The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

A ballad by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in which a mariner recounts a supernatural voyage and the consequences of killing an albatross.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: An English poet and critic whose works helped establish British Romanticism. He wrote the poem and revised it across several editions.
The Wedding-Guest: A character detained by the mariner and compelled to hear his tale. His reactions show how the mariner’s account interrupts ordinary social life.
William Wordsworth: An English Romantic poet whose work helped define the movement’s emphasis on ordinary life and nature. Wordsworth’s suggestions helped shape the poem’s original conception.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1817): The 1817 edition of Coleridge’s poem, notable for adding marginal glosses. The glosses guide interpretation more directly than the original text did.
The albatross around one's neck: An expression for a burdensome source of guilt or misfortune. The poem gave this image lasting currency as a metaphor for a burden.
Lyrical Ballads: A poetry collection by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798. The poem appeared in its first edition and helped launch the collection.
The Hermit: A religious recluse who lives apart from society, often in a wilderness setting. He hears the ship’s return and helps draw the mariner back toward human community.
Romanticism: An artistic and intellectual movement emphasizing imagination, emotion, nature, and individual experience. The poem’s sublime landscape and supernatural imagination belong to Romantic literature.
The Ancient Mariner: The poem’s central sailor, condemned to recount his voyage and its moral lesson. The character’s supernatural punishment complicates a simple reading of him as a moral teacher.
Ecocriticism: The study of how literature represents relationships between humans and the natural world. The mariner’s killing invites readings of human violence toward nonhuman life.

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