In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an “ancient Mariner” stops an innocent Wedding-Guest in the midst of his procession into the wedding hall with his “glittering eye,” and begins to tell the young man a story about a ship and the disastrous journey the Mariner takes. A theme of storytelling develops throughout the poem, and the moral of the story conveys that: “Storytelling, if the rhetoric is robust enough, can propagandize the victim, and make him or her perceive life, and human experiences differently than before the story.” In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, there are several moments where Coleridge uses persuasive language and composition diction to make the Wedding-Guest, and even the reader feel like they
