The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to row. The pilot's boy goes crazy and laughs, thinking the mariner is the devil, and cries, "The Devil knows how to row". As penance for shooting the albatross, the mariner, driven by guilt, is forced to wander the earth, telling his story over and over, and teaching a lesson to those he meets: After relaying the story, the mariner leaves, and the wedding guest returns home, and wakes the next morning "a sadder and a wiser man". The poem received mixed reviews from critics, and Coleridge was once told by the publisher that most of the book's sales were
Opium and Romanticism rheumatism, but later he believed that opium made his body harmonize with his soul. He was said to have written in a letter to his brother George Coleridge, “Laudanum gave me repose, not sleep; but, you, I believe, know how divine that repose is, what a spot of enchantment, a green spot of fountain and flowers and trees in the very heart of a waste of sands!” There has been much controversy debating if his poems "Kubla Khan" and "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" were the results of opium vision. Percy Shelley was said by scholars to have used opium