The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

A long narrative poem in ballad stanzas telling of a sailor who kills an albatross that had guided his ship through Antarctic ice, and suffers supernatural punishment and a slow penance for it, the surviving crew cursing him with the dead bird hung around his neck. First published anonymously as the opening poem of Lyrical Ballads (1798), the collection Coleridge assembled with William Wordsworth, it was substantially revised for the 1817 edition of Sibylline Leaves, where Coleridge added a prose marginal gloss. The albatross became the poem's own lasting emblem of an unwanted, self-inflicted burden.