The Rime of the Ancient Mariner summary

"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is a poem that uses the literary device known as a frame narrative, which is a story within a story (this device is also used multiple times within Frankenstein. The outer story is about an unnamed wedding guest who is stopped by an old mariner right before the wedding begins. The mariner then begins telling the wedding-guest his tale, which is the story within the outer story. 

The Mariner was on a voyage, and soon the entire ship was surrounded by ice and they were trapped. However, an albatross soon came and, as it flew around the ship, the ice broke and the ship propelled forward. Because the Mariner is apparently a total idiot, he then shot the albatross with his crossbow. As they should have been, his shipmates were really pissed at him for killing the bird for no apparent reason. Then the fog around their ship lifted, and the crew decided that it was apparently for the best that the bird died. The wind stopped, though, and they were stranded out in the middle of nowhere, and all sorts of crazy stuff happens.

The water would burn different colors and the sailors had dreams of evil spirits chasing them. They blamed the Mariner for this and made him wear the albatross around his neck. Personifications of Death and Life-in-death came in a ship. They caused all of the sailors except for the Mariner to drop dead immediately (this causes the wedding-guest to be assured that the Mariner is not a ghost). The Mariner then spent 7 days and nights trapped on a ship with hundreds of corpses and slimy creatures swimming around the ship. He then found them beautiful and was able to pray for them, and the albatross then dropped from his neck and into the sea. 

Free of the albatross, the Mariner was able to finally sleep, and then spirits came into the corpses of the sailors, who then helped propel the ship forward. The Mariner was taken back to his native country, where a hermit, a pilot, and the pilot's son swam out to save him, even though they all almost died in a whirlpool. The Mariner begged the Hermit to "shrieve" him, and as the Mariner tells the Hermit his story, the Mariner feels free from the agony of his guilt. 

Over time, the guilt returned, and the only way for him to be free of it is to re-tell his story to someone. This takes us to the present, where the Mariner is telling his story to the wedding-guest, hopefully so the wedding-guest learns the moral that "He prayeth well, who loveth well / Both man and bird and beast. / He prayeth best, who loveth best / All things both great and small; / For the dear God who loveth us, / He made and loveth all."