Rhetorical Structure of Superstitious Images in Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Rufaidah Kamal Abdulmajeed

doi:10.5539/ijel.v7n4p138

Abstract

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge was written in a way to inspire fear and create a somber, dark and terrifying atmosphere to attract the readers’ attention and to steer the attention of the readers to the themes of supernatural events and deep superstitions, thus highlighting these salient themes.The main aim of this study is to highlight the superstitious images in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and analyse them according to Hoey’s (1983) Problem-Solution Pattern of rhetorical structure of discourse analysis by showing how certain lexical items can signal the narrative structure of the whole texts. The discourse analysis of the stanzas that carry superstitious images shows that this theory is applicable not only to sentences but to poems as well. Stanzas as grammatical units with complete thoughts can be analysed as well since they have the same narrative structure. The results show that all the stanzas, the subject of the analysis, have the rhetorical narrative structure components. They are namely; situation, problem, response, evaluation whether positive or negative.

Highlights

The Romantic poets were very interested in imagination and they made use of all aspects of life that arouse the imagination including gothic elements of horror and fear and suspense
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge was written in a way to inspire fear and create a somber, dark and terrifying atmosphere to attract the readers’ attention and to steer the attention of the readers to the themes of supernatural events and deep superstitions, highlighting these salient themes
The main aim of this study is to highlight the superstitious images in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and analyse them according to Hoey’s (1983) Problem-Solution Pattern of rhetorical structure of discourse analysis by showing how certain lexical items can signal the narrative structure of the whole texts

Summary

Introduction

The Romantic poets were very interested in imagination and they made use of all aspects of life that arouse the imagination including gothic elements of horror and fear and suspense. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner has gothic elements, they are used to highlight the moral of the story. The moral stresses the idea that loving God’s creatures in the world of nature is the way to salvation. In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge shows non-human images to inspire fear and even horror in the readers. He argues in this poem that bad deeds and guilt should be followed by justice. Guilt and justice are represented by supernatural phenomena and superstitious images

Objectives

Results

Conclusion