The Ancient Mariner

Surely the most Gothic poem outside the works of Poe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's extended masterpiece The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is uncompromising in its bleakness of vision, and in the force with which it carries the reader along with it on the mariner's dark voyage. The death of the albatross at the hand of the unnamed mariner which precipitates the curse upon him, the series of nightmare visions and supernatural occurrences, and the blessed moments of brief redemption, live on in the mind long after the poem has been read.

Certain phrases from the poem - 'All in a hot and copper sky', and 'Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink' - have become well-known enough to enter the language, and the poem's central image of the mariner burdened with the slain bird hung around his neck has become idiomatically descriptive of any difficulty that refuses to leave us.

My painting began life as a  piece of commissioned art in oils for Penguin Books. Much later, dissatisfied with the changes to the art that were requested of me at the time and my own treatment of the subject, I extensively repainted it as the version which you see here. What perhaps is often overlooked is that the mariner is 'ancient' at the time that he is narrating the poem, not at the time that he made the voyage - which is why I have chosen to portray him, not grizzle-bearded, but rather in middle age.