Even after more than two hundred years, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner continues to fascinate and mystify readers with perennial scenes featuring zombies, sea monsters, and Death. But, like Beowulf, appreciation for the poem is often overshadowed by archaic language and ambiguous themes—not to mention a frustratingly random (and, some believe, amoral) protagonist.

Yet the most significant aspect of his Gothic inheritance may have less to do with any particular blood-curdling images than with the mode of reading that his poem almost forcibly inspires. Part of the reasons for Gothic’s huge popular success came from the sort of addictive, almost sado-masochistic, pleasures its narrative mode offered its readers. Hooking them by playing with their expectations, it triggered imagination’s hopes and fears.Though it operates on a much higher level, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, too, continues to exert its pull not because of any deep satisfaction it provides, but because such satisfaction is forever deferred. It haunts us because, to borrow a phrase from Keats, it teases us out of thought. One of its early readers, the poet Anna Letitia Barbauld, complained that the problem with it was the fact that it had “no moral.” Indeed, those looking for one will be frustrated not only by the Mariner’s own unconvincing attempts to make sense of his experiences within a simplistic Christian context, but by the poem’s mixed messages and the seeming arbitrariness and instability of much within it.