Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The, is a famous ballad poem by the English author Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It first appeared in Lyrical Ballads (1798), a collection of poetry by Coleridge and the British poet William Wordsworth. A revised version was published in 1817. The poem describes the ordeal and penance of a mariner (sailor) who for no apparent reason kills an albatross with his crossbow. The bird is a simple creature of nature upon whom the ship’s crew imposes vague powers of good or ill fortune, depending upon which way the actual wind blows.
The poem begins with an ancient mariner meeting a guest on his way to a wedding feast. He stops the man and begins telling the story of his ship’s terrible voyage years before. The wedding guest is puzzled, fascinated, fearful, and stunned by the strange tale he hears. The mariner describes how his ship was driven toward the South Pole by a storm. As the ship sailed amid ice and fog, an albatross flew overhead, to the joy of the sailors, who took it for a good omen. The bird followed the ship. But then without cause or explanation, the mariner shot the bird.
The mariner then describes how the ship was driven to the equator, where it sat under a burning sun. Distressed by their situation, the crew turns on the mariner and hangs the dead albatross around his neck as a symbol of his guilt. Soon after, a ghost ship passes the vessel. Upon it Death and a maiden named Life-in-Death engage in a dice game for the souls of the crew. Life-in-Death wins a reprieve for the mariner, but the rest of the crew dies. It becomes the mariner’s fate for the rest of his life to wander the earth telling his story.
Some readers see a fable of Christian humility in the ballad. Others see a more universal reverence for nature’s forces in an unpredictable universe. Toward the end, the poem suggests what may be a universal moral, “He prayeth best who lovest best/Things both great and small.” The work includes the famous line “Water, water everywhere/Nor any drop to drink.”
See also Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; Romanticism.
