Modern Man In Coleridge's The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner

greatest scientist of all times. Just before Galileo’s death, during 1638-39, Milton had visited him in Italy. Therefore, he could speak of Galileo as “the Tuscan artist” who “through optic glass views [the moon’s orb] at evening from the top of Fesole or in Valdarno, to descry new lands, rivers or mountains in her spotty globe.” Milton molded new images and figures of speech from the material newly acquired through cognitive science. He had always kept abreast of contemporary natural philosophy and was thoroughly informed of the latest in scientific knowledge.

The French Revolution, essentially bourgeois in character, had blasted not only the Bastile, but also the bastions of Feudalism. Along with it the Revolution gave birth to a new class

He exploits the resources of nature and the labor power of the worker for the production of goods for market consumption. Various recent natural calamities and climatic changes like global warming, rising sea level, landslides, storms and tempests indicate that Nature will not be always tolerant, but will retaliate vengefully. Coleridge had allegorically prophesied this in his “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. The Ancient Mariner is a representative of modern man who insensitively causes injury to the beauty of Nature and to its beautiful creatures. The Mariner had killed an Albatross, the benevolent spirit of Nature. The reward of sin is death. But in this case it was more than death. The Mariner had to live through a life-in death, a series of unnatural experiences, excruciatingly bewildering and agonizing. All natural phenomena turned against him. All elemental forces of Nature - the sea, the sun, the air and the water - were inimical and they inflicted physical torture and spiritual agony on his body and soul. Coleridge’s poetic warning, given in terms of the supernatural, is overtly

The poem, Sohrab and Rustom, an expression of the “unconscious imaginative projection of the conflict” between a father and the son, has no biographical validation.8 The poet-son adored his teacher- father. He had imbibed much of his father’s religious faith and moral discipline. There is no biographical ground for any ideological conflict between the two. Then what is the source of the apparent conflict between the father and the son of the poem? In fact, the conflict is to be found in the two qualitatively different social realities that they were destined to mediate morally. Dr.Arnold stuck to the conventional religious morality of an earlier generation with more self-assurance, whereas his son found it rather difficult to do so as his world was more violently shaken by the cultural ethos of industrial capitalism. Arnold could not but respond to the impalpable and invidious demands of the middle-class (bourgeois) ideology. While resisting it, he had to allow himself to be tamed by it.

Arnold’s denigration of the three classes in Culture and Anarchy (1869) as the Barbarians, the Philistines and the Populace, based on their responsiveness to the problems of culture, is replete with bourgeois bias. In a confessional manner he speaks