The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Christabel, and the Conversation Poems

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Great title poem plus "Kubla Khan," "Christabel," and twenty more sonnets, lyrics, and odes, including Sonnet: To a Friend who asked how I felt when the Nurse first presented my Infant to me, Frost at Midnight, The Nightingale, The Pains of Sleep, To William Wordsworth, Youth and Age, and many more.

All are reprinted from an authoritative edition published by Oxford University Press. Includes alphabetical lists of titles and first lines.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Fiction, Literature, British Literature, 18th Century, School

86 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1799

About the author

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was an English poet, critic, and philosopher who was, along with his friend William Wordsworth, one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England and one of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as his major prose work Biographia Literaria.

Reviews

[Fernando · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Agua, agua, por todas partes,
Y todas las provisiones se redujeron;
Agua, agua, por todas partes,
Para beber ni una gota.”

“La balada del anciano marinero”, este inmortal poema creado en 1798 por Samuel Taylor Coleridge, uno de los más grandes poetas del Romanticismo, admirado e idolatrado por contemporáneos y sucesores como Lord Byron, William Wordsworth (con quien entabló una gran amistad) o Percy Bysshe Shelley, todos ellos supieron mantener en alto su fama y su calidad de poeta.
Este extenso y sobrenatural poema es el epítome de su obra y la historia que narra es completamente hechizante y soberbia.
Ha sido recordada por todos los poetas que le sucedieron e incluso supo trascender las artes, desde la ilustración a cargo del inolvidable Gustave Doré que hizo un trabajo impresionante, hasta el siglo XX, incluyendo a Jorge Luis Borges e incluso hasta la banda de heavy metal Iron Maiden que incluyó una versión musicalizada de más de 13 minutos de duración en su disco “Powerslave” de 1984.
Apuesto a que no todos saben esto último…

[Theo Logos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three gothic poems compose the heart of this collection, and they are truly and beautifully weird.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a ghostly tale of terror upon the sea, as related by the ancient one to a bewitched, young Wedding Guest. Horror, transgression, madness, redemption, and compulsion are the elements of this fantastical poem.

Kubla Khan is famous for its backstory — a drug induced vision and an unfortunate interruption by a visitor that drove the vision away, leaving the poem incomplete. Yet this exquisite, arcane vision of a poem may be stronger because of it — it seems perfect as it is, and I can’t imagine that going on for many more pages would have improved on this near perfect poetical dream.

Christabel, too, is unfinished, but unlike the perfect fragment of Kubla Khan, this both frustrates and tantalizes. Coleridge was telling an eldritch tale of a young maiden bewitched by a witch woman, (or perhaps a vampire). Just as the peril is fully established and the sinister Geraldine has fully dominated Christabel, the poem is abandoned.

There are other poems here, but to me they felt like filler — backup singers to the big three superstars that compose over half the volume.

[Kiran Bhat · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best lyrics ever written, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner captures in flawless prose what it means to be an adventurer. The language is a little antiquated by modern states, but what makes the text soar is Coleridge's mastery of rhythm, and the deep sense of drama he can stir in the reader.

[Gaia · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.85⭐️

[Olivia]

The spirit who bideth by himself
In the land of mist and snow,
He loved the bird that loved the man
Who shot him with his bow.

alexa, play "the albatross" by taylor swift

[Millz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Coleridge, I love that he didn't give a fuck and just wrote down every thought he had while high and now we're studying him in schools.
Anyway his poems are amazing, The Raven is by far my favourite.

[Sofía · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lo que más me disgustó del libro fue el prólogo de Harold Bloom, pero de eso no es culpable Coleridge. En lo personal, me gustó la balada del viejo marinero, pero aún más los "otros poemas".

[Philip of Macedon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s best known poems includes the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan, Dejection: An Ode, Frost at Midnight, and The Nightingale. I’d never read anything of his before picking this up.

His talent for evocative and atmospheric writing strikes one immediately upon reading the first few stanzas of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This lengthy narrative poem is high art. It’s got that rare quality of magnificent poetry that makes it musical and stirring, a fever dream of melancholy and fear and maritime wonder. It’s a story of a mariner cursed by guilt after killing an albatross on a voyage, a bird that the crew interpreted as bringing with it favorable conditions, but that the mariner shoots inexplicably. The events following this killing unfold in a vivid, almost surreal horror, with specters and death and starvation and haunting visions, as the crew slowly perishes and the mariner is driven mad. The poem is full of possible symbolism, and reading the interpretations that have floated around for a couple centuries can stimulate one’s curiosity. The one I like best is that as the mariner begins to appreciate the beauty of wild nature around him and to no longer see it as a threat or as something to tame and destroy, he is returned to peace, although still doomed to a life of atonement for his sins.

Christabel may be just as magnificent a poem, although it was never finished. Coleridge wrote two parts of it, another narrative work entranced by the supernatural. It tells of Christabel meeting and rescuing a girl in the woods who has been abducted, soon to be followed by odd harbingers and weird happenings. It’s too bad the poem was never finished. The parts that exist present a lyrically sophisticated tale that hints at mystery and oddity that is never explained, with romanticism coursing through its veins.

Coleridge was, with William Wordsworth, responsible for the Romantic Movement and this flare for the romantic is evident in every poem in the book. His poems have this transcendent quality to them, a sort of flowing, dreamy enchantment, fixation on deeply felt emotions and sensations and experiences, an appreciation of nature, a hint of the ethereal and supernatural, enriched by a masterful use of language.

Despite being another “fan favorite”, I didn’t think much of Kubla Khan compared to the rest, although it still possesses a power that most poets would only dream of having. It evokes a sense of grandeur inspired by a dream after reading of a palace built for Kubla Khan.

His last three poems, though lesser known than the first three, stand just as tall. Dejection is a somber, but also hopeful ode to joy, to sleep, to grief, set against highly effective visuals of nature and dark forces and an abyss of pain. Frost at Midnight is a lovely little piece about exactly what its title suggests, and the Nightingale is a calming, reflective close.

This is a great collection that highlights what are supposed to be Coleridge’s greatest contributions to poetry. While apparently these poems weren’t well received in Coleridge’s day, it’s hard to read them now without a sense of awe. If readers of the late 1700s and early 1800s didn’t like them, I don’t know whose works they preferred. It wouldn’t be the first time a writer was so far ahead of his peers that true appreciation of his art came only after his death.

[Nick Black · Rating 5 out of 5]

Top eight (top ten, but in octal) ways to announce general failure to the surrounding area at work (back before telecommuting paradise anyway, w00t):

8) The plane has hit the fucking mountain!
7) I wish someone knew how computers worked around here
6) lpt0: printer on fire
5) Mr. McKitchrick, after careful consideration, I think our system: sucks
4) We're gonna need a bigger boat!
3) OH SHIT THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL
2) FUCK ME THE RINGBUFFER IS FULL

...and the number one way to let people know things are fubar...

1) "What's that look on your face?"
"I believe we've shot the ALBATROSS."

usually followed by "what's the albatross?" and a rough "First off it's ALBATROSS, second off go to school, third for the love of god, fiend, cease plaguing me thus lest many men so beautiful dead lie" but by that time they've wisely departed.

(references: big lebowski / homespun / linux kernel source code / wargames / jaws / dr. octagon / reflex interceptor source code / RotAM)

[Giorgia · Rating 3 out of 5]

[La ballata del vecchio marinaio e altre poesie, traduzione di Franco Buffoni]
Il punto forte del versificare di Coleridge è sicuramente l’abilità linguistica, metrica e la profondità che scaturisce da questo insieme. Purtroppo la lettura in traduzione non rende neanche la metà di tale bellezza, e non avendo un livello così alto di inglese da poter leggere interamente l’opera in traduzione, credo di essermi persa qualcosa. Oltretutto testi del genere hanno su di me un’attrattiva moderata, nel senso che mi affascinano entro certi limiti: l’emotività del testo, se c’è, è bel lontana dalla mia sensibilità artistica e, oltre alla storia narrata, riesco a ricavarne poco altro. A mio avviso questa traduzione penalizza il testo poetico, allontanandosi dalla versione originale. Al contrario ho trovato le poesie molto più incisive e intense, forse per la brevità e per tematiche a me più care. Qui si nota anche maggior discrepanza tra originale e traduzione, che è molto soggettiva e poco fedele al testo inglese.

[Ira Bespalova · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poem itself is about a Mariner who is telling his tale of sin and forgiveness by God. The Mariner is supposedly responsible for the death of all of the crew on his ship because of his killing of a creature(Albatross) which was to bring them the wind that they needed to put power into the sails of the ship. The whole point of the poem is to encourage or convince the reader to believe the tale that Coleridge tells.
A wonderfully written story! Having finished this short poem I felt an urgent need to help someone or do something for the sake of the humankind... That's how Coleridge influenced me.

[Nicole ✨Reading Engineer✨ · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was ok, the poems are from a different era, so it was hard for me to grasp. But some of them were decent.

[R · Rating 4 out of 5]

“You will see Coleridge—he who sits obscure
In the exceeding lustre and the pure
Intense irradiation of a mind,
Which, with its own internal lightning blind,
Flags wearily through darkness and despair—
A cloud-encircled meteor of the air,
A hooded eagle among blinking owls.—“
- Shelley


Reputation – 4/5
Samuel Taylor Coleridge is always mentioned in tandem with his more boring but more successful friend, William Wordsworth. Their joint publication of Lyrical Ballads launched the English Romantic movement in 1798. Following Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge essentially gave up poetry, and spent most of his life as an itinerant preacher and lecturer. He went on to write some influential criticism on Shakespeare, but today he is still remembered primarily as a poet who wrote very little poetry.
Coleridge’s entire poetic reputation rests on three poems: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and Kubla Khan. Only the first of these three is finished, and even that one, just barely. These three, along with basically all the poetry Coleridge ever wrote are included in this slim volume of less than 80 pages. No English poet’s reputation rests on such a small body of work.


Point – 4/5
Eugene Delacroix once gave a very astute review of Jean-Dominique Ingres in a single sentence:
“His art is the complete expression of incomplete intelligence.”
I would venture that Coleridge’s poetry is the exact opposite of that: The incomplete expression of complete intelligence.

Coleridge had one of the greatest minds of his age. In his mid-twenties he went to Germany with William Wordsworth, mastered the German language and began to read and translate Kant. He took the precepts of German Idealism back with him to England and spent a few years trying to make the new metaphysics fit into a cohesive poetic system. The task proved too much for him and instead he became a drug addict.
If Coleridge were alive today, he would be a pain pill junkie. But in the early 19th Century, laudanum was the available form of opium and Coleridge was addicted to drinking it mixed with alcohol for basically his entire adult life. He was fully aware of how his “habit” was harming him, but in his day, there was no science of addiction and those who became slaves to a substance were thought to be either possessed by evil spirits or lacking in will power. All his life Coleridge dreaded that he was either cursed by God or possessed by the devil.

Probably as a consequence of this tortured and anxious life, very little of Coleridge’s poetry makes any rational sense. Yet somehow, through the sheer power of his language it communicates something to us. It’s hard to say exactly what that is. The effect is truly Strange, in the sense of the word when used to speak about Edgar Allen Poe or H.P. Lovecraft. Just the fragment of Kubla Khan is so alien and mysterious that it could be a piece of mythological religious writing. And even though it means absolutely nothing, we are drawn to it by the gravity of its language.
We know from Coleridge’s criticism that he believed in the power of poetry to communicate something imaginative completely outside the realm of the rational mind. This faith in comprehension contra reason and the fact that it is largely successful – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, is, after all, one of the most famous poems in English – seems to me a proof of Coleridge’s profound intellect and poetic power.

Still, Coleridge has his detractors, and the argument against him being a great poet is strong. He barely wrote 100 pages of poetry, and what he did write is confusing, dense, and mostly unfinished. Plenty of his shorter poems are pointless beyond a few nice phrases, and, like William Blake, he can easily be overrated by people who just want to align themselves with the mystical and misunderstood in an attempt to be thought cool or deep. Finally, he threw away his talents, and, in the words of William Hazlitt,
“… ended in swallowing doses of oblivion and in writing paragraphs in the Courier. – Such, and so little is the mind of man!”

But there is a strong argument in favor of Coleridge’s place in the canon of English Poetry. In the little that he did write flashes lightning of such brilliance it really is impossible to say the man was not a genius. And as much as Coleridge’s unfinished work may have bothered him, we don’t seem to mind unfinished work if it is infused with perplexing depth. Leonardo da Vinci, after all, only finished a few paintings, and several of his best works are either unfinished or in a poor state of decay, yet they contain such profound artistry and inspiration that we consider them either finished or unfinishable. Coleridge’s work survives in the same way – by the incomplete expression of complete intelligence.


Recommendation – 4/5
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is an extraordinary poem – one that I think everyone should read. And once you’ve read that, you’re basically halfway through this book, so you might as well finish it, especially if you have a tendency towards Gothic or Strange literature.
Coleridge has a strong rhythmic sense - his poetry is best read out loud - and there are several fine recordings of his best poems on youtube. I would recommend listening to as much of his poetry as you can.
Finally, Percy Shelley once had a panic attack after listening to Lord Byron recite Christabel. I think that’s just about as good a recommendation you can get.


Personal – 5/5
Coleridge has one of my favorite voices in English literature. Everything he wrote is loaded with rare sharpness, even when it makes little sense. The prose he wrote in his personal journals is more poetic than most poetry and his denominated poetry reaches a realm of the uncanny that I don’t think any other writer in English has ever achieved. For me, he blows the shit out of Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft and anyone else you can name for being bizarre. Coleridge is just much more intelligent and a much more skillful with English than those other writers.
And Coleridge has another side. There are moments in his poetry where we see him as a fragile human being. When we remember that he spent most of his life as a miserable drug addict, these intimate moments are even more touching. In “Frost at Midnight” we see him meditating on his own afflicted life and wishing for something better for his infant son. It is the most tender, most heartfelt expression of fatherhood in English poetry:

”Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the interspersed vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent ’mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.”

[Arthur · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title poem lives up to its lofty reputation - it's haunting, intense, and genuinely weird. Coleridge uses repetition very effectively throughout the poems collected here. He also had a great sense of humor, which pops out in unexpected places (my man sure did have beef with the city of Cologne...).

[Adriana · Rating 5 out of 5]

A poet lies, or that which once seem'd he.
O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C.;
That he who many a year with toil of breath
Found death in life, may here find life in death!
Mercy for praise-to be forgiven for fame
He ask'd, and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same!

[helena ♡ · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5☆

[Sparrow .]

I found this in front of a brownstone in Park Slope. It’s published by Dover, which is good karma, and the print is nice and big. I am finally ready (at the age of 62) for Samuel Taylor! He is so weird! He’s a clergyman; he’s a pagan; he’s a 14-year-old girl. These pieces are semi-improvised; he wasn’t a poet, he was a “freestyle rapper,” 120 years early. My favorite piece, I think, is the Gothic “Lady Geraldine.” He can be as creepy as Poe!
And will your mother pity me,
Who am a maiden most forlorn?
Christabel answered – Woe is me!
She died the hour that I was born.
I have heard the gray-haired friars tell
How on her death-bed she did say,
That she should hear the castle-bell
Strike twelve upon my wedding-day.

[That’s from “Christabel.”] I wonder why he stopped writing poems, basically, after his youth? It’s a shame. He’s having a lot more fun than Wordsworth or Keats. I guess he was content to invent Romanticism, then go back to writing slightly cracked sermons.

[Vitani Days · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sempre un piacere rileggere Coleridge, ed è ancor più piacevole scoprire la sua poesia oltre alla Ballata del Vecchio Marinaio. "Christabel", per esempio, è un capolavoro.Coleridge si conferma poeta dal verso di pennello, sembra continuamente di inuamente di vedere tra le righe un dipinto preraffaelita o i quadri di Caspar Friedrich.
Di un'eleganza squisita, senza pari, poesie intense e commoventi che non sbavano di un millimetro, a tratti visionarie e scure. Dipinge la Natura con parole che nessun altro mai, a volte la lascia fondersi col soprannaturale con delicatezza e garbo, senza scossoni. Spettacolo.
Indubbiamente sempre un Maestro.

[Po Po · Rating 3 out of 5]

I find this work very stiff. It doesn't take literary risks. It's straight-forward, dour, devoid of humor.

The technical skill set you'd expect from a classic poet is here. So, yes, technically, this is excellent. But some of these poems seem to be missing the crucial emotional element.

My favorite poems are "Christabel", "Lewti", and "Fears in Solitude", "Love", "The Pains of Sleep" and "Dejection: An Ode." These are the ones that seemed the most heartfelt and the least contrived.

[Fishface · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great read, of course -- it's Coleridge! I've been meaning to get to "The Rime Of the Ancient Mariner" since Hector was a pup and it didn't disappoint. I was astounded how many bits and pieces of this poem I've known forever without realizing they came from this larger work.

[Maddie Wendler · Rating 3 out of 5]

I know it’s in English, but is it? I liked some of the poems, others were just words on the page. Geraldine, you raggedy bitch! I wish that Christabel was finished. The pains of sleep, Christabel, and the ryme of the ancient mariner were good. The conversation poems were not as fun.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't realize that Coleridge also wrote Kubla Khan.

[adastraia · Rating 4 out of 5]

my first real poem collection. i read a poem daily and finally finished it. it was beautiful.

[Julia · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hate poetry. Unless it's poetry for kids. Then it's tolerable.

[Richard Cubitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent. Great imagery and symbolism.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Updated Review/Sept 2025

A few nights ago I was trying to think of all the teachers I had prior to college. Since I moved around so much as a kid, I have a hard time remembering any of them. Except for one. The best teacher I ever had, 8th grade English. Fifty-one years later, I still remember her. I feel so fortunate to have had a great teacher like her.

Miss Parrish was slight, unmarried, and had a marked limp, a remnant, it was said, of polio she had as a child. She used to sit next to an overhead projector; I have visions of her diagramming sentences with us for hours. She had no textbooks, but we had a vocabulary book which we never discussed in class. We were expected to study a chapter a week and every Monday morning began with Miss Parrish reciting the ten words (or was it fifteen? twenty?), making us spell them, which was followed by analogies and examples of the words in sentences. It was brutal.

The class before Christmas holiday, Miss Parrish would surprise with a reading of a short story she loved, The Scarlet Ibis, which ends with a brother holding his bleeding younger brother as he is dying. It was surprisingly uplifting. Years later, when I was young teacher, I used to read a selection from a Studs Terkel book to all my classes on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as a way of protesting that we did not have the day off. So I used the day to teach about him by reading the selection. I only recently realized that I copied that practice from her. As I did about textbooks.

This past weekend, I looked for her and found out she died in May 2017, just before her 90th birthday. Here's an excerpt from her obituary:

Her students who struggled to correctly diagram a sentence and to read Romeo and Juliet and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” owe her a debt of gratitude for providing them with the tools to communicate effectively an idea with the written word. To her students who here correctly identified a few of Miss Parrish’s deadly sins of composition–the comma splice, dangling participle, and split infinitive–you receive an A while the rest of us receive a red-pencil 0.

As I read the intro to the review on Rime I wrote years ago, I realized how much I owe Miss Parrish. Since I was never able to do so personally, this will have to do. Even though I got a C.

Original Review

“Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.”

I think the first time I read this verse in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was when I began to understand the concept of poetry. An old sailor holds up a wedding guest to tell the story of an ill-fated voyage that he believes he cursed. Truly one of the important works of English literature. The concluding verse; the description of how the wedding guest was moved by the story, is worth remembering even for those who won’t read it:

“He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn.”

The other selections of this short volume, including the opium-inspired Kubla Khan, are not as memorable.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Albatross Hunters of the Caribbean

This is a very long poem about a group of men who set off without a sat-nav system to *spoiler alert* shoot an albatross. They know this is a bad idea, but they do it anyway. The man who eventually shoots the albatross is cunningly referred to as “the Ancient Mariner” (the AM) to ensure that the name of his family is not brought into disrepute. Having shot the bird, the soul of the AM is doomed to wander the earth, gate-crashing weddings and scaring the guests.

In the film Pirates of the Caribbean, the albatross is replaced with a cursed chest full of Aztec gold. The AM is reincarnated as a group of zombie pirates who roam the earth retrieving the gold. This makes more sense than the albatross hunting, which is a comparatively thin premise to set off on a potentially treacherous journey. So thin, in fact, that I am prepared to admit that I may have my facts mixed up.

You read it when? About 25 years ago

Impact rating: 4 out of 10 (I can quote excerpts from this poem, but not with certainty.)

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is more of a musing than a review! It was nice to revisit these poems that I probably haven't read in full for many years. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is especially dear to me since I remember discussing it after a first read with my grandma who had read it while she was in school. There was something fantastic about that. I enjoyed rereading the other poems as well and be able to look at them in a different light than when I was 17. I knew there was a reason I had kept this on my shelf!

[Lisa Cook · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the staples of European Romanticism. This poem is haunting in a lot of ways. Its Romantic elements are incredible and it's worth reading just because of the incredible number of times this poem is alluded to, probably Frankenstein being my personal favorite. (As a child, Mary Shelley got to listen to Coleridge deliver a reading in her own home - I'm so freakin' jealous...)

Anyway, short anecdote that makes me laugh:
When I asked a fellow teacher friend of mine to describe this poem in a nutshell, her response was "Albatrosses be cray cray." Hilarity ensues.

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has been in my wishlist for two years, since a dear friend of mine recommended it because she loved it very much. When I saw a beautiful second hand edition of it, I thought that I couldn’t leave it in the bookshop!
It took me an evening to read it and I loved it just like my friend did.

I really enjoy books (such as The Old Man and the Sea) where Nature and its sublimity become characters who interacts with mankind.