Three guys are on the way to a wedding celebration when an old sailor (the Mariner) stops one of them at the door (we'll call him the Wedding Guest). Using his hypnotic eyes to hold the attention of the Wedding Guest, he starts telling a story about a disastrous journey he took. The Wedding Guest really wants to go party, but he can't pry himself away from this grizzled old mariner. The Mariner begins his story. They left port, and the ship sailed down near Antarctica to get away from a bad storm, but then they get caught in a dangerous, foggy ice field. An albatross shows up to steer them through the fog and provide good winds, but then the Mariner decides to shoot it. Oops.
Pretty soon the sailors lose their wind, and it gets really hot. They run out of water, and everyone blames the Mariner. The ship seems to be haunted by a bad spirit, and weird stuff starts appearing, like slimy creatures that walk on the ocean. The Mariner's crewmates decide to hang the dead albatross around his neck to remind him of his error.
Everyone is literally dying of thirst. The Mariner sees another ship's sail at a distance. He wants to yell out, but his mouth is too dry, so he sucks some of his own blood to moisten his lips. He's like, "A ship! We're saved." Sadly, the ship is a ghost ship piloted by two spirits, Death and Life-in-Death, who have to be the last people you'd want to meet on a journey. Everyone on the Mariner's ship dies.
The wedding guest realizes, "Ah! You're a ghost!" But the Mariner says, "Well, actually, I was the only one who didn't die." He continues his story: he's on a boat with a lot of dead bodies, surrounded by an ocean full of slimy things. Worse, these slimy things are nasty water snakes. But the Mariner escapes his curse by unconsciously blessing the hideous snakes, and the albatross drops off his neck into the ocean.
The Mariner falls into a sweet sleep, and it finally rains when he wakes up. A storm strikes up in the distance, and all the dead sailors rise like zombies to pilot the ship. The sailors don't actually come back to life. Instead, angels fill their bodies, and another supernatural spirit under the ocean seems to push the boat. The Mariner faints and hears two voices talking about how he killed the albatross and still has more penance to do. These two mysterious voices explain how the ship is moving.
After a speedy journey, the ship ends up back in port again. The Mariner sees angels standing next to the bodies of all his crewmates. Then a rescue boat shows up to take him back to shore. The Mariner is happy that a guy called "the hermit" is on the rescue boat. The hermit is in a good mood. All of a sudden there's a loud noise, and the Mariner's ship sinks. The hermit's boat picks up the Mariner.
When they get on shore, the Mariner is desperate to tell his story to the hermit. He feels a terrible pain until the story had been told.
In fact, the Mariner says that he still has the same painful need to tell his story, which is why he stopped the Wedding Guest on this occasion. Wrapping up, the Mariner tells the Wedding Guest that he needs to learn how to say his prayers and love other people and things. Then the Mariner leaves, and the Wedding Guest no longer wants to enter the wedding. He goes home and wakes up the next day, as the famous last lines go, "a sadder and a wiser man."
Stanzas 1-5
Imagine that this poem starts out like the Vince Vaughn-Owen Wilson buddy comedy Wedding Crashers. Three scruffy-looking bachelors are getting ready to go into this wedding, hoping to party, meet some girls, and generally have a good time. They're laughing and swaggering as they approach the door to the party.
But standing outside the door you've got this old bearded mariner who suddenly grabs one of the guys. The other two guys enter the wedding feast, and they're like, "See ya in there."
The Mariner starts to tell a story as if it were programmed into his brain, and the Wedding Guest is understandably impatient, but also kind of rude. He says something like, "Gross. You're old and crazy. Let me go."
The Mariner immediately ("eftsoons") lets go of the guest, but the magnetic draw of his eyes is even more powerful than his grip.
The Wedding Guest has no hope of escape. He sits on a rock and listens like a little boy ("three-years' child") at story time. It's going to be a long night.
Stanzas 6-10
The Mariner starts his story:
When the Mariner's ship left port, everyone was in a good mood. They sailed out and watched the church ("kirk"), the hill, and finally, the town lighthouse disappear from sight as the ship "dropped" below the horizon.
Days went by, and the sun rose on the "left" and set on the "right." Every day the sun seemed to rise "higher," signaling that they were approaching the equator. Finally the sun was directly over the ship's mast at noon, meaning they had reached the equator.
Suddenly the Wedding Guest has second thoughts as he realizes just how long this story is going to be.
They started playing the music! The bride is led to the dance hall by the entertainers ("merry minstrelsy")! The wine! The women! He's missing out!
The guest "beats his breast" in a sign of distress.
But, as we said, there's something about that mariner that gives him power over the Wedding Guest. Something about his eyes…
Stanzas 11-15
The Mariner continues his story:
Near the equator, a storm strikes. The storm is compared to a huge flying creature that chases the ship southward. It drives them all the way down to the Arctic, where they start to see huge icebergs that look green in the clear water.
The sailors find themselves in the middle of an ice field with ice "here," "there," everywhere! Obviously there are no people or animals in sight. The giant icebergs making loud cracking, groaning sounds, like noises you might hear in a trance ("swound").
At this point, everyone on the boat is convinced that they're done for.
Stanzas 16-20
Everyone is happy to see another living thing fly past the ship: an albatross! You know, the bird with huge, white wings that can fly long distances across the ocean? Yeah, that one.
The albatross seems particularly friendly, almost as if it were a person. And not just a person, but a good "Christian soul." Somehow the bird seems related to God and peace.
The sailors feed the bird, and naturally it sticks around. Soon enough, the ice that had trapped them splits wide enough apart for the ship to sail through.
More good things happen to the ship.
A south wind that will take them back up north again starts to blow. The albatross continues to follow the boat in good fortune, and everyone treats it like their pet.
The albatross follows them around for nine nights, or "vespers." It's still pretty foggy outside, and the moon glows through the fog at night.
Then people start to notice that the Mariner has this sickly look on his face. They try to cheer up him: "What's wrong, man? Don't let the fiends get you down!"
And the mariner essentially says, "Remember that albatross that seemed so mysteriously connected to all our good fortune?" Gulp. Uh-huh? "Well, I kind of took my crossbow and shot it." YOU DID WHAT?!
Stanzas 21-25
At least time doesn't stop after he kills the albatross. The sun keeps rising and setting just as before, and the weather remains misty. Since the sailors are now traveling north instead of south, the sun rises on the right and sets on the left, instead of the other way around, as in Part I, Stanza 6.
But, leave not doubt, that bird is as dead as a doornail. The sailors' favorite pet is gone. If you have ever read any other literature about sailors, like Melville's Moby-Dick, you might know that they take their good luck charms very seriously.
The sailors are convinced that the bird brought them the good winds, and they all agree ("averred") that the Mariner has done a bad, bad thing.
But then the mist goes away, and the sailors change their minds. Instead of bringing the good winds (hooray!), the sailors decide that the bird was responsible for the fog that was making it so hard to see (boo!). They now blame the bird for bad luck. Those fickle sailors.
Everything is going along quite well for the crew. They carve the mounds or "furrows" of the waves with the wind at their back. They make their way into uncharted territory.
Stanzas 26-30
One tip for reading this poem: conditions change really fast. It only took a stanza for the sailors to decide that the albatross was really a bad luck charm instead of a good one. Here, it only takes a stanza for the weather to turn from delightful to dreadful.
In short, they lose the good breeze at their backs, and without a breeze to fill the sails, the ship can't move. Suddenly, the "silence" of the uncharted waters sounds very ominous.
The sun is small and "blood-red": it looks very far away. The sky has a strange fiery color, but their main problem is a lack of water. If they don't find some kind of land (or, heck, ice), they will all die of thirst.
There's no wind. Literally. Not even a tiny gust. The ocean looks like glass, and the scene is so motionless that it could be a painting.
Without any water, even the "boards" – the wood planks of the ship – start to dry up and "shrink." So…thirsty!
Um, so, sailors, what was that you were saying about being glad that the albatross was dead?
Stanzas 31-34
When the world gets dry, the ocean starts to "rot" from the dryness. Think of a pond that is drying up, and how it turns brackish (extra-salty) and starts growing nasty algae. The ocean around the ship is undergoing a similar transformation. Its surface turns "slimy" and gross, slimy creatures start to appear.
These creatures aren't fish: they have "legs." Are they walking on the water, or what? Hard to tell what's going on here, but the poem is beginning to turn strange.
Crazy, disturbing lights start to appear at night, and the water "burns" green, blue, and white. If you wanted to be scientific about it, you might guess that the Mariner is seeing the phenomenon of "phosphorescence." Some kinds of algae and tiny animals can literally "glow" in the water in certain times of year.
But Coleridge isn't being scientific, he's being supernatural. Some of the sailors start to dream that a spirit deep under the ocean has been following the ship ever since they left the Arctic. Needless to say, it's not a happy, fuzzy spirit.
The crew becomes so thirsty that they stop producing saliva and cannot talk. But they can still give the stink-eye to the Mariner. "This is all your fault."
In one of the poem's most famous images, they hang the dead albatross around his neck
Stanzas 35-40
They have spent a long time drifting on the ocean with no wind or water, and everyone is sick of it. Then one day, the Mariner sees something coming from the west; as in, the opposite direction as the Mariner's sweet home England.
He can't decide whether the thing is a small "speck" or a more spread-out "mist." The shape starts to come into focus and he became aware ("wist") of what looked like. It moves around in zigzag fashion as if escaping supernatural forces. Hey, join the club.
The speaker finally realizes what it is, and he wants to shout, but his mouth is too dry. His lips are sunburned and caked with dried blood. When you're as talkative as the Mariner, you know its trouble when you're so dehydrated that you can't speak.
Fortunately, he has a solution that would make the guy from the Survivor Man TV show proud. He bites his arm to wet his lips with his own blood, just enough so that he can shout
He shouts that he sees a sail.
His crewmates are so happy that they shout "gramercy!" meaning, "Thank heavens!"
The ship is coming their way. Maybe their crew will have water.
Stanzas 41-45
The sun is setting in the west, and the ship is approaching from the west. Here Coleridge provides a complicated image to illustrate how the ship is really – get ready for it – a Ghost Ship!
Here's the image: the mysterious ship sails in front of the setting sun, and rather than blocking out part of the sun completely, it just looks like the sun has bars in front of it. In other words, the ship looks like a skeleton.
The ship's sails aren't normal sails – you know, the kind that can hold wind. Instead, they look like tattered spider webs, or "gossamers." Its hull looks like ribs. Worst of all, he can now see that the crew consists of only two people: Death and Life-in-Death.
Well, shoot.
We imagine death as the hooded guy with the sickle, or something like that, while Life-in-Death is a woman who appears relatively normal except for her pale, diseased-looking skin.
Stanzas 46-51
When the ship approaches, Death and Life-in-Death are playing a game. (Please be Parcheesi, please be Parcheesi.) They are playing dice (no!) to decide who will gain the upper hand.
We have the feeling that the fate of the Mariner and his friends rests on this dice game.
We have a winner: Life-in-Death! She's just won power over a bunch of raggedy, thirsty sailors. She's probably wishing she had gone on The Price is Right instead – that dinette set is looking pretty good right about now.
But nothing happens…yet.
Night falls, and the mysterious Ghost Ship ("spectre bark") sails away.
Everyone is waiting to see what will happen. Coleridge plays the scene like a suspense movie, complete with dew going drip-drip from the sails. The partial moon rises, and it looks like a "horn," or, if you prefer, a smiley face. One of the "horns" of the moon has a star next to it. This seems to be a bad sign, for some reason.
Suddenly, everyone on the ship begins to die. They don't make a fuss but kind of just slump over. However, they do make sure to curse the Mariner with their eyes before they go.
There are 200 men on the boat besides the Mariner, and they all die. Their souls escape their dead bodies and shoot past the Mariner like the crossbow with which he shot the Albatross.
Stanzas 52-55
OK, so Coleridge isn't super-obvious about it, but at this point the Wedding Guest (remember him?) interrupts the story to make another futile attempt at escape.
After the Mariner tells this ghost story, the Wedding Guest notices that the Mariner looks a bit like a ghost himself: skinny, bony, with eerily bright eyes. Yup, all ghost-like features. Putting two and two together, the Wedding Guest freaks out.
But the Mariner reassures him that he's no ghost. He was the only one on the ship who didn't die. He doesn't exactly give the Wedding Guest a lot of comfort, but just goes on with his story.
The Mariner's story continues:
So now he's by himself on this ship with a lot of dead people, all of whom have just cursed him. He wishes that the spirit of some dead saint would take pity on him.
At least the slimy creatures are still there. He thinks what a shame it is that all these nice men have died, and he and the slimy things are still living.
Stanzas 56-60
He tries to say a prayer to save his soul, but then he hears an evil voice like a little devil on his shoulder that saps his enthusiasm for praying.
He closes his eyes to avoid looking at all the miserable sights around him. He has noticed that the bodies of all the dead sailors don't rot. Also, they're still cursing him with their looks. Let it go, guys.
Their curses are worse than the curse of a poor little orphan. And that's really bad, because an orphan could drag an angel down to Hell. For a full week, the eyes of the dead sailors emanate this terrible curse.
Stanzas 61-66
At night, the moon rises again, and the moonlight falls on the ship like frost.
He still sees all kinds of strange bright colors, like a red on the water, and a bright, "elfish" white light in the trail of the water snakes.
Wait, when were there water snakes? Oh, yeah, the "slimy things." Wait, we thought those had legs. OK, just go with it.
He looks at the water snakes swimming in the shadow of his ship. It's like a creepy version of Dr. Seuss: One Snake, Two Snake, Red Snake, Blue Snake. They are all different colors, and they make crazy phosphorescent patterns in the water.
He kind of gets excited watching the snakes. Look at the colors! He realizes that these hideous snakes are kind of beautiful. Without knowing it, he blesses the wriggly little creatures in his heart.
This blessing for fellow creatures is all it takes to remove the horrible curse that the Mariner gained from killing the albatross. He has been wearing that darn albatross around his neck this whole time, but suddenly it falls off and sinks to the bottom of the ocean.
He can pray again without being stopped by evil whispers. As Martha Stewart would say, "It's a good thing."
Stanzas 67-69
Not only can he pray again, but he can also sleep again. Exhausted from all the endless cursing and dying of thirst, he falls asleep. He credits Mary, the mother of Christ, for this sleep.
Naturally, he dreams about drinking water. But his dream actually comes true: it rains when he wakes up. Sailors are really good at collecting rainwater from their sails and in buckets, and the Mariner has all the water he needs.
(In reality, a severely dehydrated person like that would probably die from drinking too much water too fast, but we won't quibble with Coleridge on this one.)
He feels as light as if he had died and was now a ghost. But a happy ghost.
Stanzas 71-75
Now that the curse has been lifted, more good news follows. He hears a loud wind in the distance. The sound of the wind rattles the dried out ("sere") sails. But it's important to remember that the wind hasn't reached the ship yet.
He sees new activity in the sky. More stars return, and he sees things he calls "fire-flags." We have to think he's either talking about weird lightning flashes – but without clouds to block the stars – or the Aurora (in this case, the Southern Lights).
He sees a black cloud, the partial moon and lightning falling in perfectly vertical fashion. We're not sure exactly what's going on, except that these are wild descriptions.
Stanzas 76-80
OK, so what was the point of the wind if it "never reached the ship"? The wind was supposed make the ship sail again, but it does no good at a distance. Except if you have a mysterious force moving your ship: score!
Like a scene from Frankenstein, the dead sailors rise up amid the thunder and lightning. They look like zombies and don't say a word. But they all do the jobs they are supposed to do, helping to sail the ship.
If you're starting to suspect that the movie Pirates of the Caribbean borrowed a lot of material from Coleridge, we're right there with you.
The Mariner goes with the flow, and he basically says, "I don't care if these guys are just bodies with no souls, as long as we get moving again, I'll help out."
The Wedding Guest interrupts the story again. He's not the bravest Wedding Guest we've ever heard of. He's afraid that the Mariner is now telling a zombie story.
The Mariner reassures the frightened Wedding Guest that the bodies of the sailors were possessed not by their original owners, but by a bunch of good spirits, like angels. Oh, that helps.
The Mariner continues his story.
He knew that spirits were angels because, when dawn comes, they all escape from the bodies and break out into song.
Stanzas 81-85
The spirits float around the ship and sing like birds. They are like an entire symphony of voices. They stop singing after dawn, but the sails continue to make a pleasant sound like a stream following through a forest.
The ship keeps moving, but there's no wind. What gives? The Mariner is sticking with his theory that someone or something is moving the boat from underneath the ocean.
Stanzas 86-92
The Mariner explains his theory in more detail. The same spirit "nine fathoms deep" that earlier caused such problems near the Arctic has now decided to play nice and guide the ship up to the equator. At noon the sun is again directly above the mast, which means that we're back at the equator.
The ship stops and remains motionless for a bit. Then, all of a sudden, the ship takes off as if someone has just released a really fast horse or, to use a more modern metaphor, as if someone has put the gas pedal to the floor.
The force of this movement knocks out the Mariner, and he loses consciousness. While in a stupor, he hears two mysterious voices talking. We're back in supernatural territory, here.
One of the voices wants to know if the Mariner is the guy who shot the nice albatross. He sounds judgmental.
The other voice sounds gentler and says that the Mariner has done a lot of penance for his mistake, and he'll do more penance in the future.
We've got a bit of a good cop/bad cop routine here.
Stanzas 93-98
The two voices continue their dialogue, and Coleridge helps us figure out who is talking by adding stage directions: "First Voice" and "Second Voice."
The first voice is curious and the second voice is knowledgeable.
The first voice asks how the ocean has made the ship move, and the second voice replies that the ocean is just following orders from the moon, personified as a woman. The moon is happy with the Mariner, but she wasn't before.
The first voice isn't satisfied and wants to know how the ship is moving so fast. The second voice explains that the air is creating a vacuum in front of the ship and then pushing it forward from the behind. Physics students, we'll leave this one to you.
The second voice urges the ship to move faster. They have a lot of ground to cover before the Mariner wakes up.
Stanzas 99-105
The Mariner awakes from his trance and finds all the dead sailors still hanging around on the ship's deck. He thinks that a slaughterhouse would be a more appropriate place to see a sight like that.
But the sailors' curse has been lifted, and the ocean returns to its normal color. The Mariner tries not to look back on the past horrors he has seen. He's still pretty frightened that they will catch up with him again.
He feels a pleasant wind on his body, but the wind seems to be located only around him and not the ocean outside the ship.
Stanzas 106-110
The strange wind is localized just around the boat, but it means that the Mariner can sail again, even as the boat is still being pushed from beneath.
The Mariner ends up back at the port he left from so, so long ago. He sees the lighthouse, hill, and church come back into view.
It's a beautiful sight, and naturally, the Mariner is overjoyed.
Stanzas 111-115
The moonlight shines across the bay, but another set of lights soon appears. He sees shapes in "crimson" or red colors. These turn out to be angels ("seraphs"). All the dead men who came back to life to sail the ship go back to being dead, and the angels are standing beside their bodies.
These must be the angels that took over the sailors' bodies. They wave at the Mariner as if to say, "Our work is done. We're gonna peace out."
They don't speak to the Mariner, but he feels delighted anyway.
Stanzas 116-18
The Mariner hears a boat coming toward the ship. A "pilot" or oarsman and his young crewmate are coming to rescue him.
There's another man on the boat, too: the nice old "hermit." A hermit is someone, often very religious, who lives his or her life in solitude. This particular hermit lives in the forest.
The Mariner looks forward to the hermit clearing away his sins by asking him questions, by "shrieving" his soul, like a confession.
Stanzas 119-125
The hermit lives by himself in the woods near the ocean, and he likes to gab it up with sailors who have just come back from long trips. He's very religious and can be seen frequently kneeling down to pray on the lush moss in his forest.
The Mariner hears voices from the rescue boat. It's probably the pilot. The pilot wants to know what all those crazy red lights were. He thinks they were a rescue signal.
The hermit agrees that the lights were weird, and he notices that the ship and its sails look dry, like tattered, fallen leaves. We can see that the hermit is going to compare everything to the forest.
The pilot becomes afraid, but the hermit isn't too concerned.
Stanzas 126-130
What's that? Some kind of strange, rumbling sound echoes across the bay. Oh, wait, that's just the sound of the ship sinking. It sinks fast, kind of like the albatross when it fell into the ocean.
The Mariner ends up floating in the water. He seems basically comatose.
The pilot swoops by to pick him, and the small boat spins from the suction created by the sinking ship.
The pilot and hermit think the Mariner is dead, so when he moves his lips, they both freak out. The pilot faints and the hermit prays.
The Mariner is like, "OK, if you guys aren't going to help, I'll just row us out of here myself." Meanwhile, the pilot's young assistant goes batty and starts laughing in a fit, saying that the Mariner must be a devil.
Stanzas 131-135
Finally, they make it back to shore.
Immediately the Mariner starts pestering the hermit to question ("shrieve") him like an over-eager kid in math class: "Call on me! Call on me!"
The hermit plays along and asks a surprisingly dull question: what kind of man are you?
At this point, the Mariner feels a sudden pain: "Must…tell…ridiculously long…story."
As soon as he tells the story to the hermit, he feels a lot better.
Now, the Mariner explains to the Wedding Guest that he often has this painful feeling that he needs to get the story off his chest, and the pain persists until he tells it.
He travels from place to place looking for certain people who need to hear his tale. (Cough, cough, Wedding Guest.) He's a serial storyteller.
Stanzas 136-141
The Mariner has now concluded his story, and he notes that the wedding sounds like quite the party. The bride and groom are singing in the garden, but all the Mariner wants to do is to say his night prayers.
The Mariner says he knows what it means to feel lonely and distant from God.
He says that it's much better to walk to church with a friend than to go to a marriage feast. He wants to see the entire community bow down in prayer.
The Mariner summarizes his long sermon with the message that only people who love God's creations – men, birds, and animals included – can pray well and gain salvation.
You have to love big things as well as small things, he says. And with that, he's out of here.
Stanzas 142-143
For an old guy, the Mariner moves fast. He disappears and takes his bright eyes and frosty ("hoary") beard with him.
Obviously moved by the Mariner's story, the Wedding Guest decides not to enter the wedding after all. (Can we just note: weddings are getting a really bad rap from the characters in this poem! You'd think the bride and groom had robbed a convenience store after the ceremony was over.)
The Wedding Guest is totally befuddled, as if he has lost his senses. He just kind of staggers away in a stupor. He wakes up the next day "a sadder and a wiser man."
Pretty soon the sailors lose their wind, and it gets really hot. They run out of water, and everyone blames the Mariner. The ship seems to be haunted by a bad spirit, and weird stuff starts appearing, like slimy creatures that walk on the ocean. The Mariner's crewmates decide to hang the dead albatross around his neck to remind him of his error.
Everyone is literally dying of thirst. The Mariner sees another ship's sail at a distance. He wants to yell out, but his mouth is too dry, so he sucks some of his own blood to moisten his lips. He's like, "A ship! We're saved." Sadly, the ship is a ghost ship piloted by two spirits, Death and Life-in-Death, who have to be the last people you'd want to meet on a journey. Everyone on the Mariner's ship dies.
The wedding guest realizes, "Ah! You're a ghost!" But the Mariner says, "Well, actually, I was the only one who didn't die." He continues his story: he's on a boat with a lot of dead bodies, surrounded by an ocean full of slimy things. Worse, these slimy things are nasty water snakes. But the Mariner escapes his curse by unconsciously blessing the hideous snakes, and the albatross drops off his neck into the ocean.
The Mariner falls into a sweet sleep, and it finally rains when he wakes up. A storm strikes up in the distance, and all the dead sailors rise like zombies to pilot the ship. The sailors don't actually come back to life. Instead, angels fill their bodies, and another supernatural spirit under the ocean seems to push the boat. The Mariner faints and hears two voices talking about how he killed the albatross and still has more penance to do. These two mysterious voices explain how the ship is moving.
After a speedy journey, the ship ends up back in port again. The Mariner sees angels standing next to the bodies of all his crewmates. Then a rescue boat shows up to take him back to shore. The Mariner is happy that a guy called "the hermit" is on the rescue boat. The hermit is in a good mood. All of a sudden there's a loud noise, and the Mariner's ship sinks. The hermit's boat picks up the Mariner.
When they get on shore, the Mariner is desperate to tell his story to the hermit. He feels a terrible pain until the story had been told.
In fact, the Mariner says that he still has the same painful need to tell his story, which is why he stopped the Wedding Guest on this occasion. Wrapping up, the Mariner tells the Wedding Guest that he needs to learn how to say his prayers and love other people and things. Then the Mariner leaves, and the Wedding Guest no longer wants to enter the wedding. He goes home and wakes up the next day, as the famous last lines go, "a sadder and a wiser man."
Stanzas 1-5
Imagine that this poem starts out like the Vince Vaughn-Owen Wilson buddy comedy Wedding Crashers. Three scruffy-looking bachelors are getting ready to go into this wedding, hoping to party, meet some girls, and generally have a good time. They're laughing and swaggering as they approach the door to the party.
But standing outside the door you've got this old bearded mariner who suddenly grabs one of the guys. The other two guys enter the wedding feast, and they're like, "See ya in there."
The Mariner starts to tell a story as if it were programmed into his brain, and the Wedding Guest is understandably impatient, but also kind of rude. He says something like, "Gross. You're old and crazy. Let me go."
The Mariner immediately ("eftsoons") lets go of the guest, but the magnetic draw of his eyes is even more powerful than his grip.
The Wedding Guest has no hope of escape. He sits on a rock and listens like a little boy ("three-years' child") at story time. It's going to be a long night.
Stanzas 6-10
The Mariner starts his story:
When the Mariner's ship left port, everyone was in a good mood. They sailed out and watched the church ("kirk"), the hill, and finally, the town lighthouse disappear from sight as the ship "dropped" below the horizon.
Days went by, and the sun rose on the "left" and set on the "right." Every day the sun seemed to rise "higher," signaling that they were approaching the equator. Finally the sun was directly over the ship's mast at noon, meaning they had reached the equator.
Suddenly the Wedding Guest has second thoughts as he realizes just how long this story is going to be.
They started playing the music! The bride is led to the dance hall by the entertainers ("merry minstrelsy")! The wine! The women! He's missing out!
The guest "beats his breast" in a sign of distress.
But, as we said, there's something about that mariner that gives him power over the Wedding Guest. Something about his eyes…
Stanzas 11-15
The Mariner continues his story:
Near the equator, a storm strikes. The storm is compared to a huge flying creature that chases the ship southward. It drives them all the way down to the Arctic, where they start to see huge icebergs that look green in the clear water.
The sailors find themselves in the middle of an ice field with ice "here," "there," everywhere! Obviously there are no people or animals in sight. The giant icebergs making loud cracking, groaning sounds, like noises you might hear in a trance ("swound").
At this point, everyone on the boat is convinced that they're done for.
Stanzas 16-20
Everyone is happy to see another living thing fly past the ship: an albatross! You know, the bird with huge, white wings that can fly long distances across the ocean? Yeah, that one.
The albatross seems particularly friendly, almost as if it were a person. And not just a person, but a good "Christian soul." Somehow the bird seems related to God and peace.
The sailors feed the bird, and naturally it sticks around. Soon enough, the ice that had trapped them splits wide enough apart for the ship to sail through.
More good things happen to the ship.
A south wind that will take them back up north again starts to blow. The albatross continues to follow the boat in good fortune, and everyone treats it like their pet.
The albatross follows them around for nine nights, or "vespers." It's still pretty foggy outside, and the moon glows through the fog at night.
Then people start to notice that the Mariner has this sickly look on his face. They try to cheer up him: "What's wrong, man? Don't let the fiends get you down!"
And the mariner essentially says, "Remember that albatross that seemed so mysteriously connected to all our good fortune?" Gulp. Uh-huh? "Well, I kind of took my crossbow and shot it." YOU DID WHAT?!
Stanzas 21-25
At least time doesn't stop after he kills the albatross. The sun keeps rising and setting just as before, and the weather remains misty. Since the sailors are now traveling north instead of south, the sun rises on the right and sets on the left, instead of the other way around, as in Part I, Stanza 6.
But, leave not doubt, that bird is as dead as a doornail. The sailors' favorite pet is gone. If you have ever read any other literature about sailors, like Melville's Moby-Dick, you might know that they take their good luck charms very seriously.
The sailors are convinced that the bird brought them the good winds, and they all agree ("averred") that the Mariner has done a bad, bad thing.
But then the mist goes away, and the sailors change their minds. Instead of bringing the good winds (hooray!), the sailors decide that the bird was responsible for the fog that was making it so hard to see (boo!). They now blame the bird for bad luck. Those fickle sailors.
Everything is going along quite well for the crew. They carve the mounds or "furrows" of the waves with the wind at their back. They make their way into uncharted territory.
Stanzas 26-30
One tip for reading this poem: conditions change really fast. It only took a stanza for the sailors to decide that the albatross was really a bad luck charm instead of a good one. Here, it only takes a stanza for the weather to turn from delightful to dreadful.
In short, they lose the good breeze at their backs, and without a breeze to fill the sails, the ship can't move. Suddenly, the "silence" of the uncharted waters sounds very ominous.
The sun is small and "blood-red": it looks very far away. The sky has a strange fiery color, but their main problem is a lack of water. If they don't find some kind of land (or, heck, ice), they will all die of thirst.
There's no wind. Literally. Not even a tiny gust. The ocean looks like glass, and the scene is so motionless that it could be a painting.
Without any water, even the "boards" – the wood planks of the ship – start to dry up and "shrink." So…thirsty!
Um, so, sailors, what was that you were saying about being glad that the albatross was dead?
Stanzas 31-34
When the world gets dry, the ocean starts to "rot" from the dryness. Think of a pond that is drying up, and how it turns brackish (extra-salty) and starts growing nasty algae. The ocean around the ship is undergoing a similar transformation. Its surface turns "slimy" and gross, slimy creatures start to appear.
These creatures aren't fish: they have "legs." Are they walking on the water, or what? Hard to tell what's going on here, but the poem is beginning to turn strange.
Crazy, disturbing lights start to appear at night, and the water "burns" green, blue, and white. If you wanted to be scientific about it, you might guess that the Mariner is seeing the phenomenon of "phosphorescence." Some kinds of algae and tiny animals can literally "glow" in the water in certain times of year.
But Coleridge isn't being scientific, he's being supernatural. Some of the sailors start to dream that a spirit deep under the ocean has been following the ship ever since they left the Arctic. Needless to say, it's not a happy, fuzzy spirit.
The crew becomes so thirsty that they stop producing saliva and cannot talk. But they can still give the stink-eye to the Mariner. "This is all your fault."
In one of the poem's most famous images, they hang the dead albatross around his neck
Stanzas 35-40
They have spent a long time drifting on the ocean with no wind or water, and everyone is sick of it. Then one day, the Mariner sees something coming from the west; as in, the opposite direction as the Mariner's sweet home England.
He can't decide whether the thing is a small "speck" or a more spread-out "mist." The shape starts to come into focus and he became aware ("wist") of what looked like. It moves around in zigzag fashion as if escaping supernatural forces. Hey, join the club.
The speaker finally realizes what it is, and he wants to shout, but his mouth is too dry. His lips are sunburned and caked with dried blood. When you're as talkative as the Mariner, you know its trouble when you're so dehydrated that you can't speak.
Fortunately, he has a solution that would make the guy from the Survivor Man TV show proud. He bites his arm to wet his lips with his own blood, just enough so that he can shout
He shouts that he sees a sail.
His crewmates are so happy that they shout "gramercy!" meaning, "Thank heavens!"
The ship is coming their way. Maybe their crew will have water.
Stanzas 41-45
The sun is setting in the west, and the ship is approaching from the west. Here Coleridge provides a complicated image to illustrate how the ship is really – get ready for it – a Ghost Ship!
Here's the image: the mysterious ship sails in front of the setting sun, and rather than blocking out part of the sun completely, it just looks like the sun has bars in front of it. In other words, the ship looks like a skeleton.
The ship's sails aren't normal sails – you know, the kind that can hold wind. Instead, they look like tattered spider webs, or "gossamers." Its hull looks like ribs. Worst of all, he can now see that the crew consists of only two people: Death and Life-in-Death.
Well, shoot.
We imagine death as the hooded guy with the sickle, or something like that, while Life-in-Death is a woman who appears relatively normal except for her pale, diseased-looking skin.
Stanzas 46-51
When the ship approaches, Death and Life-in-Death are playing a game. (Please be Parcheesi, please be Parcheesi.) They are playing dice (no!) to decide who will gain the upper hand.
We have the feeling that the fate of the Mariner and his friends rests on this dice game.
We have a winner: Life-in-Death! She's just won power over a bunch of raggedy, thirsty sailors. She's probably wishing she had gone on The Price is Right instead – that dinette set is looking pretty good right about now.
But nothing happens…yet.
Night falls, and the mysterious Ghost Ship ("spectre bark") sails away.
Everyone is waiting to see what will happen. Coleridge plays the scene like a suspense movie, complete with dew going drip-drip from the sails. The partial moon rises, and it looks like a "horn," or, if you prefer, a smiley face. One of the "horns" of the moon has a star next to it. This seems to be a bad sign, for some reason.
Suddenly, everyone on the ship begins to die. They don't make a fuss but kind of just slump over. However, they do make sure to curse the Mariner with their eyes before they go.
There are 200 men on the boat besides the Mariner, and they all die. Their souls escape their dead bodies and shoot past the Mariner like the crossbow with which he shot the Albatross.
Stanzas 52-55
OK, so Coleridge isn't super-obvious about it, but at this point the Wedding Guest (remember him?) interrupts the story to make another futile attempt at escape.
After the Mariner tells this ghost story, the Wedding Guest notices that the Mariner looks a bit like a ghost himself: skinny, bony, with eerily bright eyes. Yup, all ghost-like features. Putting two and two together, the Wedding Guest freaks out.
But the Mariner reassures him that he's no ghost. He was the only one on the ship who didn't die. He doesn't exactly give the Wedding Guest a lot of comfort, but just goes on with his story.
The Mariner's story continues:
So now he's by himself on this ship with a lot of dead people, all of whom have just cursed him. He wishes that the spirit of some dead saint would take pity on him.
At least the slimy creatures are still there. He thinks what a shame it is that all these nice men have died, and he and the slimy things are still living.
Stanzas 56-60
He tries to say a prayer to save his soul, but then he hears an evil voice like a little devil on his shoulder that saps his enthusiasm for praying.
He closes his eyes to avoid looking at all the miserable sights around him. He has noticed that the bodies of all the dead sailors don't rot. Also, they're still cursing him with their looks. Let it go, guys.
Their curses are worse than the curse of a poor little orphan. And that's really bad, because an orphan could drag an angel down to Hell. For a full week, the eyes of the dead sailors emanate this terrible curse.
Stanzas 61-66
At night, the moon rises again, and the moonlight falls on the ship like frost.
He still sees all kinds of strange bright colors, like a red on the water, and a bright, "elfish" white light in the trail of the water snakes.
Wait, when were there water snakes? Oh, yeah, the "slimy things." Wait, we thought those had legs. OK, just go with it.
He looks at the water snakes swimming in the shadow of his ship. It's like a creepy version of Dr. Seuss: One Snake, Two Snake, Red Snake, Blue Snake. They are all different colors, and they make crazy phosphorescent patterns in the water.
He kind of gets excited watching the snakes. Look at the colors! He realizes that these hideous snakes are kind of beautiful. Without knowing it, he blesses the wriggly little creatures in his heart.
This blessing for fellow creatures is all it takes to remove the horrible curse that the Mariner gained from killing the albatross. He has been wearing that darn albatross around his neck this whole time, but suddenly it falls off and sinks to the bottom of the ocean.
He can pray again without being stopped by evil whispers. As Martha Stewart would say, "It's a good thing."
Stanzas 67-69
Not only can he pray again, but he can also sleep again. Exhausted from all the endless cursing and dying of thirst, he falls asleep. He credits Mary, the mother of Christ, for this sleep.
Naturally, he dreams about drinking water. But his dream actually comes true: it rains when he wakes up. Sailors are really good at collecting rainwater from their sails and in buckets, and the Mariner has all the water he needs.
(In reality, a severely dehydrated person like that would probably die from drinking too much water too fast, but we won't quibble with Coleridge on this one.)
He feels as light as if he had died and was now a ghost. But a happy ghost.
Stanzas 71-75
Now that the curse has been lifted, more good news follows. He hears a loud wind in the distance. The sound of the wind rattles the dried out ("sere") sails. But it's important to remember that the wind hasn't reached the ship yet.
He sees new activity in the sky. More stars return, and he sees things he calls "fire-flags." We have to think he's either talking about weird lightning flashes – but without clouds to block the stars – or the Aurora (in this case, the Southern Lights).
He sees a black cloud, the partial moon and lightning falling in perfectly vertical fashion. We're not sure exactly what's going on, except that these are wild descriptions.
Stanzas 76-80
OK, so what was the point of the wind if it "never reached the ship"? The wind was supposed make the ship sail again, but it does no good at a distance. Except if you have a mysterious force moving your ship: score!
Like a scene from Frankenstein, the dead sailors rise up amid the thunder and lightning. They look like zombies and don't say a word. But they all do the jobs they are supposed to do, helping to sail the ship.
If you're starting to suspect that the movie Pirates of the Caribbean borrowed a lot of material from Coleridge, we're right there with you.
The Mariner goes with the flow, and he basically says, "I don't care if these guys are just bodies with no souls, as long as we get moving again, I'll help out."
The Wedding Guest interrupts the story again. He's not the bravest Wedding Guest we've ever heard of. He's afraid that the Mariner is now telling a zombie story.
The Mariner reassures the frightened Wedding Guest that the bodies of the sailors were possessed not by their original owners, but by a bunch of good spirits, like angels. Oh, that helps.
The Mariner continues his story.
He knew that spirits were angels because, when dawn comes, they all escape from the bodies and break out into song.
Stanzas 81-85
The spirits float around the ship and sing like birds. They are like an entire symphony of voices. They stop singing after dawn, but the sails continue to make a pleasant sound like a stream following through a forest.
The ship keeps moving, but there's no wind. What gives? The Mariner is sticking with his theory that someone or something is moving the boat from underneath the ocean.
Stanzas 86-92
The Mariner explains his theory in more detail. The same spirit "nine fathoms deep" that earlier caused such problems near the Arctic has now decided to play nice and guide the ship up to the equator. At noon the sun is again directly above the mast, which means that we're back at the equator.
The ship stops and remains motionless for a bit. Then, all of a sudden, the ship takes off as if someone has just released a really fast horse or, to use a more modern metaphor, as if someone has put the gas pedal to the floor.
The force of this movement knocks out the Mariner, and he loses consciousness. While in a stupor, he hears two mysterious voices talking. We're back in supernatural territory, here.
One of the voices wants to know if the Mariner is the guy who shot the nice albatross. He sounds judgmental.
The other voice sounds gentler and says that the Mariner has done a lot of penance for his mistake, and he'll do more penance in the future.
We've got a bit of a good cop/bad cop routine here.
Stanzas 93-98
The two voices continue their dialogue, and Coleridge helps us figure out who is talking by adding stage directions: "First Voice" and "Second Voice."
The first voice is curious and the second voice is knowledgeable.
The first voice asks how the ocean has made the ship move, and the second voice replies that the ocean is just following orders from the moon, personified as a woman. The moon is happy with the Mariner, but she wasn't before.
The first voice isn't satisfied and wants to know how the ship is moving so fast. The second voice explains that the air is creating a vacuum in front of the ship and then pushing it forward from the behind. Physics students, we'll leave this one to you.
The second voice urges the ship to move faster. They have a lot of ground to cover before the Mariner wakes up.
Stanzas 99-105
The Mariner awakes from his trance and finds all the dead sailors still hanging around on the ship's deck. He thinks that a slaughterhouse would be a more appropriate place to see a sight like that.
But the sailors' curse has been lifted, and the ocean returns to its normal color. The Mariner tries not to look back on the past horrors he has seen. He's still pretty frightened that they will catch up with him again.
He feels a pleasant wind on his body, but the wind seems to be located only around him and not the ocean outside the ship.
Stanzas 106-110
The strange wind is localized just around the boat, but it means that the Mariner can sail again, even as the boat is still being pushed from beneath.
The Mariner ends up back at the port he left from so, so long ago. He sees the lighthouse, hill, and church come back into view.
It's a beautiful sight, and naturally, the Mariner is overjoyed.
Stanzas 111-115
The moonlight shines across the bay, but another set of lights soon appears. He sees shapes in "crimson" or red colors. These turn out to be angels ("seraphs"). All the dead men who came back to life to sail the ship go back to being dead, and the angels are standing beside their bodies.
These must be the angels that took over the sailors' bodies. They wave at the Mariner as if to say, "Our work is done. We're gonna peace out."
They don't speak to the Mariner, but he feels delighted anyway.
Stanzas 116-18
The Mariner hears a boat coming toward the ship. A "pilot" or oarsman and his young crewmate are coming to rescue him.
There's another man on the boat, too: the nice old "hermit." A hermit is someone, often very religious, who lives his or her life in solitude. This particular hermit lives in the forest.
The Mariner looks forward to the hermit clearing away his sins by asking him questions, by "shrieving" his soul, like a confession.
Stanzas 119-125
The hermit lives by himself in the woods near the ocean, and he likes to gab it up with sailors who have just come back from long trips. He's very religious and can be seen frequently kneeling down to pray on the lush moss in his forest.
The Mariner hears voices from the rescue boat. It's probably the pilot. The pilot wants to know what all those crazy red lights were. He thinks they were a rescue signal.
The hermit agrees that the lights were weird, and he notices that the ship and its sails look dry, like tattered, fallen leaves. We can see that the hermit is going to compare everything to the forest.
The pilot becomes afraid, but the hermit isn't too concerned.
Stanzas 126-130
What's that? Some kind of strange, rumbling sound echoes across the bay. Oh, wait, that's just the sound of the ship sinking. It sinks fast, kind of like the albatross when it fell into the ocean.
The Mariner ends up floating in the water. He seems basically comatose.
The pilot swoops by to pick him, and the small boat spins from the suction created by the sinking ship.
The pilot and hermit think the Mariner is dead, so when he moves his lips, they both freak out. The pilot faints and the hermit prays.
The Mariner is like, "OK, if you guys aren't going to help, I'll just row us out of here myself." Meanwhile, the pilot's young assistant goes batty and starts laughing in a fit, saying that the Mariner must be a devil.
Stanzas 131-135
Finally, they make it back to shore.
Immediately the Mariner starts pestering the hermit to question ("shrieve") him like an over-eager kid in math class: "Call on me! Call on me!"
The hermit plays along and asks a surprisingly dull question: what kind of man are you?
At this point, the Mariner feels a sudden pain: "Must…tell…ridiculously long…story."
As soon as he tells the story to the hermit, he feels a lot better.
Now, the Mariner explains to the Wedding Guest that he often has this painful feeling that he needs to get the story off his chest, and the pain persists until he tells it.
He travels from place to place looking for certain people who need to hear his tale. (Cough, cough, Wedding Guest.) He's a serial storyteller.
Stanzas 136-141
The Mariner has now concluded his story, and he notes that the wedding sounds like quite the party. The bride and groom are singing in the garden, but all the Mariner wants to do is to say his night prayers.
The Mariner says he knows what it means to feel lonely and distant from God.
He says that it's much better to walk to church with a friend than to go to a marriage feast. He wants to see the entire community bow down in prayer.
The Mariner summarizes his long sermon with the message that only people who love God's creations – men, birds, and animals included – can pray well and gain salvation.
You have to love big things as well as small things, he says. And with that, he's out of here.
Stanzas 142-143
For an old guy, the Mariner moves fast. He disappears and takes his bright eyes and frosty ("hoary") beard with him.
Obviously moved by the Mariner's story, the Wedding Guest decides not to enter the wedding after all. (Can we just note: weddings are getting a really bad rap from the characters in this poem! You'd think the bride and groom had robbed a convenience store after the ceremony was over.)
The Wedding Guest is totally befuddled, as if he has lost his senses. He just kind of staggers away in a stupor. He wakes up the next day "a sadder and a wiser man."
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