40 Fun Facts About The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the old sailor stops a man who is on his way to what?

A wedding is where the listener is headed, and as next of kin to the groom he can already hear the feast begin. He never gets inside: at the end he turns away from the door.

Which weapon does the Ancient Mariner use to kill the albatross that had been following his ship?

A crossbow is the weapon, and the killing arrives as a blunt two-line confession at the very end of the poem's first part. His listener has just asked why he looks so tormented.

Coleridge's publisher said most buyers of the Ancient Mariner volume were sailors who mistook it for what?

A naval songbook is what the sailors thought they were buying, the publisher told Coleridge. Critics were less keen: early reviewers found the poem obscure and hard to read.

Thanks to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, having an albatross around your neck means carrying what?

A heavy burden of guilt that blocks success is the dictionary sense of the idiom. In the poem the angry crew hang the dead bird on the Mariner once the wind dies and the water runs out.

What game do Death and a ghostly pale woman play aboard the skeleton ship for the Ancient Mariner's crew?

Dice settle it: Death wins the two hundred sailors, who fall dead one by one, while the woman wins the Mariner and whistles three times in triumph.

What does the Ancient Mariner swallow to wet his parched mouth so he can cry out that a sail is coming?

His own blood does it: he bites his arm and sucks, because drought has left every tongue aboard too withered to speak. The crew grin with joy, until they see what kind of ship it is.

Which English metal band closed a 1984 album with a 13-minute retelling of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?

Iron Maiden bassist Steve Harris wrote the epic for the album Powerslave, quoting Coleridge's lines directly. At 13 minutes 45 seconds it stayed the band's longest song for more than 30 years.

Which Gothic novel opens with a polar explorer vowing to kill no albatross, echoing the Ancient Mariner?

Frankenstein names the poem twice, and its author had a personal link: Mary Shelley recalled hiding behind a sofa to hear Coleridge chant it.

Which famous phrase did Coleridge coin in Biographia Literaria while explaining why he wrote the Ancient Mariner?

Suspension of disbelief, in full a 'willing suspension of disbelief for the moment', was his name for the faith a reader lends a story. His half of the joint book was to make the supernatural feel real.

What name does Coleridge give the pale woman who wins the Ancient Mariner aboard the ghost ship?

Life-in-Death has red lips, yellow hair and deathly white skin, and her name is his sentence: the Mariner must go on living while every shipmate dies around him.

Which sea animals does the Ancient Mariner bless without thinking, beginning to lift the curse on him?

Water snakes, which he had despised as slimy things, suddenly look beautiful to him in the moonlight. His heart opens, he blesses them unaware, and at last he is able to pray.

A storm drives the Ancient Mariner's ship into which region of mist, snow and mast-high ice?

The Antarctic is where the storm leaves them, hemmed in by emerald-green ice that cracks and growls. The albatross arrives through the fog, and the ice splits to let the ship escape.

Who comes out in the harbour pilot's boat and becomes the first person to hear the Ancient Mariner's confession?

A hermit who kneels to pray on a mossy oak stump is the first to hear it. When he asks what manner of man the Mariner is, an agony seizes the sailor until the whole story is out.

What swallows the Ancient Mariner's rotting ship just as rescuers reach it in his home harbour?

A whirlpool takes it: a rumble rises under the water, splits the bay, and the ship goes down like lead. The Mariner floats free and is hauled into the rescuers' rowing boat.

What penance must the Ancient Mariner perform for the rest of his life after shooting the albatross?

Retell his tale he must, whenever a burning agony returns at an uncertain hour. He passes from land to land and knows on sight which stranger has to hear it.

Which feature of the Ancient Mariner holds his listener spellbound and stops him walking away?

His glittering eye does what his skinny hand could not: the listener shakes off the grip, then stands still and listens like a three-year-old child.

To what does Coleridge compare the Ancient Mariner's becalmed vessel, stuck day after day without breath or motion?

A painted ship upon a painted ocean is the image for a vessel that cannot move. The stillness follows the killing: the breeze dies, the sails sag and a fierce noon sun stands over the mast.

The Ancient Mariner dreams that the buckets on deck are filled with dew, then wakes to find what falling?

Rain soaks him as he wakes, ending the long drought once the albatross has dropped from his neck. He feels so light that he thinks he has died in his sleep and become a ghost.

What lesson does the Ancient Mariner leave with his listener before vanishing at the end of the poem?

Love all creatures, great and small, because God made and loves them all, is the parting moral. Coleridge later said the poem's chief fault was pressing that moral on the reader so openly.

In which 1798 collection, written jointly with a fellow poet, did The Rime of the Ancient Mariner first appear?

Lyrical Ballads carried just four poems by Coleridge, yet they filled about a third of the book. His collaborator wrote the other nineteen.

Which poet suggested that the Ancient Mariner should kill an albatross and be hunted by vengeful spirits?

William Wordsworth offered the idea on a walk, having just read of a real sailor who shot a black albatross. He dropped out of the joint project soon after, leaving Coleridge to finish it alone.

Coleridge's teacher William Wales, a possible source for the Ancient Mariner, was astronomer to which explorer?

James Cook took Wales along on his second great voyage to test a new sea clock. Wales then taught mathematics at Christ's Hospital, the London school where Coleridge was a pupil.

Which unfinished poem about a pleasure dome did Coleridge write in the same years as the Ancient Mariner?

Kubla Khan was cut short, Coleridge said, when a person on business from Porlock called at his door. He was staying at a lonely farmhouse then; both poems date from his years in the Somerset village of Nether Stowey.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is often said to mark the beginning of which British literary movement?

Romanticism in Britain is often dated from 1798, when the poem led off a joint volume of verse. The book introduced its poems as experiments in the everyday speech of ordinary people.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, was addicted to what for most of his adult life?

Opium reached him as laudanum, a medicine given for his childhood illnesses, and at his worst he took two quarts of it a week. He spent his last 18 years living in a doctor's house.

Which legendary ghost ship, doomed never to make port, may have helped inspire The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?

The Flying Dutchman legend, like that of the Wandering Jew, turns on endless travel as punishment for a crime. An acquaintance's dream of a skeleton ship crewed by spectres fed into the poem too.

What did Coleridge add alongside the verses of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner for its 1817 edition?

Marginal notes in antique prose, known as the gloss, interpret the verses much as the notes in an old Bible do. That edition was also the first to carry Coleridge's name instead of appearing anonymously.

On a walking tour of which Somerset hills did Coleridge and two friends plan The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?

The Quantocks rise behind the village where Coleridge was living, and the poem had taken shape by the time the walk ended. A long-distance footpath across them now bears his name.

Which instrument does the Ancient Mariner's listener hear starting up indoors, making him beat his breast?

A bassoon sounds as the party he should be at gets under way with its minstrels. He beats his breast twice in frustration, yet cannot choose but hear the old man out.

How does Coleridge describe the Ancient Mariner's listener when he rises the morning after hearing the story?

Sadder and wiser is the verdict, a phrase that passed into everyday English, usually misquoted with 'but' in the middle. Stunned, the listener skips the celebration and goes home.

Coleridge says the red-lipped woman aboard the Ancient Mariner's ghost ship has skin as white as which disease?

Leprosy gives the spectre her colour, set against red lips and locks as yellow as gold. Moments after she appears, the sun's rim dips and darkness falls at a single stride.

Which shipmate stands knee to knee with the Ancient Mariner, hauling on the same rope without a word?

His nephew, named only as his brother's son, pulls beside him in silence. The picture makes the listener cry out in fear, and the Mariner has to calm him before going on.

After the drought breaks, who works the ropes and steers the Ancient Mariner's ship although no wind blows?

The risen corpses groan, stand and haul like lifeless tools, moved by a troop of blessed spirits and not their own souls. At dawn sweet sounds pour from their mouths like birdsong.

Where does the Ancient Mariner's ship lie becalmed under a burning sun after sailing north out of the ice?

Near the Equator the breeze dies in uncharted waters and the deck planks shrink in the heat. At night death-fires dance and the sea burns green, blue and white like a witch's oils.

Most four-line stanzas of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner follow which rhyme scheme, borrowed from old folk songs?

ABCB rhymes only the second and fourth lines of each stanza. The lines also alternate between four beats and three, the swinging measure of traditional sung stories.

Which band topped the UK chart with the guitar instrumental 'Albatross', titled after the Ancient Mariner's bird?

Fleetwood Mac guitarist Peter Green chose the title after reading Coleridge's poem. The gentle 1968 single topped the UK chart and reached number two when it was reissued in 1973.

Which real English privateer shot a black albatross near Cape Horn, giving Coleridge the Ancient Mariner's crime?

Simon Hatley fired during one of his melancholy fits, taking the dark bird for an ill omen. His captain put the episode in a book of the voyage, which Coleridge's walking companion had just been reading.

Which Somerset harbour town, said to be the main inspiration for the Ancient Mariner, has a statue of him?

Watchet unveiled the statue in 2003, with the albatross hanging from a rope around the sailor's neck. Coleridge is said to have begun the poem after seeing the harbour from the town's parish church.

How do the Ancient Mariner's shipmates treat the albatross in the days before he kills it?

They feed it and call it to them every day for food or play, hailing it as if it were a Christian soul. It perches on the mast or rigging for nine evenings before the shot.

Which Marvel undersea antihero did artist Bill Everett say he created with the Ancient Mariner in mind?

Namor got his name when Everett wrote noble-sounding words backwards and liked how 'Roman' looked reversed. The hero's other title, the Sub-Mariner, nods to Coleridge's poem too.