The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

The wedding guest is an important part of Coleridge's strategy here, in part a stand-in for the reader. Look at his speeches. How does he react to the Mariner's tale as it unfolds? How do his reactions compare to your own?

First the wedding guest is completely against whatever it is this “grey-beard loon” has to tell him. Once the Mariner “hath his will,” or rather has the Wedding Guest mesmerized. The next time the Guest speaks it’s in fear of the Mariner. We as the reader would fear him as well, consider he had just told his tale up to the point where his shipmates had just fallen down dead “With heavy thump, a lifeless lump,//They dropped down one by one.” Without knowing the rest, it is easy to assume that the Mariner is dead and either a walking dead-man or a ghost. Neither are good signs. I’d be rather bothered by that as well, but I’d like to think I wouldn’t jump to conclusions, but that much is hard to say. The Mariner is “long, and lank, and brown,//As is the ribbed sea-sand.” and has a “skinny hand” that could easily be associated with a corpse at this point. Later, the Wedding guest again claims to fear the Mariner, and that’s rightfully so, but the Mariner puts him at ease swiftly. The fear is essentially for the same reasons as before, there was just a scary part in the tale where the Mariner’s crewmates rose from the dead.“The mariners all ‘gan work the ropes,//Where they were wont to do;//They raised their limbs like lifeless tools” and honestly, the fact that “Twas not those souls that fled in pain… But a troop of sprits blest” would not comfort me much. We see in the end that the Mariner had to tell someone his story. The Wedding Guest might not be happy for it, but he is taught from the amazing story and will take this lesson to heart.
When I see the Wedding Guest and the Mariner, I think of a young person being bothered by a homeless man for money. The Mariner is much more than just some ragged man we learn as we listen, but the Wedding Guest as any of us would be is reluctant and worries that this will be nothing but madness. In the end, it might be a story of madness with spirits and bodies come to life, but this storyteller has learned a lesson that was hard on him mentally and physically. This is more than he would have experienced at the joyous event of his friends’ marriage.