In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), Coleridge strains the limits of aesthetic apprehension and provides a hermeneutical frame within which the poem can be read and interpreted. The tension between hermeneutics and aesthetics is what prevents the poem from being reduced to an entirely aesthetic performance or assimilated to an unambiguous hermeneutical paradigm. Moreover, Coleridge’s poem displays the condition of fictivity, the phenomenological neighbor of aesthetic resemblance. The poet is implicitly, if not explicitly, engaged in an act of hermeneutical retrieval, both formally and ontologically. However, the tension between fictivity and hermeneutical resolution is what generates aesthetic dissonance and produces uncanny effects. The nodal assumption of this analysis is that the fictive provides the condition that enables the imagination to project a certain view of the world. However, the fictive works against naturalization, thus suggesting the role of the imagination in the creation of an alternative reality that derives from the possibility of correcting an aberrant situation and attesting to moral concerns. The conclusion attempts to explain how Coleridge employs the devices of narrative to convey a sense of timelessness that is consistent with the religious tenor of his poem and remains compatible with the hermeneutical reading.