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

(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.

That poem never happened; but (among other things) ‘The Ancient Mariner’ happened in its place. It is the story of someone who does something terrible for reasons unknown and pays for it: we never learn why the Mariner shot the bird, but his protracted suffering is described in agonising detail. Some kind of spiritual alleviation seems to come only when the Mariner has changed his attitude towards the creatures of the sea: the sea-snakes which seemed, in the aftermath of his crime, ‘slimy things’ (l. 121) become transformed at the poem’s turning-point into ‘happy living things’ (l. 274). Recognising a joy implicit within natural appearances appears to mark a saving transition from ‘spectral persecution’ to a progressive penance.

When he saw the first illustrations of the poem, by David Scott (later published in 1837), Coleridge noted the ‘enormous blunder’ the artist had made in picturing the mariner as ‘ancient’ at the time of the voyage: on the contrary, he ‘had told this story ten thousand times since the voyage’, said Coleridge, implying that part of the poem’s force lies in its exploration of how minds use narrative to try and make sense of their experiences.[4] For what is there, actually, to connect the shooting of the bird to the disasters that ensue, apart from the superstitious insistence of the late-medieval Catholic speaker that it should be so? When Coleridge revised the poem for publication in 1817 he added a new marginal gloss which might promise to clear things up authoritatively: ‘The curse is finally expiated’ (l. 442), it tells us. But is this Coleridge himself in the margin, or a fictional editor, merely adding another layer of interpretation to a poem about trying to make sense of things? Perhaps, this perennially fascinating poem suggests, the ‘Origin of Evil’ resides in the mind’s needy attempts to make sense of experience that is really as arbitrary as the rolling of those dice that appears to determine the Mariner’s fate (l. 192).

[1] The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. by Jared Curtis (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993), p.2.

[2] Quoted in The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Derwent and Sara Coleridge (London: Edward Moxon, 1852), pp.323-4.

[3] London, British Library, MS Add. 27901, f. 24v. Also in The Notebooks of S. T. Coleridge, ed by Kathleen Coburn et al, 5 vols. (London: Routledge and Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957-2002), i, p.174.

[4] Table Talk Recorded by Henry Nelson Coleridge (and John Taylor Coleridge), ed. by Carl Woodring, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), i, p.274.