{"id":88,"date":"2023-02-03T20:21:01","date_gmt":"2023-02-03T20:21:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/?p=88"},"modified":"2023-02-07T20:00:52","modified_gmt":"2023-02-07T20:00:52","slug":"why-even-include-the-wedding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/2023\/02\/03\/why-even-include-the-wedding\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Even Include the Wedding?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Although the setting of the wedding in \u201cThe Rime of the Ancyent Marinere\u201d almost seems unnecessary, it actually serves to emphasize the extraordinariness of the mariner\u2019s story by being such a mundane or ordinary event.\u00a0 At the beginning of the poem, Coleridge writes that, \u201cThe Guests are met, the Feast is set – \/ May\u2019st hear the merry din.\u2019\/\/ But still he holds the wedding-guest – \/ \u2018There was a Ship\u2019, quoth he\u201d (lines 7-9).\u00a0 The wedding is about to begin.\u00a0 Everything is \u201cset,\u201d and any minute the bride will walk down the aisle, yet the mariner prevents the wedding guest from entering the venue with the \u201cmerry din\u201d and excitement and begins his story.\u00a0 Coleridge places the moment the wedding is about to officially commence alongside the moment the mariner begins his story, and the wedding guest is left with no choice but to listen.\u00a0 Coleridge\u2019s decision to do this implies that between a celebration of matrimony and a story of a ship, the latter is more important.\u00a0 The audience as well as the guest who is supposed to be at the wedding is meant to hear the story instead of the couple\u2019s vows.\u00a0 The importance of the story is further proved when \u201cThe Bride hath paced into the hall\u201d and yet the wedding guest \u201ccannot chuse but hear\u201d the mariner\u2019s story (lines 37 and 42).\u00a0 This story takes precedent even over the entrance of the bride, which is an important event that no wedding guest would normally be ok with missing.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The reason the wedding is so mundane compared to the mariner\u2019s story is that it lacks the sublime present in the recounting of the mariner at sea.\u00a0 Before the bride\u2019s entrance, the mariner had informed the wedding guest of the sun that \u201ccame up on the left, \/ Out of the sea came he; \/ And he shone bright, and on the right \/ Went down into the Sea\u201d (lines 29-32).\u00a0 The picture painted by the mariner encapsulates the sublime, describing the rising and setting of the sun as it shines onto the ship and the sea while establishing the direction the boat sailed.\u00a0 The wedding guest is enthralled by the sublime, and the bride, though \u201cRed as a rose,\u201d cannot compare to the image of the sun glittering on the sea as the ship sails southward (line 38).\u00a0 Readers see that nature overpowers human constructions (the wedding) because the guest is already hooked on the mariner\u2019s story just by the description of the movement of the sun.\u00a0 The wedding represents the epitome and the peak of human and societal constructions, and the sublime represents the peak of nature, or the opposite of the wedding.\u00a0 Then, the two are written to occur at the exact same time so as to force a decision to be made about which one is more important.\u00a0 And in Coleridge’s poem, nature is.<\/span><\/p>\n

The inclusion of the sublime in this poem is significant because it provides an example of the deep appreciation for nature and the sublime the romantics had.\u00a0 The continuous depictions of nature that evoke awe in the mariner\u2019s story reveal the positive inclination romantic poets had towards nature, and such depictions can be seen again and again in other works.\u00a0 Not just Coleridge, but many romantic poets, authors, and artists repeatedly make use of the sublime in their work.\u00a0 In \u201cThe Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,\u201d the significance of the sublime is played up as it is contrasted against the normal, ordinary wedding service.\u00a0 The story the mariner tells continues to be extraordinary with more inclusions of the sublime, and the wedding continues to be customary, so much so that readers forget this setting of the poem until the end of it.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Although the setting of the wedding in \u201cThe Rime of the Ancyent Marinere\u201d almost seems unnecessary, it actually serves to emphasize the extraordinariness of the mariner\u2019s story by being such a mundane or ordinary event.\u00a0 At the beginning of the poem, Coleridge writes that, \u201cThe Guests are met, the Feast is set – \/ May\u2019st … Continue reading Why Even Include the Wedding?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4747,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spring-2023"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4747"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}