How Do You Respond to the Idea That the Most Terrifying Aspect of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner Is the Game of Dice Played by Death and Life in Death?

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How do you respond to the idea that the most terrifying aspect of the mariner’s experience is the game of dice played by Death and Life in Death? There is no doubt that the Rime of the Ancient Mariner is in parts a horrifying tale riddled with elements of the supernatural, Gothic themes and terror. However out of all the gothic and terrifying experiences that the Mariner takes us, as a reader, through in his tale it can be argued that many of them are the most terrifying and abject in the whole of the Rime. During their journey, the ship encounters the supernatural and the unnatural. Particularly in part two, the water becomes like “Witch’s oil” the reference to witchcraft could have been seen as predominantly terrifying at the time as the fashion of “Witch hunts” was still rife in the era of publishing; particularly in Eastern Europe and North America, and would have been a practice still in the memory of previous generations. Additionally, at the height of Romanticism in which nature is presented to be a largely wonderful thing the idea of nature becoming so wrong and terrifying could be seen as one of the most abject parts aspects of the mariner’s tale. After killing the albatross the mariner and the sailors begin to rejoice at his actions as the fog clears away in part two, however, they become becalmed and suffer from thirst and hunger now blaming the mariner for their circumstances by hanging the Albatross around his neck. In part three a skeleton ship appears and it seems there is hope that the mariner and the crew will be saved, however they cannot call out to the ship as they have “Black lips baked” an incredibly gothic image that can possibly be compared to Shelley’s Frankenstein and when he describes his creation as having a “shrivelled complexion and straight black lips”. This image of the crew near death that seems to relate to the gothic idea of

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