianity.
And yet, at the same time, the poem’s treatment of the story isn’t quite so simple.

For one thing, the Mariner is only partially saved. Once his penance is complete and he learns to
appreciate nature, his overtly supernatural torments are ended and he can enjoy the beauty of nature
and the blessing of prayer. But, at the same time, he is compelled to continue telling his story
indefinitely, or else suffer a kind of agony. There is no indication that he will ever be truly forgiven or
absolved of his duty to share his experience, and in a way, this itself is another punishment. And yet, it
too can be viewed as a blessing, since through telling his story he is given the gift of being able to save
others, as, implied at the end of the poem, he saves the Wedding Guest.

4. Storytelling and Interpretation: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is very focused on storytelling.
The Mariner stops one of every three people he sees, since he knows that certain people need to hear
his story, and he simply begins telling his tale. And the tale itself is so compelling that his listeners can do
nothing but listen. Further, the Mariner can also be read as a kind of stand-in for a writer. The Mariner,
after his experiences, is doomed to feel a perpetual need to tell this story, a never-ending urge that
burns inside of him. And yet, at the same time, speech and storytelling is portrayed in the poem as a
power and a blessing. The Mariner has a “strange power of speech,” and tells his story not simply to tell
it, but because he wants and needs to communicate, to pass his own experience on to others so as to
save them. This simultaneous curse and blessing of storytelling can be seen as a metaphor for
storytelling in general, for the way that a writer feels compelled to tell his or her story, a compulsion to
communicate. Finally, the poem asserts that stories really do have unique powers of communication.
The poem is a story within a story, with the Wedding Guest’s encounter with the Mariner serving as a
frame for the Mariner’s own story. This frame allows the reader to both hear the Mariner’s own story,
and to witness the way the story transforms the Wedding Guest. The poem, in other words, insists on
the power of storytelling, and shows how it can change, and improve, people.

Even as the poem explores storytelling – the human compulsion to tell stories and the power of those
stories – it also investigates the just as human compulsion to interpretstories, to figure out what those
stories mean. Both readers of the poem and the characters within the poem naturally try to interpret
the information and stories they are given. Indeed, the Mariner’s slaying of the Albatross – an act that is
never explained, and because of that seems the product of a kind of strange compulsion – can be seen
as an act of interpretation. There is a long tradition that sees birds, and albatross in particular, as having
the ability to exist between realms, as being both natural and supernatural, both mortal and spiritual. By
killing the bird, the Mariner asserts an interpretation on the bird – that it is natural, mortal, and
deceased. And after the albatross dies, the crew at first interprets the act as a sin, and then when
nothing goes wrong they change their interpretation completely, saying the mariner was right to kill the
bird. But the poem suggests that interpretation carries risks: after the mariner kills the albatross,
reducing it to mere mortality, and the crew decides that killing it was justified, all of them are harshly
punished.

Similarly, Coleridge’s notes that annotate his poem can be seen as fulfilling both the urge to tell stories
and the desire to interpret. In some moments, Coleridge’s annotations seem excessive, and he seems
simply to summarize and add extraneous details. He over-tells the story because of his own urge, which
mirrors that of the Mariner. In other cases, his annotations are interpretive, giving explanations and
implying morals in the story. And yet, these interpretations don’t always come across as helpful, and
sometimes seem contradictory or incoherent when taken together. Put another way: Coleridge’s own
annotations of his poem can be seen as showing the limits of interpretation, as showing that, just as the
Mariner must learn to appreciate nature in its entirety, for what it is rather than reducing it to what it
might mean for him, a person reading the poem should do the same, and appreciate it in its wholeness
and be wary of picking it apart, of reducing it, and lessening its power.

5. Christian Allegory: Many read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as containing explicit Christian
allegory. Despite the fact that Coleridge himself said that the poem had no explicit moral, such a reading
is difficult to ignore given the overt Christian lesson that the Mariner teaches at the end of the poem. He
says that he takes immense joy in prayer, and instructs an appreciation and respect for God, God’s
creatures, and all of nature. Further, his killing of the Albatross, a great sin and crime, can be seen as an
allegorical representation of one or more Christian stories. The sin can be a parallel to Adam and Eve’s
original sin, where the act of killing the bird instigates a break with nature, bringing the Mariner out of
harmony with the natural world and causing punishment akin to the Fall of man. More obvious is the
parallel to Judas’ betrayal of Christ, in which the albatross is a symbol for Christ and the Mariner’s sin is a
betrayal. This parallel can be drawn with both Judas’ betrayal, and the proverbial sinner’s betrayal in
committing any sin. The Judas allegory is strengthened by the fact that the Mariner is then forced to
wear the albatross in place of a traditional cross around his neck.

However, the text is not quite so neat as to allow for only a straightforward, Christian allegorical
reading. The supernatural elements and the Mariner’s own path through sin and penance break the
typical mold of a Christian allegory, and the poem also contains various pagan elements that exist side-
by-side with Christian ideas. Ultimately, it might be more fruitful to view the poem not as a Christian
allegory, but as encompassing Christian symbols as part of an effort to portray a universal whole that at
once includes the truths of Christianity, but is not solely limited to those truths or the particularly
Christian way of seeing those truths. Nonetheless, recognizing the way that the poem captures and
fuses multiple aspects of Christian symbolism can help as a lens to think about it.

6. The Natural World: The Physical: While it can be beautiful and frightening (often simultaneously), the
natural world's power in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is unquestionable. In a move typical of
Romantic poets both preceding and following Coleridge, and especially typical of his colleague, William
Wordsworth, Coleridge emphasizes the way in which the natural world dwarfs and asserts its awesome
power over man. Especially in the 1817 text, in which Coleridge includes marginal glosses, it is clear that
the spiritual world controls and utilizes the natural world. At times the natural world seems to be a
character itself, based on the way it interacts with the Ancient Mariner. From the moment the Ancient
Mariner offends the spirit of the "rime," retribution comes in the form of natural phenomena. The wind
dies, the sun intensifies, and it will not rain. The ocean becomes revolting, "rotting" and thrashing with
"slimy" creatures and sizzling with strange fires. Only when the Ancient Mariner expresses love for the
natural world-the water-snakes-does his punishment abate even slightly. It rains, but the storm is
unusually awesome, with a thick stream of fire pouring from one huge cloud. A spirit, whether God or a
pagan one, dominates the physical world in order to punish and inspire reverence in the Ancient
Mariner. At the poem's end, the Ancient Mariner preaches respect for the natural world as a way to
remain in good standing with the spiritual world, because in order to respect God, one must respect all
of his creations. This is why he valorizes the Hermit, who sets the example of both prayer and living in
harmony with nature. In his final advice to the Wedding Guest, the Ancient Mariner affirms that one can
access the sublime, "the image of a greater and better world," only by seeing the value of the mundane,
"the petty things of daily life."

7. The Spiritual World: The Metaphysical: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" occurs in the natural,
physical world-the land and ocean. However, the work has popularly been interpreted as an allegory of
man's connection to the spiritual, metaphysical world. In the epigraph, Burnet speaks of man's urge to
"classify" things since Adam named the animals. The Ancient Mariner shoots the Albatross as if to prove
that it is not an airy spirit, but rather a mortal creature; in a symbolic way, he tries to "classify" the
Albatross. Like all natural things, the Albatross is intimately tied to the spiritual world, and thus begins
the Ancient Mariner's punishment by the spiritual world by means of the natural world. Rather than
address him directly; the supernatural communicates through the natural. The ocean, sun, and lack of
wind and rain punish the Ancient Mariner and his shipmates. When the dead men come alive to curse
the Ancient Mariner with their eyes, things that are natural-their corpses-are inhabited by a powerful
spirit. Men (like Adam) feel the urge to define things, and the Ancient Mariner seems to feel this urge
when he suddenly and inexplicably kills the Albatross, shooting it from the sky as though he needs to
bring it into the physical, definable realm. It is mortal, but closely tied to the metaphysical, spiritual
world-it even flies like a spirit because it is a bird.

The Ancient Mariner detects spirits in their pure form several times in the poem. Even then, they talk
only about him, and not tohim. When the ghost ship carrying Death and Life-in-Death sails by, the
Ancient Mariner overhears them gambling. Then when he lies unconscious on the deck, he hears
the First Voice and Second Voice discussing his fate. When angels appear over the sailors' corpses near
the shore, they do not talk to the Ancient Mariner, but only guide his ship. In all these instances, it is
unclear whether the spirits are real or figments of his imagination. The Ancient Mariner-and we the
reader-being mortal beings, require physical affirmation of the spiritual. Coleridge's spiritual world in
the poem balances between the religious and the purely fantastical. The Ancient Mariner's prayers do
have an effect, as when he blesses the water-snakes and is relieved of his thirst. At the poem's end, he
valorizes the holy Hermit and the act of praying with others. However, the spirit that follows the sailors
from the "rime", Death, Life-in-Death, the voices, and the angels, are not necessarily Christian
archetypes. In a move typical of both Romantic writers and painters, Coleridge locates the spiritual
and/or holy in the natural world in order to emphasize man's connection to it. Society can distance man
from the sublime by championing worldly pleasures and abandoning reverence for the otherworld. In
this way, the wedding reception represents man's alienation from the holy - even in a religious tradition
like marriage. However, society can also bring man closer to the sublime, such as when people gather
together in prayer.

8. Liminality: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" typifies the Romantic fascination with liminal spaces. A
liminal space is defined as a place on the edge of a realm or between two realms, whether a forest and a
field, or reason and imagination. A liminal space often signifies a liminal state of mind, such as the
threshold of the imagination's wonders. Romantics such as Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Keats valorize
the liminal space and state as places where one can experience the sublime. For this reason they are
often - and especially in the case of Coleridge's poems - associated with drug-induced euphoria.
Following from this, liminal spaces and states are those in which pain and pleasure are inextricable.
Romantic poets frequently had their protagonists enter liminal spaces and become irreversibly changed.
Starting in the epigraph to "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", Coleridge expresses a fascination with the
liminal state between the spiritual and natural, or the mundane and the divine. Recall that this is what
Burnet calls the "certain [and] uncertain" and "day [and] night."

In the Ancient Mariner's story, liminal spaces are bewildering and cause pain. The first liminal space the
sailors encounter is the equator, which is in a sense about as liminal a location as exists; after all, it is the
threshold between the Earth's hemispheres. No sooner has the ship crossed the equator than a terrible
storm ensues and drives it into the poem's ultimate symbolic liminal space, the icy world of the "rime."
It is liminal by its very physical makeup; there, water exists not in one a single, definitive state, but in all
three forms: liquid (water), solid (ice), and gas (mist). They are still most definitely in the ocean, but
surrounding them are mountainous icebergs reminiscent of the land. The "rime" fits the archetype of
the Romantic liminal space in that it is simultaneously terrifying and beautiful, and in that the sailors do
not navigate there purposely, but are rather transported there by some other force. Whereas the open
ocean is a wild territory representing the mysteries of the mind and the sublime, the "rime" exists just
on its edge. As a liminal space it holds great power, and indeed a powerful spirit inhabits the "rime."

As punishment for his crime of killing the Albatross, the Ancient Mariner is sentenced to Life-in-Death,
condemned to be trapped in a limbo-like state where his "glittering eye" tells of both powerful genius
and pain. He can compel others to listen to his story from beginning to end, but is forced to do so to
relieve his pain. The Ancient Mariner is caught in a liminal state that, as in much of Romantic poetry, is
comparable to addiction. He can relieve his suffering temporarily by sharing his story, but must do so
continually. The Ancient Mariner suffers because of his experience in the "rime" and afterwards, but has
also been extremely close to the divine and sublime because of it. Therefore his curse is somewhat of a
blessing; great and unusual knowledge accompanies his pain. The Wedding Guest, the Hermit, and all
others to whom he relates his tale enter into a momentary liminal state themselves where they have a
distinct sensation of being stunned or mesmerized.

9. Religion: Although Christian and pagan themes are confounded at times in "The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner", many readers and critics have insisted on a Christian interpretation. Coleridge claimed that he
did not intend for the poem to have a moral, but it is difficult not to find one in Part 7. The Ancient
Mariner essentially preaches closeness to God through prayer and the willingness to show respect to all
of God's creatures. He also says that he finds no greater joy than in joining others in prayer: "To walk
together to the kirk, / And all together pray, / While each to his great Father bends, / Old men, and
babes, and loving friends, / And youths and maidens gay!" He also champions the Hermit, who does
nothing but pray, practice humility before God, and openly revere God's creatures. The Ancient
Mariner's shooting of the Albatross can be compared to several Judeo-Christian stories of betrayal,
including the original sin of Adam and Eve, and Cain's betrayal of Abel. Like Adam and Eve, the Ancient
Mariner fails to respect God's rules and is tempted to try to understand things that should remain out of
his reach. Like them, he is forbidden from being truly close to the sublime, existing in a limbo-like rather
than an Eden-like state. However, as a son of Adam and Eve, the Ancient Mariner is already a sinner and
cast out of the divine realm. Like Cain, the Ancient Mariner angers God by killing another creature. Most
obviously, the Ancient Mariner can be seen as the archetypal Judas or the universal sinner who betrays
Christ by sinning. Like Judas, he murders the "Christian soul" who could lead to his salvation and greater
understanding of the divine. Many readers have interpreted the Albatross as Christ, since it is the "rime"
spirit's favorite creature, and the Ancient Mariner pays dearly for killing it. The Albatross is even hung
around the Ancient Mariner's neck to mark him for his sin. Though the rain baptizes him after he is
finally able to pray, like a real baptism, it does not ensure his salvation. In the end, the Ancient Mariner
is like a strange prophet, kept alive to pass word of God's greatness onto others.

10. Imprisonment: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is in many ways a portrait of imprisonment and
its inherent loneliness and torment. The first instance of imprisonment occurs when the sailors are
swept by a storm into the "rime." The ice is "mast-high", and the captain cannot steer the ship through
it. The sailors' confinement in the disorienting "rime" foreshadows the Ancient Mariner's later
imprisonment within a bewildered limbo-like existence. In the beginning of the poem, the ship is a
vehicle of adventure, and the sailors set out in one another's happy company. However, once the
Ancient Mariner shoots the Albatross, it quickly becomes a prison. Without wind to sail the ship, the
sailors lose all control over their fate. They are cut off from civilization, even though they have each
other's company. They are imprisoned further by thirst, which silences them and effectively puts them
in isolation; they are denied the basic human ability to communicate. When the other sailors drop dead,
the ship becomes a private prison for the Ancient Mariner.

Even more dramatically, the ghost ship seems to imprison the sun: "And straight the sun was flecked
with bars, / (Heaven's Mother send us grace!) / As if through a dungeon-grate he peered / With broad
and burning face." The ghost ship has such power that it can imprison even the epitome of the natural
world's power, the sun. These lines symbolize the spiritual world's power over the natural and physical;
spirits can control not only mortals, but the very planets themselves. After he is rescued from the prison
that is the ship, the Ancient Mariner is subject to the indefinite imprisonment of his soul within his
physical body. His "glittering" eye represents his frenzied soul, eager to escape from his ravaged body.
He is imprisoned by the addiction to his own story, as though trapped in the "rime" forever. In a sense,
the Ancient Mariner imprisons others by compelling them to listen to his story; they are physically
compelled to join him in his torment until he releases them.

Retribution: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is a tale of retribution, since the Ancient Mariner spends
most of the poem paying for his one, impulsive error of killing the Albatross. The spiritual world avenges
the Albatross's death by wreaking physical and psychological havoc on the Ancient Mariner and his
shipmates. Even before the sailors die, their punishment is extensive; they become delirious from a
debilitating state of thirst, their lips bake black in the sun, and they must endure the torment of seeing
water all around them while being unable to drink it for its saltiness. Eventually the sailors all die, their
souls flying either to heaven or hell. There are at least two ways to interpret the fact that the sailors
suffer with the Ancient Mariner although they themselves have not erred. The first is that retribution is
blind; inspired by anger and the desire to punish others, even a spirit may hurt the wrong people. The
second is that the sailors are implicated in the Ancient Mariner's crime. If the Ancient Mariner
represents the universal sinner, then each sailor, as a human, is guilty of having at some point
disrespected one of God's creatures-or if not, he would have in the future. But the eternal punishment
called Life-in-Death is reserved for the Ancient Mariner. Presumably the spirit, being immortal, must
endure eternal grief over the murder of its beloved Albatross. In retribution, it forces the Ancient
Mariner to endure eternal torment as well, in the form of his curse. Though he never dies - and may
never, in a sense - the Ancient Mariner speaks from beyond the grave to warn others about the harsh,
permanent consequences of momentary foolishness, selfishness, and disrespect of the natural world.

The Act of Storytelling: In "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Coleridge draws our attention not only to
the Ancient Mariner's story, but to the act of storytelling itself. The Ancient Mariner's tale comprises so
much of the poem that moments that occur outside of it often seem like interruptions. We are not only
Coleridge's audience, but the Ancient Mariner's. Therefore, the messages that the protagonist delivers
to his audience apply to us, as well. Storytelling is a preventative measure in the poem, used to dissuade
those who favor the pleasures of society (like the Wedding Guest and, presumably, ourselves) from
disregarding the natural and spiritual worlds. The poem can also be seen as an allegory for the writer's
task. Coleridge uses the word "teach" to describe the Ancient Mariner's storytelling, and says that he
has "strange power of speech." In this way, he compares the protagonist to himself: both are gifted
storytellers who impart their wisdom unto others. By associating himself with the Ancient Mariner,
Coleridge implies that he, and by extension all writers, are not only inspired but compelled to write.
Their gift is equally a curse; the pleasure of writing is marred with torment. According to this
interpretation, the writer writes not to please himself or others, but to sate a painful urge. Inherent in
the writer's task is communication with others, whom he must warn lest they suffer a similar fate. Just
as the Ancient Mariner is forced to balance in a painful limbo between life and death, the writer is
compelled and even condemned to balance in the liminal space of the imagination "until [his] tale is
told." Like a writer, he is equally enthralled and pained by his imagination. Both are addicts, and
storytelling is their drug; it provides only momentary relief until the urge to tell returns. In modern
psychological terms, the Ancient Mariner as well as the writer relies on "the talking cure" to relieve
himself of his psychological burden. But for the Ancient Mariner, the cure - reliving the experience that
started with the "rime" by repeating his "rhyme" - is part of the torture. Coleridge paints an equally
powerful and pathetic image of the writer. The Ancient Mariner is able to inspire the Wedding Guest so
that he awakes the next day a new man, yet he is also the constant victim of his own talent - a curse that
torments, but never destroys.

Symbol Analysis: 1. The Albatross: The albatross is a complicated symbol within the poem. Historically,
albatross were seen by sailors as omens of good luck, and initially the albatross symbolizes this to the
sailors when it appears just as a wind picks up to move the ship. Further, birds in general were often
seen as having the ability to move between the earthly and spiritual realms, and this albatross in
particular—with its habit of appearing from out of the fog—seems to be both natural and supernatural.
Thus the albatross can be seen as symbolizing the connection between the natural and spiritual worlds,
a connection that the rest of the poem will show even more clearly, and it can further be seen as a
symbol of the sublime (the unearthly bird) as it sports with the mundane (the ship).

With the Mariner’s killing of the bird, the symbol becomes more complicated still. First, the killing of the
innocent bird, and the Mariner’s line that “Instead of the cross, the Albatross / About my neck was
hung,” suggests that the Albatross can be read as a symbol of Christ, with the Mariner as the betraying
Judas (particularly as the Albatross is killed by a cross-bow). The dead albatross, also, can be read more
generally as a mark of sin.

But as all these symbols build up around the albatross, it also starts to be possible to see the albatross as
a symbol of resistance to symbolism: a symbol that is not a symbol of nature but rather something that
Coleridge has created to be similar to nature in the sense of its complexity, its resistance to being easily
analyzed or pinned down. The poem insists that nature is something to be revered just as God is
revered, but that, like God, nature is beyond both the mastery and comprehension of mankind. And in
the albatross, with its multiplying potential symbols, Coleridge has created something similar. This idea
is further supported by the fact that disaster strikes the Mariner and the sailors precisely after they
“interpret” the albatross. The Mariner does so by killing it: what was once so many things, natural and
supernatural, has been reduced to just being dead. And the crew then interpret the Mariner’s act as first
a crime, and then a justified killing—at which point nature and the supernatural rear up against them, a
literal reaction against these men’s “interpretation.”

2. Eyes: Other symbols and many of the themes in the poem exert their presence through the eyes.
Firstly, the Mariner holds the Wedding Guest with his story, but also with his “glittering eye.” The eye
then symbolizes both a means of control and a means of communication, which makes sense given the
spellbinding power of storytelling in the poem. When words fail, humans communicate through their
eyes. This point is also exemplified by the silent curses the Sailors give the Mariner when they are too
thirsty to speak. This form of communication is powerful, direct, and primal, and it is also continued and
pushed into the realm of the supernatural and sublime when the communicative gaze continues even
after the sailors’ deaths.

But eyes do not only symbolize a means of primal, ineffably communication between humans. They also
symbolize the means of communication between humans and the natural world, and through it, God. It
is through the eyes that we observe God’s creatures, nature, and the sublime: the Mariner observes
the Albatross, the Sun and Moon, the sublime, and the rest of the natural world with the power of sight.
Some of the most terrifying moments of the poem are given through the means of sight and the eyes,
for example, when the Mariner spies a ship and realizes its skeletal, ghostly nature as it approaches. The
communication signified here is indicating that penance or punishment is coming, but the
communication that the eye symbolizes and enables can also carry a message of salvation, as it is the
sight of the radiant beauty of the swimming snakes that allows the Mariner to realize his error.

In another way, then, the eye can symbolize the limitations of the poem and of storytelling itself. The
Mariner (and through him Coleridge) can use words to communicate the glory of God and the beauty of
the world, but this communication will always be indirect. By seeing, we can take one step closer to
God, to an appreciation of the sublime in nature, and to understanding for ourselves the lessons which
the poem seeks to impart.

3. The Sun and Moon: The Sun and Moon symbolize the competing influences on the Mariner’s journey
and on the world. The two compete with each other, at times embodying the forces of both the natural
and supernatural world. The sun is associated with blood, heat, dryness, and the thirst that ultimately
kills the Sailors. It symbolizes both the majesty and the terror of the vast natural world, as it is described
with sublime beauty and is also used to tell which direction the ship is traveling. The moon, as it is
responsible for shaping the tides, symbolizes the supernatural and divine influences on nature. We can
note that the ghostly ship of Death and Life-in-Death is superimposed over the sun, before the sun sets
and is replaced by the moon. It is then by moonlight that the next stage of penance and the Mariner’s
spiritual awakening take place. But it is this cyclic process and competition between the sun and moon
that, together, symbolizes the unity of God’s creation, divine influence, and the cyclic process of sin,
penance, and absolution that Christians experience.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner The Romantics: In order to understand British Romanticism as a
genre, one must first understand what the British Romantics were not. The Romantic movement is often
construed as a reaction against the Enlightenment's focus on the logical in favor of the purely emotional.
Additionally, it is sometimes confused with the lower-case "romantic", denoting an idealistic focus on
love. In fact, the Romantic movement was rooted deeply in the Enlightenment's focus on reason, and
often portrayed love as tormented and unreachable. Perhaps the best way to describe the Romantic
movement is as "the rebellious child of the Enlightenment" - it embraced, and then departed from, the
period's concentration on empiricism and logical thought.

The Romantic era spanned approximately 1798 to 1832, although many contemporary scholars extend
the dates to varying degrees on either end. The movement arose during a time when print culture was
continuing its sharp rise, one comparable to the rise of today's internet culture in terms of the
dissemination of information. Printed materials were available to a wide audience instead of on a
manuscript basis, inspiring writers to delve into "ordinary" themes and characters. However, this is not
to say that the quality of the Romantics' writing was less than those preceding them, mundane, or low
quality. Rather, it strove to discover the extraordinary in the ordinary. Some major themes of the
Romantic movement include the subjectivity of experience, the marriage of pleasure and pain, the
location of the infinite or sublime in nature and a corresponding reverence for the natural world, and
liminal spaces and states. The above painting by German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich
encapsulates several of these themes. In this work, Friedrich has quite literally located the religious in
nature, as reflected in the painting's very title: Abbey in the Oak Forest. Note how the scene's holiness
seems to stem not from its religious symbols (the Abbey, the gravestones, and the monks), but rather
from the glory of the sunset and the ominous majesty of the trees. The setting is perfectly Romantic:
natural, awesome, and lonely. It also takes place at a liminal time of day, either sunrise or sunset, to
emphasize the fact that the scene also balances the physical and the metaphysical, as well as the natural
and the spiritual. Note also how the humans in the picture are dwarfed by nature's sublimity so that
they are noticeable only upon close inspection, and even then are barely distinguishable from the
gravestones.

The typical progression of a Romantic narrative describes the hero's journey from a state of innocence
to one of sad wisdom, attained through realizations that occur in a liminal space and often involve
magical or spiritual intervention. Most notably, the tale is told from the hero's individualistic
perspective. While contemporary readers take the prevalence of the word "I" in literature for granted, it
was not so pervasive before the Romantic movement; stories focused on a protagonist's experience as
didactic and universal. The Romantics, drawing on the Enlightenment focus on empirical evidence,
placed great importance on their protagonists' subjective experience of the world. The greatest example
of Romantic individualism is Wordsworth's much-revised Prelude, in which he wrote thousands of lines
about his personal experiences of his surroundings.

The major Romantic poets are usually listed as follows: William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the famously precocious John Keats. However,
the movement was in actuality much larger and included many others, including Thomas DeQuincey and
Mary Shelley, as well as a host of other female writers whose works have only recently begun to receive
the attention they deserve. Romantic musicians include the likes of Ludwig von Beethoven and Franz
Peter Schubert. Romantic artists who focused on the visual include Caspar David Friedrich and Joseph
Turner, as well as William Blake himself.

1. Make a case for why the Ancient Mariner stops and tells his tale to the Wedding Guest of all
people. In your analysis, consider the Hermit, to whom the Ancient Mariner tells his tale for the
first time.

2. How does Coleridge use Christian and/or Biblical references to weave a moral into "The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner"? Is the moral itself Christian? Why or why not? Be sure to use at least two
of the following categories of evidence in your analysis: symbolism, setting, numbers, baptism,
crucifixion, original sin.

3. How does Coleridge portray the natural world before and after the Ancient Mariner shoots the
Albatross? Is there a major change? Use evidence pertaining to symbolism, metaphor, and
rhyme scheme to support your thesis.

4. In your opinion, is the Ancient Mariner's punishment for killing the Albatross fair? Whose fate is
worse, the Ancient Mariner's or the sailors'? Why?

5. Give at least three examples of liminal spaces in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and analyze
their significance, if any, to Coleridge's ultimate message to the reader.

6. Discuss Coleridge's use of imagery throughout "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". How does he
use sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell to inform the reader's experience of the story? Which
senses do you think he emphasizes the most, and why?

7. Analyze the importance of the First Voice and Second Voice. To what realm do they belong, the
physical or metaphysical? Why do you think Coleridge includes their points of view in the poem?
 8. Choose one of the following pairs of characters and analyze the similarities and differences in
how they are portrayed and what role they serve: the sailors and the Albatross, the Hermit and
the Wedding Guest, the Hermit and the Ancient Mariner, Life-in-Death and the spirit that loves
the Albatross.

9. Why do you think the Ancient Mariner kills the Albatross? Do his actions make him unusually
cruel, or do they connect him to the whole of humanity?

10. Give varying examples of instances in which someone or something is imprisoned and explain
how each contributes to a larger message. Is there any instance in which someone or something
that imprisons is then imprisoned, or vice versa?

11. Analyze "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" as an allegory for one of the following, using points
of evidence from each of the poem's seven parts: the writer's purpose, the need for spiritual
salvation, environmentalism and/or animal rights.

12. Which do you think is the more significant motivating force in "The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner": consequence, or coincidence? Make a case for one or the other using key moments of
change in the plot as evidence.

At a Glance: 1. In "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," sin separates God from man and prevents the
Mariner from understanding his relationship with God and creation. That sin is pride, and the Mariner
spends the rest of his life atoning for it through suffering and humility.

2. The Mariner's story is in essence a confession. Ever since killing the albatross, he has been walking
around, telling his story to anyone who will listen. This act of confession also serves as a warning to
listeners about the dangers of sin, particularly pride. The Mariner wants to atone for his sin by steering
others away from it.

3. Nature and religion are closely linked in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." The ancient Mariner
learns too late that God loves every creature, big or small. Each one is a living testament to his power
and to the beauty of the earth. Killing the albatross is a sin because it destroys part of God's creation.

Christian Themes: Although heavily influenced by William Wordsworth and the pantheist tradition,
Coleridge diverged from Wordsworth on the source of inspiration for life and poetry: Where
Wordsworth believed nature was his source of inspiration, Coleridge believed love was the source of
inspiration. Drawing from Christ’s instruction that the greatest commandment is love, Coleridge
develops a story that illustrates the importance of love not only for the individual soul but also for the
balance and harmony among all living things.

The senseless shooting of the albatross, a bird lured to follow the ship by the men’s initially friendly
treatment, serves as the point of illustration for a parable about right behavior. Even as the hospitality
and friendliness toward the albatross and the common sense and decency with which the ship members
treated it dried up, the men on the ship are dried to the point that their tongues turn black. Their
rottenness causes the sea to rot.

The crew is angry and afraid but unaware of its complicity in the sin, hanging the albatross around the
Mariner’s neck. For their complicity and unwillingness to take responsibility, they are punished with
death. However, the Mariner, because he is directly responsible for killing the bird and showing no
mercy, is fated to remain alive like the Wandering Jew who refused Christ the mercy of a cup of water.
Initially, the Mariner does not fully understand his responsibility for what is occurring and blames
others: “And never a saint took pity on/ My soul in agony.” Because he refuses responsibility, he feels
guilt, hearing the departing souls of his shipmates pass by “[l]ike the whizz of [his] crossbow!” and
seeing himself as one of the slimy things that lives on, but he cannot repent. Until blessed with an
overwhelming sense of love for the beauty of the sea snakes, the “wicked whisper” of both despair and
desire to blame others for his predicament prevents him from praying and moving toward atonement,
which consists of repeating his story to those who need to hear it that they might learn,

He prayeth best, who loveth bestAll things both great and small;For the dear God who loveth us,He
made and loveth all.

Critical Evaluation: Perhaps what is most strange about The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is not its
uniqueness, which makes it seem strange, but its transparency. It is about what it says it is about. An
epigraph, marginal glosses, and a moral at the end state the poem’s ideas so clearly that one may try to
second-guess them. A reader may also argue that the poem succeeds in its stated aim—to teach lessons
of the spirits, of guilt, of expiation, and of love for all of God’s creations—and that the poem’s oddity is
instrumental in this success. Without the novelty of the tale, the ancient and simple lessons would be
easier to ignore.

The epigraph by Thomas Burnet states that “[f]acile credo” (I believe with ease, or I may easily believe)
there are many invisible beings in the universe. Burnet next points out that, while it is also easy to get
bogged down in questions regarding such creatures, and therefore, implicitly, create an attitude of
cynical skepticism, it is spiritually enriching to contemplate the invisible realm and thereby to imagine a
greater and better world. Such thought gives one better perspective on the trivial concerns of daily life.
Such contemplation, Burnet concludes, is not intended to lead away from truth. This epigraph may be
interpreted, in the context of the poem, to state the following ideas: First, there is a spiritual realm, and
its mysteries are to be respected although not fully understood. The Mariner makes the mistake of
showing contempt for the spiritual world by killing what seems to be one of its representatives. Second,
spiritual mysteries are wonderful, miraculous, and terrible. They can be described, but they are best
understood emotionally rather than through analysis. When the Mariner “blessed them unaware” (part
4, line 285), his spiritual rebirth begins. Third, the marvels of the invisible can lead one to greater
understanding. This is clear in the Mariner’s case. Fourth, the marvels of the spiritual world are not
intended to lead one away from truth. Perhaps to Burnet, truth meant doctrinal orthodoxy. To the
Mariner, truth may mean, as Burnet says, avoiding extremes and telling day from night. In the Mariner’s
case, this means putting his hard-won knowledge to use in the world. He tells others what he learned.
Perhaps to Coleridge, truth was the practice of his art, the creation of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was published in the famous volume Lyrical Ballads (1798), a
collaboration between Coleridge and William Wordsworth. The volume contains two kinds of poetry. In
one type, as Coleridge would later write in chapter 14 of his Biographia Literaria (1817): The incidents
and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural, and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the
interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such
situations, supposing them real. . . . In this idea originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads, in which it was
agreed that my endeavors should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least
romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth
sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief which
constitutes poetic faith. . . . With this view I wrote The Ancient Mariner.
Whether the faith be Christian, poetic, or pagan, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is about, among other
things, faith. For example, in part 1 of the poem, the albatross appears to guide, or seems to guide, the
ship out of the ice, “As if it had been a Christian soul,/ We hailed it in God’s name.” A bird, after all, is
not foreign to Christian symbolism. Coleridge hedges somewhat (“as if” and “supposing them real”), but
this hedging is the test of faith. Readers may decide to take the poem literally, to accept it as a work of
imagination that tells important spiritual truths, or to consider the poem simply a strange story of no
consequence.

The quotation from Burnet (translated in most modern editions) should alert readers to the fact that
Coleridge, who once planned to be a clergyman, is concerned in this poem with demonstrating the
inadequacy of materialism and rationalism as interpretations of reality. Materialism is the belief that
only matter and motion exist (as opposed to spiritual reality of any kind). Rationalism is the belief that
reason is capable of comprehending the totality of nature. Although Coleridge was inconsistent as a
philosopher, he regularly opposed both of these suppositions.

In a letter of December 31, 1796, for example, he opposed materialism and regarded himself as “a mere
apparition—a naked Spirit!—And that Life is I myself I!” In January, 1798, he described himself as a
committed defender of religion, regarding scientific discoveries of any kind as being important primarily
for their theological revelations. In later years also, Coleridge would emerge as a significant religious
teacher who always believed in a spiritual reality beyond the material one. The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, defying both reason and materialism, is something of a sermon on the sanctity of life, which in
all its forms is a manifestation of the divine. It may be said that the poem argues, with perhaps
deceptive simplicity and candor, that the laws that govern living things are not physical but moral and
come from God.

Close reading of the poem can reveal how its spiritual themes, often discussed in reference to text not
belonging to the poem, are developed. The poem’s frame (the Mariner telling his story to the Wedding
Guest), for example, may be examined in terms of Christian symbolism, the psychology of the reader
(whose responses to the Mariner may be much like the guest’s), and the creation of the willing
suspension of disbelief. The Mariner’s story follows a clear pattern of guilt, penance, expiation, and
confession, and this pattern may be examined in terms of the flow of the narration and the uses of the
irregular stanzas and of the glosses. Finally, what may be the poem’s most memorable element—its
descriptions of natural and supernatural phenomena—may be examined in terms of sheer poetic
technique. In any case, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’s uniqueness is indisputable, and its spiritual
themes may be considered to be no less authentic for being stated clearly.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: On his way to a wedding, a young man is stopped by an Ancient
Mariner who insists on relating a strange tale of adventure at sea. The Mariner reveals that years ago he
had sailed from his home to the South Pole and beyond. While the ship lay becalmed near the Pole, he
shot an albatross which had been following the vessel. Initially praised by his shipmates, the Mariner is
eventually reviled because the deed seems to being bad luck; the albatross is hung about his neck. A
spectral ship, carrying two figures, approaches the Mariner’s vessel; Death and Death-in-Life play dice
for the Mariner, and the latter wins. The other crew members aboard the ship die, but the Mariner lives
on. Alone, he contemplates the heinous crime he has committed. Noticing the beauty of the sea
creatures following the boat, he blesses them. Almost immediately, the wind picks up, the ship sails
forward, and a band of spirits descend to inhabit the dead crew, aiding the Mariner to return to his
homeland, where his ship goes down. He is rescued, but is compelled to tell his story to others as
penance for his deed.
Coleridge’s poem is characteristically Romantic: Set in a strange locale, containing accounts of the
supernatural, it uses the elements of the fantastic to highlight a universal human problem. The Mariner
commits a motiveless crime, but it becomes an occasion for the poet to explore the notion of guilt and
repentance. Fittingly, the act of contrition involves a recognition of the beauty of nature, another
Romantic axiom. Further, the Mariner is forced to share his experience with others; this, too,
characterizes Romantic poetry, whose practitioners felt that poetry was a vehicle for sharing experience
as well as conveying ideas. Like many Romantic heroes, the Mariner is exiled from society by his crime,
and returns to it only when he feels within himself a brotherhood with other creatures of nature.

Introduction: The following entry presents criticism of Coleridge's poem The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner (1798). A major work of the English Romantic movement, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is
considered one of the most significant and famous poems in the English language. While the poem was
poorly received during Coleridge's lifetime, it is now praised as a classic example of imaginative poetry,
characterizing Coleridge's poetic theories, of which he said in the Biographia Literaria, "My endeavors
should be directed to persons and characters spiritual and supernatural, or at least romantic."

Biographical Information: In 1796 Coleridge met the poet William Wordsworth, with whom he had
corresponded casually for several years. Their rapport was instantaneous, and the next year Coleridge
moved to Nether Stowey in the Lake District, where he, Wordsworth and Robert Southey became
known as "the Lake Poets." Much of Coleridge's most admired work was composed between the years
1798 and 1800, his most prolific period as a poet. During that time, Wordsworth and Coleridge
collaborated on Lyrical Ballads, with a few Other Poems (1798), in which The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner appears. Lyrical Ballads marks the beginning of the Romantic movement in England, and is a
landmark of world literature.

Plot and Major Characters

Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner appears in Lyrical Ballads in a purposefully "archaic" form, with words
spelled in the manner of an earlier day. Coleridge changed some of the archaic diction of the
original Ancient Marinere for the second edition of Lyrical Ballads and added glosses in the margins
when it was included in Sibylline Leaves (1817). In its original form and in the modified version that
followed, the poem describes an elderly mariner who, compelled to wander the Earth repeating his tale
of woe, narrates his story to a wedding guest he meets in a village street. The story he tells relates how,
in his youth, the mariner had set out on a sea voyage to the Southern Hemisphere with two hundred
other men aboard a sailing ship. During the voyage, the ship is shadowed by an albatross, a huge seabird
considered an omen of good fortune by seafarers. For no good reason, the mariner shoots the albatross
dead with his crossbow, to the horror of his companions. In a short time, the ship is becalmed, and soon
all the crew members die of thirst—all except the mariner. Before they died, the angry crew hung the
dead albatross around the mariner's neck for his folly; and now, stricken with the horror of his deed's
consequences, the mariner spends his time watching the phosphorescent trails of slimy creatures who
writhe and coil in the night waters in the ship's shadow. In his heart, he blesses these humble creatures
for their life and beauty, and at that moment, as he leans over the ship's side, the curse on his life begins
to lift, as the albatross falls from his neck and sinks into the sea. The rest of the poem tells of the
supernatural events that took place as spirits and angels propel the ship north into the snug harbor of
the mariner's home town and his rescue by a holy hermit, who pronounces the terms of the mariner's
penance upon him. The poem presents a variety of religious and supernatural images to depict a moving
spiritual journey of doubt, sin, punishment, renewal, and eventual redemption.
Major Themes: The Ancient Mariner begins with almost the sense of classical Greek tragedy, with a man
who has offended against pagan forces condemned to wander the world and repeat his tale to
passersby when the daemon within him moves him. There is much in this poem concerning luck, fate,
and fortune; this and the theme of death-in-life appear throughout the poems first half, with death-in-
life, graphically symbolized by the revivified crew of corpses, appearing from the poem's mid-point
almost too the end. There is a point of transition between pagan and Christian elements in the poem,
falling at the moment the mariner blesses the sea-snakes in his heart. Death-in-life continues, and
elemental spirits converse in the poet's conscious. Yet now, a redemptive presence is at work in the
mariner's life, and even the elemental spirits and the living dead are subservient to it, as it becomes
apparent that angelic beings have taken over the bodies of the dead crew and are bringing the ship into
port. Christian themes and imagery become more pronounced as the poem nears its end, with the
mariner declaiming about the quiet, longed-for joy of walking to church with his friends in the village,
and then uttering one of the most-quoted stanzas in the entire poem: "He prayeth best who loveth best
/ All things both great and small; / For the dear God who loveth us, / He made and loveth all"—lines
expressing sentiments endorsed by even so formidable an agnostic as Theodore Dreiser. Much of the
poem's Biblical and medieval Catholic imagery has sparked radically different interpretations, and
several commentators consider it an allegorical record of Coleridge's own spiritual pilgrimage. Coleridge
himself, however, commented that the poem's major fault consisted of "the obtrusion of the moral
sentiment so openly on the reader. . . . It ought to have had no more moral than the Arabian Nights' tale
of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates."

Critical Reception: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was initially disliked and, because it was the longest
poem in the collection, helped keep Lyrical Ballads from success. In a review shortly after its first
publication, Southey called it "a Dutch attempt at German sublimity," and even Wordsworth disliked the
negative appraisal the poem seemed to garner their entire volume. Although critical estimation of The
Ancient Mariner increased dramatically after Coleridge's death, relatively little positive commentary was
written on it until the turn of the century. Today, most critics agree that the poem constitutes a seminal
contribution to English literature. Perhaps the most important twentieth-century study of The Ancient
Mariner appeared in 1927 in John Livingston Lowes's magisterial work The Road to Xanadu: A Study in
the Ways of the Imagination. Here, Lowes brought his broad and deep knowledge of poetic history,
poetic diction, and the imagination to bear on Coleridge's early poetry in general and The Ancient
Mariner in particular. Of Coleridge's first major poem, Lowes harked to themes from the works of
Apuleius, Josephus, Michael Psellus, Marsilio Ficino, and many others to "make it clear—where for
dæmons of the elements, or water-snakes, or sun, or moon—that the rich suggestiveness of a
masterpiece of the imagination springs in some measure from the fact that infinitely more than reached
expression lay behind it in the shaping brain, so that every detail is saturated and irradiated with the
secret influence of those thronged precincts of the unexpressed. . . ." Other major scholars who have
written at length on The Ancient Mariner include E. M. W. Tillyard, C. M. Bowra, Robert Penn Warren, A.
E. Dyson, and Julian Lovelock. In response to critics such as Warren, who have read moral overtones into
the poem, Camille Paglia has ruminated upon The Ancient Mariner as an expression of pagan visions of
sexuality and possession—what T. S. Eliot termed "fear of fear and frenzy" and "fear of possession"—
layered over with a veneer of Christian symbols. To Paglia, writing in her Sexual Personae: Art and
Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), the Mariner is a "male heroine," who is the receptor
of all the active forces of nature which bear him down during the course of the poem's story. The
symbols that recur in The Ancient Mariner,discussed by Paglia and others, have inspired critical debate
over their aptness and Coleridge's use of them. James Stephens has written that "this poem is extreme,
its fantasy is extreme, its knowledge of music and colour and pace is extreme," concluding, "No miracle
of talent or technique can quite redeem untruth from being initially and persistently inhuman in both
life and letters." Other critics, notably Lowes and Bowra, have found otherwise, with the latter writing
that the poem succeeds because it is nevertheless "founded on realities in the living world and in the
human heart." While a few commentators consider the poem overrated, contemporary scholars
generally look to the poem as one of the greatest works of the English Romantic movement.

KEATS’S ODES

Themes: 1. The Inevitability of Death: Even before his diagnosis of terminal tuberculosis, Keats focused
on death and its inevitability in his work. For Keats, small, slow acts of death occurred every day, and he
chronicled these small mortal occurrences. The end of a lover’s embrace, the images on an ancient urn,
the reaping of grain in autumn—all of these are not only symbols of death, but instances of it.

2. The Contemplation of Beauty: In his poetry, Keats proposed the contemplation of beauty as a way of
delaying the inevitability of death. Although we must die eventually, we can choose to spend our time
alive in aesthetic revelry, looking at beautiful objects and landscapes. Keats’s Speakers contemplate
urns (“Ode on a Grecian Urn”), books (“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” [1816], birds (“Ode to
a Nightingale”), and stars (“Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art” [1819]). Unlike mortal beings,
beautiful things will never die but will keep demonstrating their beauty for all time. The speaker in “Ode
on a Grecian Urn” envies the immortality of the lute players and trees inscribed on the ancient vessel
because they shall never cease playing their songs, nor will they ever shed their leaves. He reassures
young lovers by telling them that even though they shall never catch their mistresses, these women
shall always stay beautiful. The people on the urn, unlike the speaker, shall never stop having
experiences. They shall remain permanently depicted while the speaker changes, grows old, and
eventually dies.

Motifs: 1. Departures and Reveries: In many of Keats’s poems, the speaker leaves the real world to
explore a transcendent, mythical, or aesthetic realm. At the end of the poem, the speaker returns to his
ordinary life transformed in some way and armed with a new understanding. Often the appearance or
contemplation of a beautiful object makes the departure possible. The ability to get lost in a reverie, to
depart conscious life for imaginative life without wondering about plausibility or rationality, is part of
Keats’s concept of negative capability. Keats explored the relationship between visions and poetry in
“Ode to Psyche” and “Ode to a Nightingale.”

2. The Five Senses and Art: Keats imagined that the five senses loosely corresponded to and connected
with various types of art. The speaker in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” describes the pictures depicted on the
urn, including lovers chasing one another, musicians playing instruments, and a virginal maiden holding
still. All the figures remain motionless, held fast and permanent by their depiction on the sides of the
urn, and they cannot touch one another, even though we can touch them by holding the vessel.
Although the poem associates sight and sound, because we see the musicians playing, we cannot hear
the music. In “Ode to a Nightingale,” the speaker longs for a drink of crystal-clear water or wine so that
he might adequately describe the sounds of the bird singing nearby. Each of the five senses must be
involved in worthwhile experiences, which, in turn, lead to the production of worthwhile art.

3. The Disappearance of the Poet and the Speaker: In Keats’s theory of negative capability, the poet
disappears from the work—that is, the work itself chronicles an experience in such a way that the reader
recognizes and responds to the experience without requiring the intervention or explanation of the
poet. Keats’s speakers become so enraptured with an object that they erase themselves and their
thoughts from their depiction of that object. In essence, the speaker/poet becomes melded to and
indistinguishable from the object being described. For instance, the speaker of “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
describes the scenes on the urn for several stanzas until the famous conclusion about beauty and truth,
which is enclosed in quotation marks. Since the poem’s publication in 1820, critics have theorized about
who speaks these lines, whether the poet, the speaker, the urn, or one or all the figures on the urn. The
erasure of the speaker and the poet is so complete in this particular poem that the quoted lines are
jarring and troubling.

Symbols: 1. Music and Musicians: Music and musicians appear throughout Keats’s work as Symbols of
poetry and poets. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” for instance, the speaker describes musicians playing their
pipes. Although we cannot literally hear their music, by using our imaginations, we can imagine and thus
hear music. The speaker of “To Autumn” reassures us that the season of fall, like spring, has songs to
sing. Fall, the season of changing leaves and decay, is as worthy of poetry as spring, the season of
flowers and rejuvenation. “Ode to a Nightingale” uses the bird’s music to contrast the mortality of
humans with the immortality of art. Caught up in beautiful birdsong, the speaker imagines himself
capable of using poetry to join the bird in the forest. The beauty of the bird’s music represents the
ecstatic, imaginative possibilities of poetry. As mortal beings who will eventually die, we can delay death
through the timelessness of music, poetry, and other types of art.

2. Nature: Like his fellow romantic poets, Keats found in nature endless sources of poetic inspiration,
and he described the natural world with precision and care. Observing elements of nature allowed
Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, among others, to create extended meditations and
thoughtful odes about aspects of the human condition. For example, in “Ode to a Nightingale,” hearing
the bird’s song causes the speaker to ruminate on the immortality of art and the mortality of humans.
The speaker of “Ode on Melancholy” compares a bout of depression to a “weeping cloud” (12), then
goes on to list specific flowers that are linked to sadness. He finds in nature apt images for his
psychological state. In “Ode to Psyche,” the speaker mines the night sky to find ways to worship the
Roman goddess Psyche as a muse: a star becomes an “amorous glow-worm” (27), and the moon rests
amid a background of dark blue. Keats not only uses nature as a springboard from which to ponder, but
he also discovers in nature Similes, symbols, and Metaphors for the spiritual and emotional states he
seeks to describe.

3. The Ancient World: Keats had an enduring interest in antiquity and the ancient world. His longer
poems, such as The Fall of Hyperion or Lamia, often take place in a mythical world not unlike that of
classical antiquity. He borrowed figures from ancient mythology to populate poems, such as “Ode to
Psyche” and “To Homer” (1818). For Keats, ancient myth and antique objects, such as the Grecian urn,
have a permanence and solidity that contrasts with the fleeting, temporary nature of life. In ancient
cultures, Keats saw the possibility of permanent artistic achievement: if an urn still spoke to someone
several centuries after its creation, there was hope that a poem or artistic object from Keats’s time
might continue to speak to readers or observers after the death of Keats or another writer or creator.
This achievement was one of Keats’s great hopes. In an 1818 letter to his brother George, Keats quietly
prophesied: “I think I shall be among the English poets after my death.”

Ode to a Nightingale Themes and Meanings: In “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats is really only talking about
the beauty of nature and how painful it is to think of dying and having to leave it. These are thoughts
with which every reader can identify. What makes Keats a great poet is that the feelings he expresses
are common to all humanity. This feature, found in all of his greatest poetry, is called universality, and it
is generally regarded as the distinguishing feature of all great art. An aspiring writer can learn from Keats
that the secret of creating important work is to deal with basic human emotions.
Keats was going through considerable mental anguish when he wrote this poem. His brother Tom had
just died of tuberculosis. He himself had premonitions of his own death from the same disease, which
turned out to be true. He was in love with young Fanny Brawne but found it impossible to marry her
because he had rejected the career in medicine for which he had been trained; he was finding it
impossible to make a living as a writer. Like many present-day poets, he was tortured by the fact that he
had chosen an impractical vocation; yet, it was the vocation for which he believed he was born, and it
was the only thing he wanted to do.

The ode has a piquant, bittersweet flavor, not unlike the flavor of a good red wine, because it
deliberately blends thoughts of beauty and decay, joy and suffering, love and death. Keats had rejected
the teachings of the established church.

Critical Evaluation: John Keats, a widely admired poet of the English romantic period, composed his
“Ode to a Nightingale” in eight stanzas (sections), each containing ten lines of rhymed iambic
pentameter, with the exception of the eighth line of each stanza, which is short. Also, Keats invented his
own rhyme scheme for the ode.

“Ode to a Nightingale” has become, along with Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1820), one of the most
famous poems in the English language. Readers are moved by his word-pictures, his evocation of the
senses, and his subtle use of poetic language.

Notably, “Ode to a Nightingale” was composed in a single morning. Two facets of the poem are its
original stanza form, masterfully adapted by Keats from earlier models, and its focus on a central
symbol, the nightingale, whose interpretation remains elusive and thus poetically interesting. Whether
the bird symbolizes the ideal type of music, art, or nature, the poet still suggests both its appeal to
humanity and its contrast with human reality, a contrast between a cold immortality and the fading
away that is human mortality.

The ode’s ambiguous language creates room for scholarly debate and explication. Debated by many
critics is the difficult line “Already with thee!” in stanza four, which in one interpretation signals that the
poet has entered a trance. However, this slippery language also contributes to the poem’s universal
appeal.

Keats' Poems and Letters Themes: The Imagined/Ideal versus the Experienced/Real

There is a constant struggle between these two worlds in Keats' poetry. In "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Ode
to a Nightingale", "The Eve of St. Agnes", and others, characters express disappointment when they
compare the ideal worlds formed in the imagination to the necessarily subpar world of reality.

Romance: "Romance" is defined here as a movement which prized and prioritized vivid moods and
flights of fancy. Keats' constant preoccupation with early death (which proved to be a reasonable
preoccupation, in his case) and his focus on the impossibility of achieving artistic/romantic fulfillment
during his lifetime are interests that both fall squarely within the Romantic tradition. In his treatment of
such themes, he was greatly influenced by another Romantic poet, William Wordsworth, who described
the moments of drama and insight that can occur in the course of everyday life.

The Natural World: As a true Romantic, Keats shows extreme appreciation for the natural world in his
poetry. Detailed descriptions of plants (including over a hundred species names) are included in many of
his poems, including "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode to Psyche". For Keats, the natural world
represents a kind of Eden, and is the only environment which comes close to mirroring the idyllic world
of the imagination.

The Nature of Beauty: Keats states, in a letter to Richard Woodhouse, that "the mere yearning and
fondness" he has for the Beautiful is the greatest impetus for his poetry. But the nature of beauty itself
is something Keats also explores in a few poems. In "Ode on Melancholy", he expresses the Romantic
idea that beauty and joy can only be found in opposition: beauty can only be found in melancholy. "Ode
on a Grecian Urn", however, concludes with the timeless lines, "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty," perhaps
a simpler concept and a more reassuring answer. In any case, a love of beautiful things -- both physical
and philosophical -- is one of the touchstones of Keats' work.

Mortality: Any casual reader of Keats will quickly recognize that mortality is one of the poet's
major preoccupations. Having lost his father when he was at age eight, his mother at fifteen, and his
brother at twenty-three, Keats was forced to reckon with the human condition from an early age. The
topic of mortality arises directly in poems such as "When I have fears that I may cease to be", in which
Keats struggles with the prospect of dying before he has achieved artistic success. Similar themes are
addressed more indirectly in "Ode to a Nightingale", in which he wishes (though perhaps only for
dramatic effect) to die while listening to the songbird of the title.

Paradox: The ultimate inextricability of pleasure from pain, joy from sorrow, happiness from
melancholy, and life from death is essential to Keats' poetry. Keats believed that recognition of these
relationships is a hallmark of practical education. In a letter to his brother George and sister-in-law
Georgiana (in May of 1819), Keats writes, "Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles
is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul?" Without pain, pleasure could never be experienced fully.
This paradox is described most directly in "Ode on Melancholy", but also appears in "La Belle Dame Sans
Merci" and "The Eve of St. Agnes".

Romantic Notions of the Female: Mystical female figures are a constant presence in Keats' poetry:
these range from Psyche in "Ode to Psyche", to the Belle Dame in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci", to the
female figures of Love, Ambition, and Poesy in "Ode on Indolence". Female figures are often marked by
a dreamy otherworldliness; in fact, even mortal women like the mistress in "Ode on Melancholy" have
"peerless eyes" that are to be "fed upon" in the midst of angry moods. Madeline, in "The Eve of St.
Agnes", represents notions of female virginity and sexual purity. Keats's male figures are often
chivalrous, but Keats himself often plays the role of spectator-poet in relation to the women he
describes.

1. In "Ode to Psyche", what does Keats offer to build for Psyche? What is special about his
construction, and how does it reflect his worldview?

Keats, or the poet-protagonist, comes across Psyche and Cupid embracing in a forest. Keats is
sympathetic to Psyche because, as a Greek goddess who was once mortal, she does not enjoy any
temples or direct worship. To correct this, Keats offers to "be thy [her] priest," and build a temple for
her himself. He will build this temple and all its accoutrements in his mind, where the temple will be
permanent, unsullied, and idyllic. This goal reflects Keats' fixation on the Romantic "ideal," which often
surpasses its worldly counterpart.

2. How does "Ode on Melancholy" reflect a paradox?

"Ode on Melancholy" is about the intertwined relationship of pleasure and pain. Joy cannot be
experienced without the experience of its opposite, and the beauty of mortality lies in the fleeting
nature of life itself. Keats saw joy in this paradoxical relationship, and encouraged readers to accept the
reality of such apparent contradictions.

3. What devices does Keats use to describe the season in "To Autumn"?

Keats uses metaphor and personification to describe autumn. In the first stanza, autumn is represented
by the ripe fruit, full honeycomb, swollen gourds, and plump, sweet corn. In the second stanza, Keats
personifies the season autumn -- sometimes likened to a goddess in this poem -- through the figures of
the people working in the harvest. Lastly, in the final stanza, autumn is represented by "songs" -- the
songs of gnats, lambs, crickets, and birds. These songs could be interpreted as melancholy, but Keats
urges his readers to recognize the beauty of such forms of expression.

4. What does the urn represent for Keats in "Ode on a Grecian Urn"?

For Keats, the images depicted on the surface of a Grecian urn -- lively, engaging, intriguing -- represent
a kind of ideal world. It is ideal primarily because of its inability to be altered; Keats envies this immortal
reality. Love cannot fade; the young cannot age; even the ideal music played in this scene -- the music of
"unheard melodies" -- is somehow superior to what is experienced in reality. This poem, like many of
Keats' others, represents the struggle between the ideal world of the imagination and the necessarily
imperfect world of actuality.

5. What does the nightingale represent in "Ode to a Nightingale"?

The nightingale represents "the ideal," immortality, and perfection. Keats is overwhelmed because he is
"too happy in thy [the nightingale's] happiness" (6). In the mortal world, "but to think is to be full of
sorrow" (27) because of the inevitable passage of time and the arrival of death. The nightingale, in
contrast, "was not born for death, immortal Bird!" (61); it has sung the same song across millennia.

6. What type of cultural/religious figures does Keats repeatedly cite in his poetry? What might his
motivation be for doing so?

Keats makes frequent references to ancient Greek mythological figures and places in his poetry. He
likely does so in order to anchor his work in an ancient tradition, and to work within the
classicizing poetic traditions of his own day.

7. How does dreaminess play a role in Keats's poems, and what concept of his does such
dreaminess reflect?

Dreaminess -- a state that opens "Ode to a Nightingale" facilitates the creative impulse. Negative
capability, the pursuit of the beautiful and mysterious in the absence of logical explanation, is also made
possible by moods that are dreamy and nonjudgmental.