Aquatic Imagination in Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: An Ecocritical Reading

Abstract

This article reads Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ as a poem in which the sea is more than a setting for spiritual trial: it is a material environment that shapes perception, exposes human dependence, and unsettles the assumption that nonhuman life exists for human use. Bringing ecocriticism into dialogue with the Blue Humanities and environmental ethics, the study examines the poem’s maritime world through three linked movements: the sublime and animate seascape; the disruption produced by the Mariner’s unexplained killing of the albatross; and the ethical reorientation associated with his spontaneous blessing of the water-snakes. The method is qualitative close reading of the 1817 text and its marginal glosses, with attention to imagery, sound, narrative framing, and the poem’s religious and moral vocabulary. The analysis argues that the poem stages ecological relation without becoming a simple allegory of modern environmental science. Its becalmed ship, undrinkable abundance, and putrefying sea render human vulnerability legible, while the Mariner’s changed response to other creatures marks a movement from instrumental perception towards attention and care. Yet the poem’s moral framework remains ambivalent: suffering is narrated through providence, guilt, and penance, and the natural world is not reducible to a contemporary ecological system. The article’s contribution is to define “aquatic imagination” as a reading practice that attends to water’s material force, narrative agency, and ethical implications while resisting anachronistic claims. The conclusion considers how this reading can inform environmental humanities teaching and contemporary discussions of marine responsibility without treating literary imagery as empirical evidence.