The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, written by English Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the years 1797 to 1798, was published in the first edition of lyrical ballads. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner starts with the Mariner, who once killed an albatross, a good omen, telling his story to a wedding guest, for he is compelled to tell his story to everyone, as that is part of his curse from killing the wondrous bird. The poem is in iamb meter, and it is in quatrains of A-B-C-B rhyme scheme. 

    The poem starts with the Mariner stopping a wedding guest, who is not very inclined to hear his story. The Mariner explains that an albatross passed by his ship everyday, and his fellow sailors said that the albatross is the reason for their good winds. One day, out of nowhere, the Mariner killed the albatross, Initially, his fellow sailors were furious that he killed their good luck charm, but when the previously persistent fog drained away, they thanked him. However, they soon came to realise that the Mariner’s actions were truly damaging when the winds stopped and the ship did not move. There was “Water, water everywhere nor any drop to drink.”

     Eventually a ship comes by, but the Mariner hadn’t any moisture in his mouth to speak, “I bit my arm, I sucked the blood” and called out to the incoming ship. It turned out that on the ship was “ DEATH” and “LIFE-IN-DEATH”.  After rolling dice, two decided that the Mariner should live with life in death, and so he stayed alive while his crewmates died, while the people he knew suffered from disease, and his curse was that he had to tell his story, from beginning to end - to every person he met. 

     While some literary critics like Kelly Grovier think that “Coleridge’s work is based on mysterious foreknowledge of his future self”, and others like David Beres that think the Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a reflection of “Coleridge's unhappy relationships with his mother”, perhaps it brings a broader glimpse into things we take for granted. In the poem, the Mariner takes the Albatross’ life and presence for granted, and does not appreciate its beauty. Some 200 years later, in 2019, it is said that a bat was killed and then eaten in China, thus starting the COVID-19 pandemic. 

     Just like in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, many people have died from the coronavirus. Whoever comes in contact with the Mariner gets plagued, just as if you come in contact with someone that has coronavirus - you are likely to contract the disease. While of course Coleridge could not have known about the traumatic pandemic that was going to happen hundreds of years after his poem, it certainly does align with the current pandemic that we have happening in our world. Lastly, as the Mariner’s curse faded away and he was able to tell the people that he met about his travels, we hope that a vaccine will come out soon so that we will be able to save lives and tell our descendants of this time.