How ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ plays tricks with the mind

I’ve just returned from five days in the Lake District, attending the biennial ‘Friends of Coleridge’ conference in Grasmere. All the other attendees were seasoned Coleridge scholars, but I was a newbie. The reason for my going was the fact that I’m engaged in a project that has at times felt something of a lonesome road and indeed an albatross: to write a book about Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. The poem comes to us with a vast undertow of explicit and implicit cultural and historical baggage, from its self-conscious antiquarian roots in late medieval ballads to its engagement with more currently pressing concerns of environmentalism and how we navigate the story of colonial expansion.

No other poem in the English canon has such viral reach today or is quoted with such abandon. ‘Water, water everywhere – let’s all have a drink!’ says Homer Simpson in a 1993 episode. Taylor Swift’s most recent album, The Tortured Poets Department, released earlier this year, contains an hommage in a song called ‘Albatross’.

When it was first published as the opening number in Lyrical Ballads – the joint volume by Wordsworth and Coleridge that kickstarted the English Romantic movement in 1798 – it was dismissed as ‘the strangest story of a cock and a bull that we ever saw on paper’. But within 20 years it was being confidently referred to in the literary press as a work with which ‘every reader of modern poetry is acquainted, of course’, and as a poem ‘which, when once read, can never afterwards be entirely forgotten’. Since then it has continued to work its uncanny magic over audiences that range from the youngest children to the most erudite academics.