Ancient Mariner, The Rime of

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 ballad, the opening poem of Lyrical Ballads, co-published with Wordsworth. A mariner shoots an albatross and brings supernatural retribution on his becalmed ship, with the dead bird hung round his neck. Coleridge revised it for the 1817 Sibylline Leaves edition, adding the marginal gloss. Its imagery (the painted ship on a painted ocean, water everywhere yet none to drink) fixed the albatross as a maritime omen and made it the most cited English sea poem.