sea adventure

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge-
This Gothic sea-fantasia contains some of the most brilliantly outlandish magic and mystery in all literature—the mariner’s killing of the albatross, the death of all his crewmates, the mysterious undersea force that propels his ship, night Life-in-Death and an ocean surface swarming with serpents. Nonetheless, perhaps paradoxically, there is a peculiar solidity and believability about the voyage that Coleridge describes here. He took many of the details from a factual account of a British privateer sailing the coasts of South America—George Shevlocke’s Voyage Round the World by the Way of the Great South Sea Perform’d in the Years 1719, 20, 21, 22, in the Speedwell of London—and something of that realism gives strange force to the Fantastical elements. Perhaps that’s why this poem has proved so enduring an evocation of the sea