The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Broken Down

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Coleridge uses many writing techniques to tell the Ancient Mariner’s story. Coleridge uses these writing techniques in order to create emotions, quicken the pace, build suspense and ultimately tell the story of the mysterious Ancient Mariner. The beginning of the Ancient Mariner is interesting because Coleridge uses a scene to begin telling the story. Coleridge sets up a scenario of three men walking to a wedding then a ‘Grey-beard loon’ stops one of three to tell them his story. Coleridge could have just started the poem with, ‘There was a ship’, but he decided he needed to put forward the fact that the story of the Ancient Mariner was so fascinating and compelling that the wedding guest was unable to move from his seat because he was so captivated by the Ancient Mariner’s ‘glittering eye’. Coleridge uses structural devices such as interruptions within part one. As the Ancient Mariner begins telling his story to the wedding guest Coleridge interrupts him with something that the wedding guest does or says. Coleridge may have done this to show how, more and more involved the wedding guest is getting with the story. In the beginning the wedding guest wants to get away from the Mariner, ‘Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon’, however, later on in part one the wedding guest seems to have forgotten about the wedding, ‘God save thee, ancient Mariner,’. By the wedding guest slowly caring less and less about the wedding it emphasises how hypnotic the Ancient Mariner’s ‘glittering eye’ is and it also suggests that the Mariner is otherworldly because he has the wedding guest completely hypnotised and unable to leave the stone seat to go to an important wedding that he is part of. Coleridge also uses interruption to build suspense and empathise something significant. In the last stanza Coleridge interrupts the Mariner, it seems as the story
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