Dr Seamus Perry describes the origins of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and considers how Coleridge uses the poem to explore ideas of sin, suffering and salvation.

A failed collaboration

In the Autumn of 1797, Coleridge was nearby William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, in north Somerset; and, despite his wife and young child, he spent as much time as he could with the Wordsworths. Both men, still in their 20s, were published poets, though neither had achieved anything approaching commercial success and money was tight; so, when the three of them decided to go off on a walking tour across the Quantock Hills towards the sea they had to think about funds. They set out, imprudently, at half past four on a November evening, and the poets’ conversation promptly fell, as Dorothy recorded, in a letter on 20 November 1797, to ‘laying the plan of a ballad’. For ballads were fashionable and they hoped to sell their work to a magazine.

Much later in life, Wordsworth would recall his own contribution to their collaborative work:

certain parts I myself suggested; for example, some crime was to be committed which would bring upon the Old Navigator, as Coleridge afterwards delighted to call him, the spectral persecution, as a consequence of that crime and his own wanderings. I had been reading in Shelvocke’s Voyages, a day or two before, that, while doubling Cape Horn, they frequently saw albatrosses in that latitude, the largest sort of sea-fowl, some extending their wings twelve or thirteen feet. ‘Suppose,’ said I, ‘you represent him as having killed one of these birds on entering the South Sea, and that the tutelary spirits of these regions take upon them to avenge the crime.’ The incident was thought fit for the purpose, and adopted accordingly. I also suggested the navigation of the ship by the dead men, but do not recollect that I had anything more to do with the scheme of the poem.[1]

(Shelvocke’s book was entitled A Voyage Round the World, by Way of the Great South Sea.) Wordsworth’s remarks are self-deprecating; but at first sight it is difficult to see what else of much consequence there is to the ‘scheme of the poem’ besides his contribution – a crime that revolves around the killing of an albatross, and the consequent persecution of a wandering life in a ship of ghoulish horrors.

Nevertheless, although they attempted to pursue the poem together, it was Wordsworth who soon felt himself out of the place in the enterprise: as he remembered, years later, ‘I had very little share in the composition of it, for I soon found that the style of Coleridge and myself would not assimilate’.[2] Wordsworth withdrew, while something about the story of the poem evidently captured Coleridge, and the poem grew and grew over the next few months. When it was published in the summer of 1798 in Lyrical Ballads, which gathered poems by both writers, it was by far the longest in the book.