High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! To the River Otter is a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Though its date of creation is uncertain, it was possibly composed in 1793. The poem deals with the image of the River Otter, near Coleridge's childhood home.Editions of Coleridge's works edited by James Dykes Campbell (1899) and by E. H. Coleridge (1912) determine that the "To the River Otter" is from 1793. However, J. C. C. Mays (2001) argues that there is no certainty for the earlier dating as the poem does not appear in Coleridge's 1796 collection of poems and was not described as "juvenilia" in his later collections. The first 11 lines were used in Coleridge's 1796 poem "Recollection" and published as a sonnet in the late 1796 Sonnets from Various Authors. The poem was eventually republished in Coleridge's 1797 collection of poems and in all of the later collections. "Recollections" was published 2 April 1796 in Coleridge's The Watchman periodical.