Description

Sibylline Leaves is a collection of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poems (later published as Sybylline Leaves). As he writes in the Preface, it contains almost all his ‘poetical compositions, from 1793 to the present date’. Among these are poems that first appeared in the book Lyrical Ballads, including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. 

Revising the Ancient Mariner 

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the only poem on which Coleridge continued to work – and unarguably improve – until shortly before his death. For the 1800 edition of the Lyrical Ballads, a selection of works by Coleridge and William Wordsworth, he removed several stanzas and some of the more obvious archaic expressions – turning ‘ancyent marinere’, for example, into ‘ancient mariner’. For Sibylline Leaves, he further modernised some of the language and added the marginal prose gloss that has ever since been an integral part of the poem.