Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," line 134, repeated in
lines 378 and 403 (1798: lines 383, 408). In the 1818 edition, the allusion is noted
only through quotation marks, allowing the knowing reader to make the connection between
Coleridge's sublime tale of moral transgression and the events to unfold in the novel.
No effort is made to affect the time frame of the novel. In the 1831 text (I:L2:6),
on the other hand, Walton self-consciously attributes his own thirst for adventure
partly to the influence of this poem, presumably encountered among the volumes of
poetry he read after exhausting Uncle Thomas's library of discovery. This forces an
impossible chronology on the novel, since Coleridge's poem was published, as Walton
dates his letters, only fifteen months before the 17--s became the 18--s.