What I am suggested about "The Rime" isn't the most obvious interpretation nor is it one everyone can accept, since there is a tradition that sees the Mariner as a demonic character whose blessing of the water snakes links him to the most infamous snake in the Western tradition--the serpent in the Garden of Eden--but the idea is a development of the notion, which was put forth by M. H. Abrams in his classic study Natural Supernaturalism, that the Mariner learns "the lesson of community," though we need to add to Abram's insight the theory that communal bonds are formed and the integration of the alien is achieved through the act of storytelling and that the lesson the Mariner learns involves nature's community, represented in the poem by the spirits, as well as the human community.
The relationship between storytelling and communal bonding in Coleridge's poem is most clearly expressed at the end of Part V and the beginning of part VI when, as the marginal note observes, "The Polar Spirit's fellow-dæmons [at the equator], the invisible inhabitants of the element, take part in his wrong [when the ship carrying the Mariner is about to enter the northern hemisphere]; and two of them relate, one to the other, that penance long and heavy for the ancient Mariner hath been accorded to the Polar Spirit, who returneth southward." The telling of the story of the Mariner's crime at that point in the poem unites the northern spirits, the characters who are speaking, to the Polar Spirit, whom the Mariner alienated himself from when he shot the albatross, and justifies the northern spirit's participation in carrying out the Mariner's punishment. They come to share the wrong suffered by the Polar Spirit.
That storytelling is integral to the exchange between the northern spirits is of interest because the Mariner's penance also involves the act of telling his story, though the Mariner's tale, as he tells it, concerns not simply his shooting of the albatross but also his blessing of the water snakes, an act that reforms, at least according to one interpretive tradition, the bond he had with nature, represented earlier in the poem by his feeding of the albatross, before he committed his crime. What the blessing of the snakes does not do is reunite him to the human community, of which he is also no longer a part, as is indicated by his and his shipmates' inability to laugh in part III: laughter, at least according to a tradition associated with Aristotle, is what separates humans from the rest of the animals.[1]
The penance then is significant because through telling his story the Mariner reintegrates himself, now an alien figure, into the human community: telling his tale, not to everyone but to significant members of a variety of communities--who enter a hypnotic state while the Mariner speaks so as to be able to more fully absorb the import of the story into their psyche--is the means by which he adds his story to theirs. What, you might ask, does this have to do with environmentalism or the concerns of Wordsworth's sonnet? The answer is simple: the tale is about the consequences of the Mariner alienating himself from nature, as Wordsworth complains we all have been, and how such actions eventually led to his becoming inhuman: its point is that we as humans need to remember that we participate, or should acknowledge that we participate, in nature. The consequences of acting as if we don't are dire, and the tale integrates that idea into humanity's story, or reintigrates it, since it is something that has been forgotten, hence Wordsworth's wish to be "A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn."
I've only offered a short sketch of an interpretation here, one into which other elements of the poem can be integrated, but I'd love to hear your views, whether you object to mine or not. After all, it is through the exchanging of our ideas that we can form interpretive communities.
Notes
[1] The shipmates are not offered the chance at penance that the Mariner gets because they lack constancy. They first side with the Polar Spirit by condemning the Mariner's crime, then praise the Mariner when their ship begins to move, and finally ostracize him when the ship again becomes stranded. They simply reject what they find most convenient to turn away from, showing allegiance to no particular story and thus no community. For the importance of laughter to our humanity, see Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World, where Bakhtin writes, "according to Aristotle, a child does not begin to laugh before the fortieth day after his birth; only from that moment does it become a human being."
