«How a Ship, having passed the Line, was driven by storms». The metaphorical journey of The Ancient Mariner

The article examines Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s use of navigation in his Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), in which the motionless ship becomes a metaphor for alienation and Christian suffering. In the poem the question of the divine is constantly reiterated, thus becoming the centre of both the author’s aesthetic theory and poetics. As a natural philosopher, Coleridge associates divine wrath with the concept of the Sublime and explores the themes of sin and repentance through a physical, spiritual and introspective journey that ends in redemption. In the poem ‘landscape’ rhymes with ‘mindscape’ and the ship in the open sea becomes a complex religious, cultural, political and social metaphor.