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
Stylistics poetic effects in understanding a poem's meaning. Widdowson points out that in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798), the mystery of the Mariner's abrupt appearance is sustained by an idiosyncratic use of tense. (Widdowson. 1992, 40) For instance, the Mariner 'holds' the wedding-guest with his 'skinny hand' in the present tense, but releases it in the past tense ('...his hands dropt he.'); only to hold him again, this time with his 'glittering eye', in the present (Widdowson. 1992, 41). Widdowson notices that when the content of poetry is summarised, it often refers to very general