The Mariner Has Wi-Fi: Postmodernism Ruins (or Saves?) Coleridge

To preface... brain farts ARE a thing people! Soooooooooo: ⤵️

Let’s face it. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is dramatic. There’s an albatross, some slimy sea creatures, undead sailors, ghost ships, and a guy who can’t stop trauma-dumping on wedding guests. It’s the literary equivalent of someone hijacking your Uber Pool to confess all their sins for seven straight hours. But here’s the twist: what if we stop treating this ancient sea-ghost poem like a morality tale and start reading it like the broken, self-aware, kinda glitchy narrative it actually is? Practically postmodernism, where meaning collapses, irony reigns, and the narrator might just be stuck in a never-ending, storytelling TikTok loop. Through a Postmodern lens, Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner is a cursed podcast that never ends. To prove it, we can mash it up with E.E. Cummings’ love poem without rules, Ry Book Suraski’s visual commentary on beauty and violence (it’s an airplane btw), and Gorillaz’s animated skate session, Humility. You’ll never see that bird, or poetry, the same way again.

💧🤯 Thirst Trap: Water, Water, and More Water... Plus Nowhere to Think

Take the iconic moment when the Mariner laments being “surrounded by water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink” (Coleridge ll. 121-122). Originally, this line uses irony, repetition, and vivid imagery to emphasize the Mariner’s despair as he’s surrounded by endless water but dying of thirst. Classic Romantic nature as a sublime move. But Postmodernism loves irony and contradiction. This line, viewed through a postmodern lens, is about the failure of

perception and language. Water = life, right? Not here. In fact, abundance becomes deprivation. This unstable, contradictory meaning is what Postmodernism thrives on. Now, throw in E.E. Cummings’ [i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]. Cummings demolishes form, tossing out punctuation and capital letters. His emotional vulnerability mirrors the Mariner’s isolation, but instead of a cursed sea, it’s a poem adrift in an arrangement of words. Both texts are communicating emotional truths while actively undermining language as a stable system. In both, we can’t trust words to work the way we expect them to. Welcome to emotional shipwreck.

🕊️💥 Bird Drop: When Symbolism Has a Midlife Crisis

Now let’s address the bird in the room. The symbolic moment when “the Albatross fell off, and sank like lead into the sea.” (Coleridge ll. 291-292). Symbolism 101 says the albatross = guilt. When it sinks, the Mariner is temporarily freed. But the simile (“like lead”) implies heaviness; the guilt may be off his neck, but it’s not gone. In a Postmodern view, this destabilizes symbolism. If the bird means so many different things (blessing, burden, scapegoat), then does it really

mean anything at all? Enter Ry Book Suraski’s Decoration of an Airplane, a warplane painted with peaceful, colorful flowers. It’s a perfect example of Postmodern intertextual irony. Like the albatross, the airplane flips between symbols like destruction, decoration, beauty, and absurdity. Both texts invite us not to trust symbols as fixed. They force us to

ask: are we making meaning, or are we just decorating machines of violence with flowers (or birds)?

🧟‍♂️💔 Peace, Love, and Zombie Sailors: Moral Lessons Nobody Asked For 😐

By the end of Coleridge’s tale, the Mariner tries to tie everything up with a neat little bow, saying, “He prayeth best, who loveth best, all things both great and small.”(Coleridge ll. 615-616). Sounds wholesome, right? Like the kind of thing you’d cross-stitch onto a pillow in a Victorian Etsy shop🧵🪡. This tidy little rhyme is meant to be the moral of the story, a closure moment. But hold on. The poem just put us through ghost ships, zombie crewmates, and eternal guilt monologues, and now we get a nursery rhyme about love? Postmodernism basically says: “Hard pass.” This is a classic case of the destruction of moral absolutes. The Mariner’s forced moral sounds hollow after everything we just experienced. Gorillaz’s Humility plays with a similar feeling. The animated lead singer, 2-D, is endlessly skating through cheerful music, but he’s visibly empty inside. The aesthetics don’t match the vibe, just like Coleridge’s clean moral doesn’t match the chaos. The result? The reader and/or viewer is left uncertain, asking: Was that redemption, or just a narrative trick to make us feel like we got closure? Jeeeeez, harsh.

💻⚠️🌀 Meaning.com Has Crashed: A Postmodern Farewell

When we apply a Postmodernist perspective to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, everything comes undone. Language lies. Morality crumbles. Symbols melt. The poem becomes a funhouse mirror of meaning, not a clear lesson about guilt and redemption, but a strange, self-aware ritual that keeps restarting. Like a ghost ship set on autoplay. 👻🚢

Golden Nugget: Maybe the bird wasn’t the curse. Maybe it was our belief that stories have to mean something at all. 🤔