The Rime of the Ancient Mariner that the poem may have been inspired by the voyage of Thomas James into the Arctic. According to William Wordsworth, the poem was inspired while Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Wordsworth's sister Dorothy were on a walking tour through the Quantock Hills in Somerset. The discussion had turned to a book that Wordsworth was reading, "A Voyage Round The World by Way of the Great South Sea" (1726) by Captain George Shelvocke. In the book, a melancholy sailor, Simon Hatley, shoots a black albatross: As they discussed Shelvocke's book, Wordsworth proffers the following developmental critique to Coleridge, which importantly contains a reference
The Bone Church King says, by such Robert Browning narrative poems as "My Last Duchess". (Another Browning piece, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came", famously inspired King's self-described magnum opus, his "Dark Tower" series.) The poem's narrative style, of a man relating to a stranger the details of a macabre journey, has invited comparisons with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the plot of whose poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" follows a similar thread. The fearsome jungle setting and wildlife, on the other hand, has been compared to some of the poems and stories of Rudyard Kipling. The Bone Church "The Bone Church"