THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER

S. T. Coleridge The Rime of The Ancient Mariner The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). It was first published in Lyrical Ballads, with a few other poems in 1798. The Lyrical Ballads were written and published jointly by Coleridge and his good friend William Wordsworth (1770-1850) by whom most of the poems were written. The first version of the poem was entitled The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, and much of the spelling was very archaic (old-fashioned) even at that time. In 1800 the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads appeared, with another volume of poems to accompany the first. Coleridge, at Wordsworth's suggestion, had modernized much of the spelling and the title appeared in the form at the head of this page. The text of the poem generally used today appeared in Coleridge's collection Sibylline Leaves in 1817. It is very substantially different from the first version: as well as modernizing the spelling, Coleridge added or removed stanzas or lines and changed tenses of verbs. The narrative in the poem has many sources: some ideas come from other poems which Coleridge read; the central action was suggested by Wordsworth, who had been reading Shelvocke's A Voyage round the World by the Way of the Great South Sea (1726): on this voyage one of the crew shot an albatross which had followed the ship in bad weather. According to a friend of Wordsworth, the Rev. Alexander Dyce, the poem was founded on a strange dream which one of Coleridge's friends had; the dreamer, John Cruikshank of Nether Stowey in the Quantock hills (between Bridgewater and Minehead), where Coleridge lived, dreamed of a skeleton ship with figures in it.

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