What is the title of Coleridge's narrative poem about an ancient mariner?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a narrative poem about a sailor haunted by the consequences of killing an albatross. It is one of the defining poems of British Romantic literature.

Coleridge wrote the poem in 1797–98, and it was first published in the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads, the groundbreaking collection produced with William Wordsworth. The poem begins when the Mariner stops a Wedding-Guest and forces him to hear the story of a disastrous voyage. After the Mariner shoots an albatross, the ship and its crew suffer supernatural punishment, and he must wander the world retelling his tale.

The poem explores guilt, penance, reverence for nature, and the unsettling power of the supernatural. Its famous albatross is not merely a symbol of bad luck in the poem: the Mariner’s thoughtless violence against a living creature triggers a moral and spiritual crisis. The narrative ends with the Wedding-Guest becoming “a sadder and a wiser man.”

The title can cause confusion because Coleridge revised the poem repeatedly. The original title used archaic spelling—The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere—and a 1800 version shortened it to The Ancient Mariner. Later editions restored the familiar longer title, especially the influential 1817 text with marginal glosses.