The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Front Cover
Coleridge's celebrated poem was written at the suggestion of William Wordsworth in the early days of their friendship, and published for the first time in 1798. It is the story of a nightmare voyage to the South Pole told by the sole survivor, the bright-eyed ancient mariner whose wanton killing of an albatross, a bird of good omen, brought misfortune on the ship and all its crew. Coleridge's own commentary on the fateful drama, written some years later at a time of renewed religious feeling, is printed alongside the poem. The poem is brilliantly illustrated with a sequence of specially commissioned drawings by Mervyn Peake. His powerful, arresting images perfectly express the qualities of the text, its gothic atmosphere and supernatural terrors, ultimately softened by pity and the hope of redemption.

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About the author (2004)

Born in Ottery St. Mary, England, in 1772, Samuel Taylor Coleridge studied revolutionary ideas at Cambridge before leaving to enlist in the Dragoons. After his plans to start a communist society in the United States with his friend Robert Southey, later named poet laureate of England, were botched, Coleridge instead turned his attention to teaching and journalism in Bristol. Coleridge married Southey's sister-in-law Sara Fricker, and they moved to Nether Stowey, where they became close friends with William and Dorothy Wordsworth. From this friendship a new poetry emerged, one that focused on Neoclassic artificiality. In later years, their relationship became strained, partly due to Coleridge's moral collapse brought on by opium use, but more importantly because of his rejection of Wordworth's animistic views of nature. In 1809, Coleridge began a weekly paper, The Friend, and settled in London, writing and lecturing. In 1816, he published Kubla Kahn. Coleridge reported that he composed this brief fragment, considered by many to be one of the best poems ever written lyrically and metrically, while under the influence of opium, and that he mentally lost the remainder of the poem when he roused himself to answer an ill-timed knock at his door. Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and his sonnet Ozymandias are all respected as inventive and widely influential Romantic pieces. Coleridge's prose works, especially Biographia Literaria, were also broadly read in his day. Coleridge died in 1834. Marina Warner spent her early years in Cairo, and was educated at a convent in Berkshire, and then in Brussels and London, before studying modern languages at Oxford. She is an internationally acclaimed cultural historian, critic, novelist and short story writer. Her non-fiction works include The Beast to the Blonde, No Go the Bogeyman, Fantastic Metamorphoses and Stranger Magic, while her fiction includes the novels The Lost Father (shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Indigo and The Leto Bundle, and short story collections including Murderers I Have Known. She lectures widely in Europe, the United States and the Middle East and was appointed CBE in 2008.

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