In the Library
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798
- Form
- Form Poem
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 15 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 7
- Length
- Length 4k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Moby-Dick
Herman Melville
Melville takes Coleridge's cursed voyage and expands it to a novel, and the albatross becomes a whale.
£1.99
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
Conrad sends another man on a journey that destroys him, and the compulsion to tell the story is the same.
£1.99
The Odyssey
Homer
Homer wrote the original story of a mariner cursed to wander, and the sea is just as indifferent to both.
£1.99
About the book
For no reason he can ever name, a sailor lifts his crossbow and kills the white bird that had followed the ship through the Antarctic fog, and everything after is the price. The wind dies, the ship hangs as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean, water on every side and not a drop to drink. Coleridge wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in the diction of an old medieval ballad, and it still moves like a fever you cannot wake from. The crew hang the albatross around his neck; then two hundred of them die and leave him alone with the corpses under a staring moon. What finally breaks the curse is not prayer or penance but an involuntary jolt of wonder, the moment he watches the water snakes coil and flash and blesses them without meaning to. And even then the tale is never done: doomed to wander and retell it, he stops a stranger on the way to a wedding, holds him with a glittering eye, and you, reading, cannot leave.