The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Now that he has undergone a spiritual awakening, and has learned to appreciate the beauty of nature, the Mariner is also able to pray and to fall asleep: “O sleep, it is a gentle thing / Belov’d from pole to pole! / To Mary-queen the praise be yeven / She sent the gentle sleep from heaven / That slid into my soul’ (13). As the Mariner sleeps, he dreams that it’s raining; when he wakes up, he finds that it actually is. He drinks and quenches his thirst. However, after he has finished drinking, and is feeling quenched, the Mariner sees that the wind is becoming wild. The dead sailors reanimate; they do not speak or move their eyes, and instead start working, and begin to sail the ship. The Wedding Guest is horrified at this revelation, but the Mariner tells him that it is angels, not demons, that have restored the sailors’ dead bodies.

The Mariner then tells the Wedding Guest that when the sun rose, the angels also rose from the sailors’ bodies and were flying and singing like a choir of birds. When they stop, the ships sails onward, despite there being no wind.