Poetry
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Samuel Taylor Coleridge · 1798
Synopsis
An old mariner stops one of three guests on their way to a wedding and holds him with his skinny hand, then with his gaze. The guest protests, threatens, then sits down on a stone and listens. The old man tells of a ship driven south by the storm as far as the ice, where neither man nor beast is to be seen. An albatross comes through the fog; the crew greet it and feed it, the ice splits and a good south wind rises. For nine evenings the bird perches on the mast. Then the old man says, without explaining why, that he killed it with his crossbow.
Context
The poem was planned on a walk in November 1797 by Coleridge and Wordsworth, accompanied by Dorothy, who hoped to pay for their excursion by selling a poem to a magazine. Wordsworth was then reading the account of a navigator of 1726, in which a melancholy sailor shoots a black albatross: he suggested this crime and the vengeance of the guardian spirits, then withdrew from the undertaking. The poem opened the joint collection of 1798 and was by far its longest piece. The marginal glosses found in modern editions were added in 1817, nearly twenty years later.
Who it is for
A narrative poem of about six hundred and fifty lines, in seven parts, in ballad quatrains; several French translations have appeared since 1877.
Prizes and reception
The image of the albatross hung around the sailor's neck has passed into everyday English, to mean a burden of guilt.
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