The Rime of the Ancient Mariner who are playing dice for the souls of the crew. With a roll of the dice, Death wins the lives of the crew members and Life-in-Death the life of the mariner, a prize she considers more valuable. Her name is a clue to the mariner's fate: he will endure a fate worse than death as punishment for his killing of the albatross. One by one, all of the crew members die, but the mariner lives on, seeing for seven days and nights the curse in the eyes of the crew's corpses, whose last expressions remain upon their faces. Eventually, this
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner until Judgement Day for a terrible crime, found in Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, M. G. Lewis' "The Monk" (a novel Coleridge reviewed) and the legend of the "Flying Dutchman". It is argued that the harbour at Watchet in Somerset was the primary inspiration for the poem, although some time before, John Cruikshank, a local acquaintance of Coleridge's, had related a dream about a skeleton ship manned by spectral sailors. In September 2003, a commemorative statue, by Alan B. Herriot of Penicuik, Scotland, was unveiled at Watchet harbour. In "Biographia Literaria", Coleridge wrote: In "Table Talk", Coleridge wrote: Wordsworth wrote