Samuel Taylor Coleridge 
Rime of the Ancient Mariner 

This masterpiece of eighteenth-century English poetry tells the epic tale of a sailor who endures a fate worse than death for killing an albatross. After callously shooting an albatross with his crossbow, a sailor is doomed to a nightmarish voyage from the Antarctic to the Equator before returning home as the sole survivor of the journey. When the haunting figure Life-in-Death wins his soul in a game of dice, the sailor is doomed to forever roam the Earth, compelled by guilt to repeat his story time and again. First published in the volume Lyrical Ballads in 1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is considered the first major work of English Romantic poetry, and one of the great masterpieces of Western literature.