Rime of the ancient mariner - Part 5, 6, and 7

Supernatural elements and spirits

Part 5: in this and the following parts, there are the most supernatural elements. Here the spell begins to break and the spirits of the dead sailors who stand up and start sailing the ship to take the ancient mariner back to home.

Farewell, farewell! but this I tell

To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!

He prayeth well, who loveth well

Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth best

All things both great and small;

For the dear God who loveth us,

He made and loveth all.”

The Mariner, whose eye is bright,

Whose beard with age is hoar,

Is gone; and now the Wedding-Guest

Turned from the bridegroom’s door.

He went like one that hath been stunned,

And is of sense forlorn:

A sadder and a wiser man

He rose the morrow morn.

Farewell and moral message

This is the farewell of the mariner to the wedding-guest and it gives him something to learn: who loves everyone (because we are all God’s creatures and God loves everyone) and prays, lives better. It’s a message of peace, reconciliation, respect, a typical Christian message, there’s a moral message. This message is find by some critics out of place if you consider what happened before. But it’s like a message that gives a last realistic tone to the story, to help the reader understanding it and stay in that world. Through the wedding-guest this message is given to all the readers.

Transformation of the wedding-guest

Then the mariner goes, without explanations (just like when he arrived) and there’s a twist: the wedding-guest, who was before impatient to return to the wedding feast (part 1) now doesn’t take part to it (“Turned from the bridegroom’s door.”). In the last stanza there’s the new description of the wedding-guest, who has been stunned: this experience was too much for him, he starts coming back to reality, but the next day he wakes up sadder and wiser. But now there’s a question: the mariner has to tell this story again and again but how does he choose him? He chooses him because he was impatient and he was the one who needed it the most, he was maybe young, thoughtless, with the only aim to have fun and he doesn’t know anything about the sadness of reality. So after he listens to this story, he totally changes: he’s wiser because he has learnt something from the story, he’s no more impatient and careless; and he’s sadder because now he understands better the complex human reality and he’s come in touch with something he has had no notions before: in the world there are not only beauty, happiness etc, but also bad sides, such as pain, death, sufferance, the evil, something he didn’t have experience of before.