Wordsworth added some details. The poem, based on a dream of Coleridge's friend Cruikshank, was originally planned as a collaboration between Coleridge and Wordsworth, to pay the expense of a walking tour they took with Dorothy Wordsworth in November 1797. Before he dropped out of the enterprise, Wordsworth suggested the shooting of the albatross and the navigation of the ship by the dead men; he also contributed lines 13?16 and 226?27. When printed in Lyrical Ballads (1798), this poem was titled 'The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere' and contained many archaic words and spellings, which, Wordsworth believed, hurt the sales of their volume. In later editions Coleridge revised the poem, in part by pruning those archaisms. He also added the Latin epigraph and the marginal
glosses written in the old-fashioned style of 17thcentury learning.
2. 'I readily believe that there are more invisible than visible Natures in the universe. But who will explain for us the family of all these beings, and the ranks and relations and distinguishing features and functions of each? What do they do? What places do they inhabit? The human mind has always sought the knowledge of these things, but never attained it. Meanwhile I do not deny that it is helpful sometimes to contemplate in the mind, as on a tablet, the image of a greater and better world, lest the intellect, habituated to the petty things of daily life, narrow itself and sink wholly into trivial thoughts. But at the same time we must be watchful for the truth and keep a sense of proportion, so that we may distinguish the certain from the uncertain, day from night.' Adapted by Coleridge from Thomas Burnet, Archaeologiae Philosophicae (1692). 3. At once.
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THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER / 431
The wedding guest is spellbound by the eyeof the old sea-faringman, and constrained to hear his tale.
The iMariner tells
how the ship sailed
southward with a good wiiul and fair
weather, till it
reached the line.
The Wedding Guest heareth the bridal music; but the mariner continuetll his tale.
The ship driven by a storm toward the south pole.
He holds him with his glittering eye-?
The wedding-guest stood still,
And listens like a three years' child:
The Mariner hath his will.4 The wedding-guest sat on a stone:
He cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner. 'The ship was cheered, the harbor cleared,
Merrily did we drop
Below the kirk,5 below the hill,
Below the light house top. The sun came up upon the left,
Out of the sea came he!
And he shone bright, and on the right
Went down into the sea. Higher and higher every day,
Till over the mast at noon6?'
The wedding-guest here beat his breast,
For he heard the loud bassoon.
The bride hath paced into the hall,
Red as a rose is she;
Nodding their heads before her goes
The merry minstrelsy. The wedding-guest he beat his breast,
Yet he cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.
'And now the storm-blast came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong:
He struck with his o'ertaking wings,
And chased us south along.
With sloping masts and dipping prow,
As who pursued with yell and blow
Still treads the shadow of his foe,
