Poem: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Overview
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 ballad unfolds as a framed tale: an Ancient Mariner detains a wedding guest with a hypnotic gaze and compels him to hear a sea-voyage that became a moral curse. Cast in archaic diction and rolling ballad stanzas, the poem fuses Christian imagery, folk superstition, and vivid natural description to explore guilt, alienation, and the recovery of grace. Later editions added a marginal gloss that shadows the narrative with a quasi-scholarly, spectral commentary.

Voyage and Transgression
The Mariner’s ship departs merrily from an English harbor, but a storm drives it south into a maze of ice. An albatross appears, hailed as a good omen; it guides the ship out of danger, and the crew befriends it as a fellow traveler. Without motive, the Mariner shoots the bird with his crossbow, a gratuitous breach of hospitality toward a creature that had brought them wind and hope. The crew first condemns him, then shifts to complicity when the fog clears, sharing in the moral debt.

Curse and Desolation
The ship enters the shimmering torpor of the equatorial calm. Water rots in the casks, tongues blacken, and the crew is tormented by thirst: “Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.” Slimy shapes writhe in the sea, and the sailors hang the dead albatross around the Mariner’s neck as a sign of blame. A phantom bark glides near, bearing Death and a nightmare woman, Life-in-Death, who win the souls by casting dice; she claims the Mariner, condemning him to living punishment. One by one the crew collapses, cursing him with their eyes, and he remains “alone, alone,” unable even to pray.

Turning and Partial Redemption
Under a sanctifying moon, the Mariner, moved by the beauty of water-snakes, blesses them “unaware.” The spontaneous love dissolves his hardness; the albatross drops from his neck, and prayer returns. Rain falls; he sleeps; then angelic spirits inhabit the corpses of the crew, who rise and wordlessly work the ship. A polar spirit, wronged by the bird’s death, helps drive the vessel homeward while disembodied voices decree that penance shall continue in wandering and tale-telling. The world softens, but the sentence is not lifted.

Return and Burden of Tale
Near home harbor, a pilot, his boy, and a holy hermit approach. The ship suddenly sinks in a whirl, leaving the Mariner afloat; he is rescued and urges the hermit to shrive him. Absolution brings no release from the inward goad. An agony seizes him until he finds a listener, and he must repeat the narrative to the soul who “knoweth” it is for him. So he waylays the wedding guest, serves his penance, and passes on.

Themes and Techniques
The killing of the albatross is a primal act of ingratitude that violates a moral and ecological order, making love of “man and bird and beast” the route back to prayer. Guilt, confession, and penance unfold in sacramental images: the albatross as a perverse cross, the rain as cleansing, the hermit as minister. The poem’s ballad rhythms, archaic spellings, internal rhyme, and refrains create incantatory momentum, while the marginal gloss refracts the tale into commentary, enlarging its mystery. Supernatural machinery coexists with minute natural detail, keeping motive and law tantalizingly ambiguous.

Final Effects
The wedding guest rises at dawn “a sadder and a wiser man,” altered by borrowed experience. The Mariner, fated to wander, embodies the cost of violating kinship with the living world and the saving power of attention: “He prayeth well who loveth well / All things both great and small.” The frame closes, but the compulsion to retell persists, binding terror and blessing in a single, unforgettable voice.