When Did the Natural World Stop Feeling Sublime?

Written in 1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” kicked off the Romantic era with the senseless killing of an albatross. Pay attention to the unseen, Coleridge’s poem instructs, because there is something invisible and unknowable in nature. Somehow, the bird’s death augurs catastrophe. It’s a symbol—a highly aestheticized thing that cannot satisfyingly explain the “motiveless malignity” of the Mariner’s crime. This is nature writing at its best and most challenging.