SOURCE: "Christian Skepticism in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,'' in From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, edited by Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom, Oxford University Press, 1965, pp. 439-52.

In the following essay, Boulger interprets The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as a reaffirmation of faith in a natural order despite apparent chaos.

For many years the essay of Robert Penn Warren on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner [i.e., "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: a poem of pure imagination" (1946)] held wide acceptance. Warren pointed out that the two major functions of the poem were the creation of a sacramental universe by means of creative imagination and the operation within this universe of the Christian pattern of Fall and Redemption. The nature of both functions was inferred partially from outside sources, Biographia Literaria, "The Friend," and "Aids to Reflection," but...