Coleridge wrote it in 1797, high on opium and collaboration with Wordsworth, and nothing else in English poetry sounds quite like it. A mariner stops a wedding guest and compels him to listen to a story of cursed voyages, death ships, and an albatross that will not release its victim. The ballad meter hypnotizes; the imagery is both medieval and hallucinatory. Coleridge spent the rest of his life trying to explain what it meant. The poem resists explanation. It is a spell that still works.