A grey-bearded sailor seizes a wedding guest by the arm and holds him with a glittering eye, and the tale he tells will not let either of them go. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 1798 ballad, first published in the revolutionary Lyrical Ballads, conjures a voyage into supernatural waters where the killing of an albatross unleashes a chain of horrors: a ship becalmed on a rotting sea, the crew dead with curses in their eyes, spirits beneath the keel. The archaic language and hymn-like stanzas create a dream from which the reader, like the mariner, cannot fully wake. It is a poem about guilt that offers penance but never quite absolution, its music echoing through two centuries like a bell that will not stop ringing.