The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge‘s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner also mirrors a journey like Walton’s into the hostile waters of the Arctic.
• In Letter II, Walton even makes reference to the epic Romantic poem: "but I shall kill no albatross...or if I should come back to you as worn and woeful as the Ancient Mariner".

• Whilst Walton shares the self-interest and ignorance of nature as the eponymous seafarer from the poem, it is Victor that Shelley wishes us to view as the mariner.
• He defies God like the mariner does when he shoots the albatross.

• Like the mariner who descends into a living hell, devoid of natural life and God, ("water, water everywhere/ nor any drop to drink"), Victor also descends into a personal hell, devoid of family and alienated in the furthest reaches of the earth.
• "I did not conceive the hundredth part of the anguish I was destined to endure."

Like one who, on a lonely road,
Doth walk in fear and dread,

And, having once turned round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;

Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread

• In Chapter 5, Shelley makes direct (and quite abrupt) reference to the lines of Coleridge’s poem within Victor’s narrative just after he has finished his "miserable monster".
• He makes an allusion to Dante Alighieri's 14th-century epic poem Divine Comedy: "it became a thing such as even Dante could not conceive", referring to Dante’s Inferno section of the epic poem, in which he journeys into Hell.

• After this, Coleridge’s lines are embedded into Victor’s narration, illustrating his dread and despair as he abandons the Monster and flees into the streets of Ingolstadt.