How The Rime of the Ancient Mariner drew on Genesis
A documented line of influence: Samuel Taylor Coleridge demonstrably engaged Moses’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Genesis
Moses · c. 550 BCE
BibleThe influenced
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Samuel Taylor Coleridge · 1798
PoetsRelevance
8/10
On The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’s page
- The Mariner is a sea-going Cain — and that's no accident
- Coleridge had been trying to retell Genesis 4 directly in The Wanderings of Cain; when that collapsed ("broke up in a laugh"), The Rime was written in its place
- The whole machinery — innocent blood shed, the mark of guilt, the curse of endless wandering — comes straight out of Cain's exile in Genesis
On Genesis’s page
- Genesis 4 — Cain marked, condemned to wander for shedding innocent blood — is the buried template under Coleridge's poem
- Coleridge first tried to retell it straight as The Wanderings of Cain; that scheme, by his own account, "broke up in a laugh: and the Ancient Mariner was written instead"
- The Mariner is a Cain at sea — kill the innocent albatross, wear the mark, wander the earth telling your tale