The traditional elements of crime writing—an eerie setting, a terrible crime involving a death and a victim, vengeance, guilt, punishment, and a transgression against morals and/or laws can be applied to Coleridge’s famous long ballad. Indeed, the crime of the Mariner is so dreadful that it has disturbed the spirit world, which wreaks vengeance on him for shooting the sacred albatross, which can be viewed allegorically as a Christian soul. Pride, or "hubris," is the...
The traditional elements of crime writing—an eerie setting, a terrible crime involving a death and a victim, vengeance, guilt, punishment, and a transgression against morals and/or laws can be applied to Coleridge’s famous long ballad. Indeed, the crime of the Mariner is so dreadful that it has disturbed the spirit world, which wreaks vengeance on him for shooting the sacred albatross, which can be viewed allegorically as a Christian soul. Pride, or "hubris," is the Mariner’s flaw, both in thinking he would escape punishment —even though he transgressed against the life force of the albatross—and in embarking on a voyage of discovery, which, in the 1790s, might have been seen as contrary to biblical teaching because of the sailors' attempt to "play God" by embarking on an over-ambitious expedition. The Mariner suffers guilt, as would be portrayed in a crime story, and learns a moral lesson, realizing that he has done a "hellish thing." Although there is no conventional "trial" of the Mariner, the spirit voices act as judges and represent the Mariner’s own guilt.
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