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 to tutelary spirits: "Suppose you represent him as having killed one of these birds on entering the south sea, and the tutelary spirits of these regions take upon them to avenge the crime." By the time the trio finished their walk, the poem had taken shape. Bernard Martin argues in "The Ancient Mariner and the Authentic Narrative" that Coleridge was also influenced by the life of Anglican clergyman John Newton, who had a near-death experience aboard a slave ship. The poem may also have been inspired by the legends of the Wandering Jew, who was forced to wander the earth