the land of mist and snow
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, 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.
