The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a long narrative poem in ballad form by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It was 658 lines in its original version

Origins

The poem was conceived by Coleridge and Wordsworth in the course of a walk along the Quantock hills on 13 November 1797, in the expectation that the New Monthly Magazine would pay £5 for it. According to an account by Wordsworth dictated in his old age, the basic outline was Coleridge's, but Wordsworth contributed the idea that the crime committed by the Mariner should be the shooting of the albatross. This was based on an incident in Shelvocke's Voyage Round the World, published in 1726. Coleridge was the unquestioned author, but Wordsworth said that he contributed a couple of lines, and Coleridge attributed a different pair of lines to him. On 23 March 1798 Dorothy Wordsworth recorded in her journal that Coleridge brought his ballad completed. It was not offered to the New Monthly Magazine but appeared in Lyrical Ballads under the title of The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere.

Bishop Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry had first appeared in 1765, and its success had done much to popularise the ballad form.