SOURCE: "The Poem, the Gloss and the Critic: Discourse and Subjectivity in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" in Forum for Modern Language Studies, Vol. XXVI, No. 3, July, 1990, pp. 259-71.

In the following essay, Davies claims that, contrary to the tendencies of most critics, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner cannot and need not be entirely unified and unambiguous.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which has been studied with great enthusiasm and ingenuity by many critics as a moral poem—an imaginative adventure with a moral lesson—seems actually to provide incessant problems for these critics in its refusal to finally unify to a point where all the poem's elements serve one particular reading. From the beginning the poem posed difficulties for those who strove to find in it a coherent relation of the parts to the whole. Indeed, Wordsworth himself, in his notorious criticism of the...