Summary:
Three young men are walking together on their way to a wedding ceremony, when one of them is grasped by a grey-haired old sailor. The young Wedding-Guest angrily commands the Mariner let go of him, therefore the Mariner obeys. But the young man is transfixed by the ancient Mariner’s “glittering eyes” and can do nothing, but sit on a rock and listen to his strange tale. The Mariner recounts that he sailed on a ship out of his native harbor ”below the kirk, below the lighthouse ” and into a sunny and cheerful sea. In the meantime music can be heard drifting from the direction of the wedding. The listener imagines that the bride is probably entering the hall, but even though he is still helpless to tear himself away from the Mariner’s tale. The Mariner reminisces that the voyage soon darkened, as a giant storm rose and chased the ship southward. Soon after, the ship came to a frigid land “of mist and snow,” where “ice, mast-high, came floating by”; the ship was entrapped in a maze of ice. Suddenly the sailors saw an Albatross, a great sea bird. As it circled the ship, the ice began to crack and split, then the wind from the south carried the ship forward and  out of the frigid regions, into a foggy water expanse. The Albatross followed, a good luck charm to the sailors. All of a sudden, a pained look crosses the Mariner’s face and the listener asks him, “Why look’st thou so?” The Mariner then confesses that he shot and killed the Albatross with his crossbow.

At first, the other sailors were enraged with the Mariner for having killed the bird, that made the breezes blow. But soon afterwards when the fog lifted, the sailors decided that the bird had actually brought not the breezes, but the fog. Therefore they now praised the Mariner for his deed. The wind pushed the ship into a still and silent sea, where the sailors soon were stranded; the winds died down, and the ship sat “As idle as a painted ship, Upon a painted ocean.” The sea then thickened, and the men had no drinking water. It seemed as if, the sea were decaying, slimy creatures crawled out of it and slithered across the surface. At night, the water burned green, blue and white with the fire of death. Some of the sailors dreamed that a spirit, nine fathoms deep beneath the ship, had followed them from the land of mist and snow. The sailors blamed the Mariner for their plight, and hung the carcass of the Albatross around the seaman’s neck like a cross.

As time passed; the sailors mouths became so parched, they were unable to speak. But one day, gazing westward, the Mariner spotted a tiny speck on the horizon. It soon turned into a ship, coming toward them. Too dry-mouthed to speak out and warn the other sailors, the Mariner bit down into his arm. By sucking the blood out of his wound, he was able to moisten his tongue just enough to be able to cry out, “A sail! a sail!” The sailors smiled, believing they were saved. But as the ship neared, they saw that it was a ghostly, skeletal hull of a ship and that its crew included two figures: Death and the Night-mare Life-in-Death, who takes the form of a pale woman with golden locks and red lips, and “thicks man’s blood with cold.” Death and Life-in-Death began to throw dice, and the woman won, whereupon she whistled three times, causing the sun to sink to the horizon, the stars to instantly emerge. As the moon rose, chased by a single star, the sailors dropped dead one by one—all except the Mariner, whom each sailor cursed “with his eye” before dying. The souls of the dead men leapt from their bodies and rushed by the Mariner.