The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the longest poem Samuel Taylor Coleridge completed and one of the most famous poems in English. It opened Lyrical Ballads (1798), the anonymous collection by Coleridge and William Wordsworth that launched English Romanticism. In 625 lines of a deliberately archaic ballad style, it tells how an old sailor — the Mariner — stops a young man on his way to a wedding feast and, holding him with his “glittering eye”, forces him to listen to his tale: of a voyage to the South Pole, of an albatross that followed the ship and that he shot for no reason with his crossbow, of a dead calm and a curse, of a spectral ship crewed by Death and Life-in-Death, of his shipmates dying around him, of his moment of grace when he blessed the water-snakes “unaware”, and of his supernatural voyage home. He has been condemned ever after to wander the land telling his story to those who need to hear it.

It is a nightmare and a parable — a poem about guilt, isolation, the bond between all living things, and the strange compulsion to tell stories. Its phrases have entered the language: “Water, water, every where”, “an albatross around one’s neck”, “a sadder and a wiser man”.

At a glance

Written	November 1797 – March 1798, at Nether Stowey, Somerset
Published	Lyrical Ballads, September 1798; revised 1800; the 1817 version (Sibylline Leaves) adds a prose gloss in the margins
Form	A literary ballad — mostly four-line stanzas of alternating four- and three-stress lines, rhyming abcb, with variations
Origin	Planned on a walk with Wordsworth in November 1797 as a poem to sell to a magazine to pay for a trip; Wordsworth suggested the albatross (from George Shelvocke’s A Voyage Round the World, 1726) and the dead men working the ship

The poem

The Wedding-Guest. Three young men are on their way to a wedding feast when an “ancient Mariner” with a long grey beard and glittering eye stops one of them. The Guest protests — the feast has begun, he is next of kin — but the Mariner holds him “with his glittering eye”, and “The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone: / He cannot choose but hear.”

The Mariner tells how the ship left harbour in cheerful weather and sailed south past the equator until a storm drove it toward the South Pole, into a land of mist, snow and ice: “The ice was here, the ice was there, / The ice was all around: / It cracked and growled, and roared and howled, / Like noises in a swound!” An albatross flew out of the fog; the sailors greeted it “As if it had been a Christian soul”, fed it, and it played with them; the ice split, and a south wind drove them north. For nine days the bird followed the ship. Then the Mariner, his face changing, confesses: “With my cross-bow / I shot the ALBATROSS.”

The sailors at first blame him for killing the bird that brought the breeze; then, when the fog clears and the sun shines, they praise him for killing the bird that brought the fog — and so share his guilt. The ship sails into the Pacific; then the breeze drops. The ship is becalmed under a blazing sun:

Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.

The sea seems to rot; slimy things crawl on it; at night “death-fires” dance and the water burns “like a witch’s oils”. The parched sailors, unable to speak, hang the dead albatross around the Mariner’s neck instead of a cross.

A ship appears on the horizon. The Mariner bites his arm and sucks the blood to wet his throat so that he can cry out “A sail! a sail!” But it is a skeleton ship, moving without wind or tide, its ribs like prison bars against the setting sun. On its deck two figures play dice: Death, and a woman with red lips and yellow hair, skin “as white as leprosy” — “The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she, / Who thicks man’s blood with cold.” She wins the Mariner. The sun sets at once; “At one stride comes the dark.” One by one, his two hundred shipmates turn to look at him with a curse in their eyes and drop down dead, and their souls fly past him “like the whizz of my cross-bow”.

The Wedding-Guest is afraid that the Mariner himself is a ghost. “Fear not, fear not, thou Wedding-Guest! / This body dropt not down.” Alone among the dead, the Mariner endures seven days and nights:

Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea! And never a saint took pity on My soul in agony.

He sees the “slimy things” that live on, while so many beautiful men lie dead; he tries to pray but cannot. Then, in the moonlight, he watches the water-snakes moving in tracks of shining white and coloured fire, “blue, glossy green, and velvet black”, and a spring of love gushes from his heart:

O happy living things! no tongue Their beauty might declare: A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware.

At that moment he can pray, and the albatross falls from his neck “and sank / Like lead into the sea.”

He sleeps, and rain falls. A wind rises, though it does not touch the ship. The dead sailors rise and work the ropes without speaking — inhabited, the gloss says, by “a troop of spirits blest” — and the ship moves on. At dawn the spirits leave the bodies and gather round the mast, singing sweet sounds like a skylark. Beneath the ship, the polar spirit that loved the albatross drives it northward. The Mariner faints and hears two spirit voices discussing him: “Is it he?… By him who died on cross, / With his cruel bow he laid full low / The harmless Albatross… The man hath penance done, / And penance more will do.”

The ship flies home on a supernatural motion. The curse is lifted; the dead men’s eyes still stare at him, but a breeze blows on him alone, “Like a meadow-gale of spring”. He sees his native harbour, the lighthouse-top, the hill, the kirk — “Is this mine own countree?” — and on every corpse stands a seraph, a “man all light”, waving his hand silently.

A pilot, the pilot’s boy and a holy Hermit row out. The ship suddenly sinks with a noise like thunder; the Mariner is pulled into the boat, as if dead. When he moves his lips, the pilot shrieks and falls into a fit, the Hermit prays, and the boy goes mad, laughing: “The Devil knows how to row.” On land, the Mariner begs the Hermit to shrive him, and is seized by “a woful agony” that forces him to tell his tale; then he is free. But the agony returns at intervals:

Since then, at an uncertain hour, That agony returns; And till my ghastly tale is told, This heart within me burns.

I pass, like night, from land to land; I have strange power of speech; That moment that his face I see, I know the man that must hear me: To him my tale I teach.

Music from the wedding feast drifts out. The Mariner says that sweeter than the feast is to walk to church in good company and pray, and gives his moral:

Farewell, farewell! but this I tell To thee, thou Wedding-Guest! He prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all.

The Mariner vanishes. The Wedding-Guest turns away from the bridegroom’s door, stunned: “A sadder and a wiser man, / He rose the morrow morn.”

The gloss

In 1817 Coleridge added a prose commentary in the margins, written in the voice of a seventeenth-century antiquarian scholar, explaining the events and giving them a pious, rational interpretation — “The ancient Mariner inhospitably killeth the pious bird of good omen.” It includes one of the most beautiful passages of prose Coleridge wrote, describing the stars in the sky, “and every where the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.” The gloss adds a second voice that tries, not always successfully, to contain the poem’s strangeness.

Interpretation

Sin and redemption. The poem is readily read as a Christian allegory: the albatross, greeted “as if it had been a Christian soul”, hung around the neck instead of the cross, is a Christ-figure; the Mariner’s crime is a fall; his blessing of the water-snakes is grace, which comes “unaware”, unearned; his penance is endless. Yet the punishment — two hundred men dead for one bird, the dicing of Death and Life-in-Death — seems wildly disproportionate and arbitrary, and the moral (“He prayeth best, who loveth best / All things both great and small”) seems too simple for the nightmare. Coleridge himself told a friend that the poem “had too much” moral for a work of pure imagination, and that it should have had no more moral than the Arabian Nights tale of the merchant who throws away date-stones and kills a genie’s son.

The one life. The poem dramatises Coleridge’s belief in “the one Life within us and abroad”: the Mariner’s crime is a violation of the bond between all living creatures; his healing begins when he recognises the beauty of the despised “slimy things”. Modern ecological readings see it as an early environmental parable.

Guilt and the unconscious. The crime has no motive — the Mariner simply shoots the bird — and the guilt is irrational and inescapable. Critics have connected the poem to Coleridge’s own sense of guilt, his addiction and his later life of wandering; it has been read as prophetic of his fate. It is also a poem about the irrational depths of the mind, explored in Robert Penn Warren’s famous essay “A Poem of Pure Imagination” (1946).

Storytelling. The frame — the compulsion to tell, the glittering eye, the listener who “cannot choose but hear” and leaves changed — makes the poem a parable of literature itself: the story that must be told and the listener transformed by hearing it.

Afterlife

The poem has inspired Gustave Doré’s engravings (1876), Mervyn Peake’s illustrations, Iron Maiden’s thirteen-minute song (1984), and countless allusions: Mary Shelley’s Walton in Frankenstein says he will “kill no albatross”; T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land echoes it. “An albatross around one’s neck” means a burden of guilt or misfortune that one cannot shake off.

In conversation

• An albatross around one’s neck — a burden of guilt or bad luck.
• “Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink” — abundance that cannot satisfy.
• “A sadder and a wiser man” — chastened by an experience.