Part 4 of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner

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How does Coleridge tell the story in Part IV of the poem? At the opening of the 4th part, Coleridge uses the narrative voice of the wedding guest to express the supernatural appearance of the mariner. The mariner is compared to a landscape, which is as long as the ‘ribbed sea sand.’ His metaphorical presentation of the mariner suggests his strange appearance after he has endured the strange world of the ‘silent sea.’ The power of the mariner is explored through the wedding guest fearing ‘thy glittering eye; in the second stanza of this section. The mariner’s distortion is shown through the wedding guest describing the ‘skinny hand, so brown’ which suggests that the mariner has been physically distorted by his experience of this strange and supernatural world. Therefore, at the start of this section, Coleridge uses the frightened narrative voice of the wedding guest to express the mariner’s supernatural appearance. As the section progresses, Coleridge uses ambiguous description to express the hellish experience of the mariner, having been disconnected from the divine. The repetition of ‘alone’ creates a sense of the mariner’s isolation in this ‘rotting sea’ after his shipmates have died. Coleridge described the ‘thousand slimy things’ which are the only living creatures left with the mariner after the death of his crew. The ambiguous description of them as ‘things’ suggests that this world is so supernatural that it cannot be described in detail. The repetition of ‘thousand’ reinforces this supernatural image, implying that these ‘things’ are a huge force. Furthermore, the description of the ship’s shadow as burning a ‘still and awful red’ aids the creation of the supernatural world, adding ‘hellish’ connotations, as if the ship has been tarnished by the devil. In addition, the personification of the ‘water snakes’ which ‘moved in tracks of elfish white’ creates
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