Samuel Taylor Coleridge first published “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in Lyrical Ballads, a collaborative volume that he completed with William Wordsworth in 1798. Like many of Coleridge’s poems, this one went through many revisions. Initial revisions modernized the deliberately archaic spellings of the first edition (e.g., “ancyent”). Later, more substantive revisions led to the poem’s final form, which features an unusual series of marginal annotations that variously summarize and comment on the poem in strange and surprising ways. The poem’s main text concerns an anonymous elderly Mariner who draws a young man away from his companion’s wedding celebration to tell him a story. This story recounts his experience of wrongfully killing an albatross and the harrowing spiritual journey that followed. The Mariner interprets his own tale as a moral allegory about sin and redemption. However, the poem contains numerous references to supernatural agents whose presence complicates this straightforward Christian reading. Though the Mariner insists that the moral of his tale relates to the sanctity of all God’s creatures, it’s clear to the reader that the poem resists a single, definitive interpretation.

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