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'By the end of the poem, justice has been done.' To what extent do you agree with this view of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?

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The poem is ambiguous as to what rules, if any, its protagonist has broken. The ultimate effect of this ambiguity is to prompt readers to scrutinise the concept of justice itself.

The poem disrupts any attempt to explain its protagonist's actions straightforwardly as a sin against the Christian God. Coleridge achieves this by utilising a mixture of Christian and pagan mythology. Most obviously, this is seen when the mariners greet the albatross “as if it had been a Christian soul”. This is consistent with nautical folklore which suggested that albatrosses embodied the souls of dead sailors and therefore deserved respect. However, such beliefs have no biblical basis and any claim that non-human creatures have souls could be considered blasphemous. The Bible does not condemn the slaughter of animals and, according to Captain James Cook, sailors ate albatrosses if hunger necessitated. Moreover, it is the pagan “Polar Spirit” who declares that the Mariner “hath penance more to do” and invokes “him who died upon the Cross.” Coleridge's marginal notes also refer to the “angelic power” that propels his ship. This synthesis of paganism and Christianity could imply that the Mariner has broken a cosmic law that encompasses different religious mythologies. This ensures that we cannot appeal to the authority of a single god when discussing if justice has been served. These voices could also be projections of the Mariner's subconscious, given that he is in a trance when he hears them. This possibility further complicates any attempt to view his suffering as the direct consequence of the Christian God's wrath.

William Empson proposes that Coleridge “held a heretical belief that all life is one”. The poem's conclusion appears to corroborate this view: “He prayeth best, who loveth best / All things both great and small.” The syntactical parallelism of this sentence establishes a loose equation between an attitude of benign stewardship towards animals and a path to Christian salvation. Empson suggests that this equation is 'convenient' for Coleridge in making pagan ideas palatable to a Christian readership. The degree to which the Mariner is punished for sinning against God or for transgressing a natural law remains ambiguous. The trope of the 'fog' through which the albatross emerges may serve a symbolic function in relation to these ideas. Just as the sailors must navigate through literal murkiness, so we must pick a cautious path through the poem's ambiguities. We are offered no “lighthouse top” in the form of a holy text to aid us.

The poem's unspecified nautical setting also deprives us of the opportunity of appealing to legal authority when answering this question. We cannot reasonably discuss the Mariner's action as a crime against the laws which govern a particular territory. The poem therefore forces us to abandon discussing justice in terms defined by a codified law. Coleridge does, however, invoke the idea of the rule of law in its depiction of the mariners' reaction to the killing. The inconsistency of the crew's actions and beliefs is exemplified by their reaction changing twice during the poem's second section. They initially condemn the protagonist, before stating “'Twas right ... such birds to slay.” Finally, they greet him with “evil looks” and hang the Albatross about his neck. Coleridge's implication appears to be that punishment is a means of satisfying public desire to create scapegoats during a crisis. None of the other crew-members are differentiated in terms of character, emphasising their status as a collective representation of mob-justice. Their only consistent principle is to seek to blame a living creature for their suffering. Initially, they confer this status on the albatross but when that proves ineffective to their cause, punish the Ancient Mariner instead. The physical proximity of the Mariner and the dead bird emphasises this parallel: both are victims of scapegoating. The substitution of the cross around the protagonists' neck for the albatross's corpse prompts our contemplation of the function of formal punishments. Is its implication that the Mariner has sinned and should no longer seek salvation through God? Is it a means of ensuring that he never forgets the victim of his transgression? Is it simply a method of public humiliation, like the crown of thorns with which Christ was goaded? In ascribing no motive to the crew's behaviour, the poem allows us to consider all these possibilities as viable motives. Their moral inconsistency, coupled with the disproportionately spiteful nature of their punishment, can be considered as a coded expression of Coleridge's revulsion at the Reign of Terror that prevailed in post-revolutionary France: a representation of how an angry mob's conception of justice is rash and ill-considered, rather than the product of moral principle. The random nature of the exercise of justice is further exemplified by Life-in-Death winning the prize of determining the protagonist's fate at the roll of a die. Whereas man-made justice is presented as motivated by a spiteful impulse towards retribution, the course of cosmic justice is decided by chance.

Although Coleridge latterly complained of the “obtrusion of moral sentiment” onto his poem, it resists reduction to a clear moral message concerning justice. The usual criteria that we might use to determine the justice of an action – particularly the appeal to religious or legal authority – are compromised for reasons that have been explained above. The poem has, however, forced us into such a visceral contemplation of suffering, particularly that of the protagonist, that we are, almost inevitably, forced into considering how it might be alleviated. The poem's implication is that the inconsistent superstitions of the mariners and appeals to the competing authorities of Christian and pagan gods ought not to be confused with true justice, which is the result of the exercise of agapeistic principles.