Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – Textual Comparison: 1798 and 1817

This page sets the two major versions of Coleridge’s poem in parallel, with the 1817 marginal gloss displayed in a third column. Changes between the versions are highlighted: altered words or lines appear in amber; new stanzas or passages in green; deleted passages in red.

The most striking differences include: the complete replacement of the storm opening in Part I; the transformation of the unnamed woman into the named allegorical figure “Life-in-Death” in Part III; the substitution of “never a saint” for “Christ” in Part IV; the Wordsworth attribution footnote; and throughout, the 1817 marginal gloss’s imposition of a moralising theological framework on material that consistently resists it.

A note at the foot of the page discusses Coleridge’s adaptation of the Latin epigraph from Thomas Burnet’s Archaeologiae Philosophicae (1692), including translations of both Coleridge’s version and Burnet’s original, and an account of what Coleridge chose to omit.