'All this 'pother about a bird' : consciousness and conscience in The Rime of The Ancient Mariner by S.T. Coleridge

• Main Author: Remblance, Michelle
• Published: University of East Anglia 2011
• Subjects: 821
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.572059

This PhD consists of a novel entitled Shooting the Albatross and a thesis entitled 'All This ‘Pother About a Bird': Consciousness and Conscience in The Rime of The Ancient Mariner by S.T.Coleridge. The novel is an interpretation of The Rime of The Ancient Mariner in the context of the poem’s forerunner The Wanderings Of Cain. The thesis is a discussion of my interpretation, in the context of a range of academic readings of the poem. In Part One of my thesis I discuss how the albatross came to be incorporated into the poem, what the albatross has signified to various critics in the last two hundred years, and what range of explanations have been given for the shooting of the bird. I then offer my own examination of the shooting of the albatross, as a conscious act of the diseased will, discussing how and why I have incorporated this interpretation into Part One of my novel. In Part Two of my thesis I discuss Part Two of my novel with reference to Coleridge’s poem as a journey from a state of the ‘impure will,’ or a diseased consciousness and disconnection from God, towards temporary reconnection and increased consciousness through the act of blessing the snakes. Part Three of the novel is discussed in the third part of the thesis, where I examine critical reactions to the message in The Rime of The Ancient Mariner ‘to love all creatures great and small’. I discuss my interpretation of the message in relation to the novel, and in the context of twenty-first century environmental concerns.