The A to Z of English - The power of love and respect

WE are treading on not just difficult times but also on dangerous paths with threats looming and hanging over us like dark clouds waiting to unleash its fury.
There have been blasts and murders the past weeks that during the Raya break many of us decided that home was a safe bet.
What is going wrong with the world today? I would surmise lack of or absence of love and respect as the cause of people going on a rampage, killing and hurting others.
Amid all these, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner came to mind and I remember writing an essay, "The Power of Love and Respect for all of God's Creations as a Guide to Salvation", discussing at length what caused the Mariner's grief and how love gave him the deliverance. Perhaps love is all we need to set things right, but where do we begin?
The poem is one of Coleridge's most accomplished imaginative poetic works. It is primarily about human guilt and repentance where the writer deals with the supernatural and anything that is beyond our capacity to make sense is locked away with no answers.
The poem arises out of the subconscious mind and evokes a magical and mysterious mood. I would think that the triumph of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is in its presentation of a series of incredible events through a method of narration which makes them not only convincing and exciting but also a real criticism of life.
When reading the poem, the reader has to suspend his disbelief and not question the credibility of the narrative and only then can the poem make sense, in an illogical way of course.
Briefly, the poem recounts the story of an old sailor, who during a voyage kills a large sea bird called the albatross. He is punished for his wanton act and experiences extreme hardship and alienation from God and man and is tormented by guilt.
The theme of sin and redemption are explicit in the poem where man is made out as a sinful creature, but redemption awaits him if he repents his wrongdoing and performs penance. This theme manifests itself when after the Mariner commits the sin by killing the albatross, guilt hounds him in the form of strange phenomena.
It is during one terrifying experience that he has a change of heart and repents. After confessing to the Hermit, he carries out a penance, which is to travel the world to tell his tale to strangers.
The poem can be read as a simple adventure narrative or as a complex study of nature of good against evil. It deals with the psychology of crime and punishment and emphasises the power of repentance and love.
The poem is one profoundly involved with the theme of love as the all-encompassing power and the extract below supports that:
Love's Efficacious Power
He prayeth best, who loveth best
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.
This is the moral of the poem that the Mariner wants to convey to his listeners when he tells his story; Love all of God's creations, big and small.
The poem is one of the most talked about English poems and it comes with a fair share of quirks and paradoxes.
The old sailor who stops a wedding guest to tell him his story raises many questions but as I warned earlier, there will be no answers to the obvious questions.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was published in 1798 in Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems that essentially launched the movement known as British Romanticism.
A lyrical ballad, by the way, is a poem that combines story-telling and intense expressions of subjective and emotional experience presented as lyrics. The collection marked a pretty radical departure from the standard poetry of the time.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner has several trademarks that would later become associated with Romanticism which contains elements of the supernatural, a deep sense of history, lots of dramatic images of nature, formal experimentation, and an interest in conversational language, among others.
The quote, "Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink", is coined by Coleridge in this poem and it simply means despite being surrounded by something, we may not benefit from it. Just as we are surrounded by people who lack the human nature and characteristics, what use are such people except to bring about devastation?
Comments: letters@thesundaily.com