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The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel…
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The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (original 1798; edition 1970)

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Author), Gustave Doré (Illustrator), Millicent Rose (Introduction)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
2,382346,370 (4.06)153
Memorized maybe ten stanzas of this ballad meter, 40 lines in Junior H.S., and they stayed with me all my life. You would never know that the author of such simple verse had the most astute critical mind in English literature. I now have on my shelf the Oxford edition of Coleridge's letters and Notebooks, 13 volumes (2.5 ' of shelf space) which I inherited on the death of the Coleridge of our time--but also the Shelley, dying at 29-- Tom Weiskel, my brilliant Amherst College friend who became Harold Bloom's favorite young colleague at Yele, and of whom I wrote a verse biography, Parodies Lost, which HB invited to his Linden Street home in 2016, saying "I think of Tom every day. I still grieve him." The Mariner, too, lives in recollection.
"It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three
By thy long grey beard and thy glittering eye,
Now wherefore stoppest thou me?"...

"There was a ship..." (holds him with his glittering eye)...

Then in the middle, reflections on water that apply to Flint, MI, for entirely different reasons:
"Water, water everywhere
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink."

And the conclusion summarizes a Christianity, and a Naturism, a bit like the dome of St Pauls in London:
"Farewell, farewell! But this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding Guest!
He fareth well who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.

He fareth best who lovth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

Here's a Christianity that even Emily Dickinson might cheer; she never attended the stone church her brother
constructed across the street, partly because doctrine forbid that creatures, birds had souls and continued as do all souls.
My faith is in Marineresque, Dickinsonian love of bird and beast...and okay, manunkind as cummings has it.
Coleridge's simplicity, at odds with some orthodoxy, issues from his brilliant, critical mind not unlike Tom Weiskel's,
upon whom I depended when we worked at Star Island, visited in Guilford or Leverett or Shelbourne, considered buying a 350 acre farm in Ashfield, or..built an outhouse well enough to be considered as a wine cellar. ( )
  AlanWPowers | Jul 7, 2018 |
English (31)  Italian (1)  Portuguese (Brazil) (1)  Dutch (1)  All languages (34)
Showing 1-25 of 31 (next | show all)
This little book contains a lot; a lot to read and a lot to think about. It starts with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and moves on to Christabel. These were followed by some shorter poems, including, Kubla Khan. There follow some prose extracts by Coleridge which I found interesting. But of most interest to me was Editor Henderson's commentary on the merits of Coleridge poetry. I'll read that again later. The next section is a short biography - what a tortured soul. An Appendix explores his personality, and the book finishes with an Analysis of The Ancient Mariner. Right at the end of the printed matter included is a list of the first 180 titles in the Kings Treasuries series. ( )
  gmillar | Feb 9, 2024 |
As poetic as English poetry gets. Full of strange images and full of allusions that I just don't understand. ( )
  mykl-s | Jun 11, 2023 |
It's hard to picture a more imaginative interpretation of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner!"
And, the resilient Albatross was a lot of fun.

Exceptional pairing of Poetry and Cartoons.

In both high school and college, Samuel Coleridge's poem was always compelling

(For some reason, though this is Hunt Emerson's book, most of the review comments refer to Dore'.) ( )
  m.belljackson | Feb 22, 2022 |
Excellent Addition to Coleridge

"The Rime of The Ancient Mariner" is a classic poem. As literature, it is exceptional. It has numerous editions, including updated and annotated versions by Coleridge himself after the poem was first published. Some of the more famous editions started to be published in 1876 with illustrations by Gustave Doré. Being difficult to interpret, the literal drawings by Doré seem appropriately moody. Carol Moran's illustrations, however, try to give the poem a more spiritual dimension. The vision of death, for example, is drawn as a buxom blonde with ruby-red lips. At times, the illustrations have a very innocent, child-like quality to them. This is perhaps why I was first attracted to the book when I found it on my family's bookshelf some thirty years ago and have kept it on my own shelves ever since. Moran's work appears to be done with colored pencils, watercolors, and pens, but I cannot say for certain. Fans of "The Ancient Mariner" will enjoy this edition, along with Doré's, and Coleridge's annotated version. ( )
  mvblair | Aug 9, 2020 |
Interesting story

Coleridge is not for the weak. Good story, but man I don't enjoy poetry much. This version reads easier than the previous one. ( )
  Sonja-Fay-Little | Jan 24, 2019 |
"Water, water, everywhere,
And still the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink."

I've heard bits and pieces of Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner many many times in my life (my own dad memorized the poem when he was a teenager and often would recite a good portion of this poem), but I have been in the mood for some good, classic literature and poetry. Poets are in a class unto themselves! ( )
  emeraldgirl68 | Sep 30, 2018 |
Memorized maybe ten stanzas of this ballad meter, 40 lines in Junior H.S., and they stayed with me all my life. You would never know that the author of such simple verse had the most astute critical mind in English literature. I now have on my shelf the Oxford edition of Coleridge's letters and Notebooks, 13 volumes (2.5 ' of shelf space) which I inherited on the death of the Coleridge of our time--but also the Shelley, dying at 29-- Tom Weiskel, my brilliant Amherst College friend who became Harold Bloom's favorite young colleague at Yele, and of whom I wrote a verse biography, Parodies Lost, which HB invited to his Linden Street home in 2016, saying "I think of Tom every day. I still grieve him." The Mariner, too, lives in recollection.
"It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three
By thy long grey beard and thy glittering eye,
Now wherefore stoppest thou me?"...

"There was a ship..." (holds him with his glittering eye)...

Then in the middle, reflections on water that apply to Flint, MI, for entirely different reasons:
"Water, water everywhere
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink."

And the conclusion summarizes a Christianity, and a Naturism, a bit like the dome of St Pauls in London:
"Farewell, farewell! But this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding Guest!
He fareth well who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.

He fareth best who lovth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

Here's a Christianity that even Emily Dickinson might cheer; she never attended the stone church her brother
constructed across the street, partly because doctrine forbid that creatures, birds had souls and continued as do all souls.
My faith is in Marineresque, Dickinsonian love of bird and beast...and okay, manunkind as cummings has it.
Coleridge's simplicity, at odds with some orthodoxy, issues from his brilliant, critical mind not unlike Tom Weiskel's,
upon whom I depended when we worked at Star Island, visited in Guilford or Leverett or Shelbourne, considered buying a 350 acre farm in Ashfield, or..built an outhouse well enough to be considered as a wine cellar. ( )
  AlanWPowers | Jul 7, 2018 |
I mean, I guess it's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by ST Coleridge, but more like it's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Doré, libretto by Coleridge. Either way it's great, and occasioned some great conversations between me and my son on thoughtlessness and doom. ( )
  MeditationesMartini | May 22, 2018 |
Haunting and terrifying story. A poem, a story, a little of everything. Case in point. Don't take your life for granted. Some have it much worse than you. I feel that the author accomplished what many writers before him attempted to capture. He truly scares the crap out of you. Not for your sake but for the Mariners sake. STC truly brings out the chill in the fog and isolation of the world around us. I am an old sailor and I spent many nights out on deck during my off time thinking about this book and the character. It made my life experiences so much more realistic and enjoyable. ( )
1 vote JHemlock | Apr 17, 2018 |
Basically a horror story--the awful power unleashed when a thoughtless man makes a single mistake against the spirit world. The images are as scary as any modern movie. Even more relevant now as a tale of despoiling the earth. Timeless! ( )
1 vote LaurelPoe | Dec 25, 2017 |
Certamente un precursore della poesia simbolista, un grande della poesia di tutti i tempi. La sua Ballata è inimitabile e inimitata. Poesia dalla meccanica fantastica, costruita con grande scaltrezza culturale ed intellettuale, una grandissima ispirazione linguistica, immaginifica, fantasticamente surreale ed emblematica. ( )
1 vote AntonioGallo | Nov 2, 2017 |
Already having an edition of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner illustrated by Gustave Doré, I bought this one for the illustrations by my favourite book illustrator, Mervyn Peake.

Where Doré beautifully catches the gothic mood of Coleridge's verse, Peake catches the macabre, tenebrous quality of the Mariner's feverish nightmare. In her introduction, Marina Warner tells of how Peake's commissioning editor found his illustration of the Night-mare Life-in-Death too horrifying for its intended 1940s British readership and her portrait was dropped from the first edition, though much reprinted since and included here.

Much as I love Peake's work, I wish for an edition printed on better quality paper to present them in the fashion they deserve.

As for the poem, what can I say that hasn't been said before and more eloquently? ( )
1 vote Michael.Rimmer | Aug 13, 2016 |
Beautiful illustrations accompany this re-telling of Coleridge's classic poem. The large pages, white space and column notes make this more accessible to a younger audience, although, sometimes the column notes are as complicated as the 1800's text of the ballad. ( )
  GReader28 | Feb 21, 2016 |
The Dover edition with Doré's woodcuts adds a whole new dimension to Coleridge's poem. The horror, sublimity, and poignancy are greatly accentuated by them in the Dover edition. If you've read the poem before, loved it or hated it, revisit it in this edition and your opinion will evolve either way. If you haven't read it before, this is certainly no a bad way to become acquainted. ( )
1 vote poetontheone | Nov 20, 2013 |
‘I closed my lids, and kept them close,
And the balls like pulses beat;
For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky
Lay dead like a load on my weary eye,
And the dead were at my feet.’


The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is, inarguably, one of the five or six most important poems ever recorded in the English language. And while Samuel Coleridge may have abhorred the Gothic excesses nourished to increasingly baroque heights during the years he was busy writing literary criticism, a younger Coleridge—perhaps, even, a more naïve and spiritually-aware Coleridge—managed to pen the only one of those five or six paramount poems to feature the supernatural as more than a passing reference: and certainly the only one to regard it with the mingled aura of terror, awe, and beauty that we have come to define as ‘Sublime.’ With this, Coleridge gave birth to Romantic literature (particularly the Romantic as we define it today: the Romantic as it breathes in the works of Mary Shelley, James Hogg, and—later—Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville).

The poem is so familiar, that I will avoid summarizing it in detail: suffice it to say that the story of the Ancient Mariner, who kills the albatross and is cursed to suffer at the hands of a Nature that is at turns mournful, spiteful, and furious, is one of the more archetypal scenarios in Romantic literature (and perhaps English literature, and popular culture, as a whole: the tale of the man who underestimates the forces that protect the natural world, and their contingent retribution, has been retold through lenses as diverse as comedy, horror, high fantasy, pulp adventure, and children’s television). Any underestimation of its impact, similar to Shakespeare, can be dispelled with examples of its gifts to popular culture and the popular lexicon: the notion of an ‘albatross hanging about one’s neck’ is a common enough allusion that it borders, nearly, on the cliché; meanwhile, lines like ‘Water, water, everywhere/Nor any drop to drink’ have become references so pervasive that many who have never even read the poem are aware of them. This parallels, say, the aggressive influence of a novel like Frankenstein on the popular imagination; unlike that novel, though, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner has not entered the zeitgeist through the vehicle of cinematic adaptation or references in a body of literature that bears little relation to it (although, coincidentally, Frankenstein makes numerous references to Coleridge’s poem, and is one of the earlier works of literature to truly embody the full scope of its impact—aside from operating as an extrapolation upon its central, supremely Romantic theme).

I have neatly avoided the relationship of Coleridge to Wordsworth, or The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’s inclusion in Lyrical Ballads: these details bear little relation to the concerns of this journal. I will, however, dwell for a moment on the initial details of the poem’s publication: as most are aware, the poem was originally presented without a gloss and utilizing the most arcane variety of spelling; this was corrected in a later publication (which has since become standard) largely because the format was not in keeping with Romantic ideals. That said, though, this return to an earlier, more esoteric device and the mysteries suggested by avoiding comment or explanation, are very much in keeping with the ethos of the Gothic, both as an extension of the Romantic imagination and a separate set of motifs. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’s early concern with itself as a text, by utilizing a unique (and antique) format is both indebted to the early Gothic of Radcliffe, Beckford, and Walpole, and influential on the later Gothicism of the Shelleys, Maturin, and Poe. Reorganized, with gloss and modern spelling, the poem takes on a new, more obvious, concern with itself as a text, which in its own right has become influential on the ‘epic’ poetry of later authors.

Interspersed throughout this review (see the original post at therealmoftheunreal.blogspot.com) are several of Gustave Dore’s illustrations for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: but this is only the tip of the iceberg: the weight of allusion to Coleridge’s masterpiece over the past two centuries has been so incredible that to list even a dozen of them here would take more space than is permissible; needless to say, the breadth of this fascination with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is not relegated merely to fine art and literature: again and again, up to and including the present day, the poem resurfaces in allusions and analysis both obscure and immediate in forums as diverse as popular music, animated television, and even video games. Still, it must be said, the most impactful and haunting of these references and homages to Coleridge’s famous poetic conceit rest in those that have taken illustration as the nature of their devotions: Dore’s images, while possessing a value to art uniquely their own (and, in many ways, remaining the standard illustrations to Coleridge’s opus), are, as I said, merely the tip of the iceberg. And this, in my eyes, remains the measuring stick by which we judge the canonicity of a given work of literature: not merely how often it is read—nor by whom—nor the nature of its subject matter, nor its ability to stand as a document of its time and circumstances, but by the degree to which it propels Art, and hence Imagination, as a whole, towards higher and higher atmospheres: both by stimulating the creative faculties of other artists and by drawing forth these faculties in the minds of those who have not yet developed them.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is, indeed, one of the great works of English poetry; but it is also one of the great works of world literature in its entirety, standing confidently among works as diverse as The Arabian Nights, Hamlet, and the Bible as a major influence on the art of those who have yet to even experience it first-hand. And for this, Coleridge was a prophet—and a guide.

( )
5 vote veilofisis | May 14, 2013 |
Great setup for Moby-Dick! ( )
  AlCracka | Apr 2, 2013 |
No doubt this reflects a tremendous lack in me, but I don't get it. I got the rhythm, which is drilled into my brain, but the point of the thing eludes me. Sailor kills an albatross, which is bad, the ship is becalmed and everyone except him dies. Now he travels the earth where every so often he meets someone he is compelled to tell his story to. Poor wedding guest is stuck listening to the story, and is moved by it, which makes one of us.

I have no idea why killing albatrosses should be worse than killing anything else, no idea why he killed it in the first place, and no idea why everyone else should be killed thereby, nor why he is saved to tell the story. I'm going to guess it's something religious, or drug-addled. There are a few catchy lines, but there's a lot more that annoy me being so unnaturally stuffed into the scheme.

( )
  Kaethe | Mar 29, 2013 |
I enjoyed this epic poem about the sanctity of life. ( )
  silva_44 | Nov 26, 2012 |
No doubt this reflects a tremendous lack in me, but I don't get it. I got the rhythm, which is drilled into my brain, but the point of the thing eludes me. Sailor kills an albatross, which is bad, the ship is becalmed and everyone except him dies. Now he travels the earth where every so often he meets someone he is compelled to tell his story to. Poor wedding guest is stuck listening to the story, and is moved by it, which makes one of us.

I have no idea why killing albatrosses should be worse than killing anything else, no idea why he killed it in the first place, and no idea why everyone else should be killed thereby, nor why he is saved to tell the story. I'm going to guess it's something religious, or drug-addled. There are a few catchy lines, but there's a lot more that annoy me being so unnaturally stuffed into the scheme.

( )
  Kaethe | Oct 19, 2012 |
Signed by Lady Coleridge
  steveclark | Aug 3, 2012 |
This is my all time favorite epic poem for many reasons, among them being the beauty of the words. Coleridge eloquently tells the rough and tough story of the sea with deaths and shootings in a refined manner. Not only is his choice of words well above the average cut, but the order in which he places the words delights the reader. This is a yearly read for me.

2023 A re-read for me of this classic. My book is linen bound and beautiful silver pages illustrated by Gustave Dore. The pictures are as beautiful as the words. This will remain on my shelf. 95 pages ( )
1 vote Tess_W | Dec 23, 2010 |
Many years ago I heard a radio broadcast of Richard Burton reading this which moved me very deeply. I still reread it every so often just as I reread scripture and other writings which remind me of God's pure love for all his creations-even me. ( )
  markbstephenson | Jun 5, 2010 |
It's magnificent--a true English epic. I 'cannot choose but hear'.
(10/10) ( )
1 vote Tullius22 | Apr 17, 2010 |
I'm glad that Folio Society dedicated their efforts to such short work, and in a single volume. The wood engravings by Garrick Palmer have the same gothic tone even if they are a little too abstract for my taste. I think that Palmer also did the wood engravings for the Folio Society's Moby Dick as well.

The poem itself is haunting and clever. I particularly like the moral of not hurting animals linked with the superstitions of sailors. I however fail to see all the connections to Christianity that other reviews mention. I think Coleridge was more fascinated by nature mysticism and old pagan believes and folksy form of story telling. Even though it took barely an hour to read slowly, the poem left me with a bit of a chill. Mainly because it leaves you wondering how much of the Mariners "rime" is a hallucination and how much is based in reality. ( )
1 vote BenjaminHahn | Nov 10, 2008 |
A strange, occult tale of ghostly ships and terrifying curses written by a laudanum addict; whoever said the classics were boring? Coleridge's strange poem of a man who kills a mighty bird at sea and ends up cursed (or something, it's thick going without footnotes) is a favorite of English teachers who like to punish their students by making them write term papers about literature they might have otherwise enjoyed. While it induces a lot of groans from people, this is a beautiful piece of work.

(This review originally appeared on zombieunderground.net) ( )
2 vote coffeezombie | Jan 18, 2007 |
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