line 15: loon = a clownish, awkward, ill-bred person. (The slang expression “loony”, from lunatic, did not become current until much later in the 19th century.)

line 17: mesmerism was enjoying a vogue in Coleridge’s day. Coleridge himself may have attended demonstrations in which the wills of people were frozen by what appeared to be the occult power of the mesmerist’s gaze. More than one contemporary commentator has said that Coleridge himself, in his power to hold listeners entranced by his conversation, possessed something of a “glittering eye”.

line 19: the last two lines of this stanza were written by Wordsworth.

line 34: at the equator, the noonday sun is never far from overhead; at the vernal and autumnal equinoxes (23 September and 21 March) it is directly overhead. So this line means the ship is on the Equator.

line 36: an anachronism: musical instruments that can legitimately be called bassoons did not come into existence until the 17th century, whereas the action of the poem must be earlier than that (see introductory note on the date of the action). However, while Coleridge was working on the poem, the church choir at Stowey was given a bassoon by Thomas Poole, in whose house Coleridge was then living. This may have affected Coleridge’s choice of instrument, though it has to be said that there are not many instruments that rhyme with “noon”.

Alternatively. the Ancient Mariner might be condemned to walk the earth until the Day of Jidgement and the date of the wedding is indeed in the 1790s, which would make him a bit more than 300 years old.

line 49: it might be worth noting that the description of the fog and ice in this and the next two stanzas was taken from the accounts of voyagers in the Arctic seas. Coleridge has imaginatively transferred the fog and ice to the southern polar seas. Probably none of his readers would have been any the wiser.

line 55: ken = saw.

line 60: swound = swoon (rhymes with “around”, obviously).

A person regaining consciousness after fainting can sometimes hear a sudden jarring onrush of sounds. In 1800, Coleridge altered the line to “A wild and ceaseless sound”, apparently in response to complaints that the line was nonsensical, but later restored the original in 1817 (except for the substitution of “in” for “of”).

line 62: thorough = through (archaic).

line 65: Coleridge may have come to realise the incongruity of giving a bird the size of an albatross food which would barely satisfy a bird the size of a wren, since he later changed the line to "It ate the food it ne’er had eat". However, there is one account (which Coleridge would have read) of Magellan and his crew in the first (1520) crossing into the Pacific of the mariners being forced out of necessity to eat the powder and worms which remained, having consumed all the ship’s biscuit in their four-month journey since leaving the Straits of Magellan.

line 73: shrouds are the heavy ropes which stretch from the top of the mast to the side of the ship, whose purpose is to keep the mast upright and rigid.

line 74: vespers is a Roman Catholic prayer service held at sunset, so the sense here is that the albatross perched for nine evenings (i.e. for nine days).

The perching probably also reflects Coleridge’s ignorance of albatrosses, which although they have three forward facing toes in common with most birds (albeit webbed in the case of the albatross), they have no toe behind – thus rendering them unable to perch on anything. Voyagers did report, however, of albatrosses resting by supporting themselves on and against the rigging of the ship.

line 75: in the original edition (1798), this was printed as "fog-smoke white" but corrected to "fog smoke-white" in an errata slip. a reading which has persisted through all later editions. However, early voyagers referred to the fogs round Greenland and Sptzbergen as as being smoke-like fog or frost-smoke. It could be that the original printing is in fact accurate.

line 79: The crossbow was a medieval weapon for shooting arrows and other missiles by means of a bowstring drawn back over a groove, with a trigger mechanism for holding and releasing the taut string. For a picture of a crossbow, click .

line 83: a “weft” is a seafaring term, originally meaning any sort of cloth that was used for giving a signal. In Coleridge’s time, it referred more specifically to a flag rolled up into a cylinder which was hoisted to the top of the mast as a signal of distress. Coleridge would have encountered the word in many travel books, but later removed it because although a familiar term among sailors, it was not a term a landsman would understand.

line 90: an old form of “them” was “hem”, often spelled in this contracted form.

line 93: "Ne dim ne red" but glorious gold, like God’s own head; a simile which occurs in more than one voyager’s account of the first rising of the sun above the horizon in early spring north of the Arctic circle. The dimness and redness refer to the days preceding, when the dawning sun does not fully come above the horizon.

line 99: the easterly trade winds, which are at this point carrying the ship north-east, were called “the Brises” in Coleridge’s time.

line 105: the word “break” was sometimes pronounced “breek” in Coleridge's day, thus giving a nice internal rhyme.

line 108: perhaps "The bloody sun at noon" refers to an early childhood memory of the summer of 1783 (when Coleridge would have been 10 years old) when, as Gilbert White records in his Natural History of Selbourne (chapter 65) "the sun, at noon, looked as blank as a clouded moon and shed a rust-coloured ferruginous light on the ground and was particularly lurid and blood-coloured at rising and setting". This could have been due to Iceland's Laki volcanic event.

line 123: About, about. Coleridge is quoting from a chant of the three witches in Macbeth (Act I scene 3 lines 32-34):

The Weird Sisters, hand in hand,
Posters of the sea and land,
Thus do go about, about;

The chant occurs just after one of the witches has pronounced a curse on a mariner, depriving him of drink and sleep and sending a storm to wreck his ship.

line 124: “death-fires” are ghostly lights which the superstitious in Coleridge’s day believed could be seen at night hovering over burial grounds. The light was supposed to come from decaying corpses. In fact, putrefied fish and the decaying bodies of animals (including humans) are sometimes attacked by luminous bacteria that emit a blue-green glow.

line 125: “witch's oils” are mysterious oils that burn with vivid colours, and are supposedly used by witches in the preparation of their charms.

line 126: many plankton organisms (which swarm on the ocean’s surface) are luminescent, especially when agitated. The voyagers often wrote of such luminescence as a kind of burning.

line 127: assured were: were given a revelation.

line 129: a fathom is six feet, so nine fathom is about sixteen and a half metres.

line 137: we know the Mariner was a Roman Catholic, so it is reasonable to assume that he was wearing a crucifix around his neck which his shipmates took off before replacing it with the albatross. Moreover, Coleridge would also have known that a burning sign of the cross was branded on the forehead of the Wandering Jew, as a sign of his crime.

line 144: wist = knew.

line 148: tacked = turned towards the wind; veered = turned away from the wind.

line 156: gramercy = mercy on us!

line 158: as = as if.

line 160: weal = well-being, happiness.

line 161: A strange black ship with all her sails set, coming in against wind and tide, is the authentic phantom ship of the traditional superstitions of the sea.

line 166: a setting sun, its light refracted through dense layers of atmosphere, can assume a broad oval shape.

line 169: “fleck'd” here has the sense of “striped”.

line 176: “gossameres” are filmy cobwebs that float in the air when there is no wind.

line 179: in 1817, Coleridege improved these two lines to

Is that a DEATH? and are there two?
Is DEATH that woman's mate?

No single change in the later version is more remarkable than this sublimation of the earlier supernatural crudity into the powerful suggestion of these three startled questions.

line 180: Pheere = mate, spouse (archaic, more often spelled “fere”).

line 186: in a copy of Lyrical Ballads (1798) Coleridge added in manuscript at this point another stanza, which never appeared in any of the ballad’s printings:

This ship it was a plankless thing
A bare Anatomy!
A plankless Spectre – and it mov’d
Like a being of the sea!
The woman and a fleshless man
Therein sate merrily.

 

line 191: naked hulk = a hulk without planking.

line 193: Death wins all the crew except the Mariner who is won by Life-in-Death. His doom is therefore to live on in a kind of suspended animation, unable to die.

There is an ancient tale, which belongs to the oral tradition of the Netherlands, of one Reginald Falkenburg who, for murder done, is doomed to wander forever on the sea, accompanied by two spectral forms, one white, one black; and in a ship with all sails set, the two spectres play at dice for the wanderer's soul.
“Six hundred years has that ship been sailing without either helm or helmsman, and so long have the two been playing for Reginald’s soul. Their game will last till the last day. Mariners that sail on the North Sea often meet with the infernal vessel.” (Quoted in Lowes, Chapter XV.)

line 195: Coleridge's decision to remove this stanza went unheeded by the printer of the first edition of Sybilline Leaves (1817), so Coleridge indicated its removal in the first entry on the errata page.

line 201: clombe = climbed

A waning moon can rise at any time between 2 am and sunrise, but a new moon must rise in broad daylight.

line 202: the phenomenon had been noticed on a few occasions between 1788 and 1794 and reported in the Philosophcal Transactions of the Royal Society Volume 84, pages 429-434 (1 January 1794) ("An Account of an Appearance of Light, like a Star, seen in the Dark Part of the Moon"), which in turn was reviewed in the British Critic (which Coleridge read).

line 207: ee = eye.

line 234: eldritch = weird, frightful, hideous.

line 237: or = ere.

line 259: main = sea.

line 263: non-luminous “red seas” are common in the reports of the voyagers; they are caused by marine plant and animal organisms.

line 265: there are many reports from the voyagers of various luminescent snake-like forms, probably nemerteans, which are beautifully coloured ribbon-like marine worms varying from a few millimetres long to more than 30 metres.

line 301: in this and the following stanzas we seem to have a combination of an aurora and a tropical storm. Although the combination of calm at the Line and a thunderstorm with lightening which falls like a river are well attested to by voyagers, the combination of an equitorial thunderstorm and an aurora is not to be seen as bewildering meteorology (which indeed it is) but as an imaginative and eminently Coleridgean rich association of ideas and images.

line 302: anear = near.

line 304: “sere” cloth is cloth that has been worn to shreds.

line 306: “sheen” is here an adjective meaning bright and shining.

line 309: this stanza appears to describe an aurora; but an aurora is a polar phenomenon and could not be seen if the ship is still near the equator. Probably Coleridge drew on descriptions of the aurora from the voyagers and translated the phenomenon to the tropics in ignorance. Or see the introductory note on the route of the voyage for an alternative explanation.

line 311: sigh like sedge = sigh like wind blowing through sedge.

line 332: we have Wordsworth's word for it that it was he who suggested that the ship be navigated by dead men, or by dead men reanimated by a cohort of angels who reanimate the bodies (the latter probably being Coleridge’s elaboration of Wordsworth’s suggestion, it being a feature of an old seafaring legend which Coleridge may well have come across in his extensive reading).

line 333: in 1800, Coleridge adds a stanza

“I fear thee, ancient Mariner”
Be calm, thou Wedding-Guest
’Twas not those souls that fled in pain
Which to their corses came again
But a troop of spirits blest

thus making it clear that the ship is now being navigated by a troop of angelic spirits, whose instruments are the bodies of the dead.

line 348: Lavrock = lark (Scottish).

line 357: the sails are presumably shaking in the pseudo-breeze produced by the ship’s rapid motion through the still air.

lines 362-365: This stanza, with its doctrine of ocular magnetic emanation, often associated with the Wandering Jew, and a frequent theme in English Gothic fiction of the eighteenth century, was expunged in later versions.

line 375: n’old = would not.

line 382: As the 1834 gloss makes clear, from the shooting of the albatross to the dramatic climax at the end of the Fourth Part, the impelling agency of the ship is daemonic. From that point to the end, the moving forces are angelic.

line 386: control of the ship has now passed from the daemons to the angels of the Lord, even though the underwater deamon is still the agent that moves the ship, but now does so reluctantly. For some reason it seems that he cannot cross the Equator. One imagines the daemon angrily moving the ship back and forth with a “short uneasy motion” as he realises the Line has been reached and he must abandon his power over the ship and, frustrated in his vengeance, gives the ship a last violent shake (line 395) before he lets go and returns to the South Pole.

line 399: have not = am unable.

line 412: “honey-dew” is literally a sweet sticky substance that exudes from the leaves of certain trees in hot weather, but here, as in other poetic usage, it is a supernatural substance, deliciously sweet, that falls from the heavens.

line 420: blast = wind.

line 422: the moon is, of course, the cause of ocean tides, i.e. she tells him what to do.

line 429: an attempt to introduce a quasi-scientific explanation. A vacuum forms in front of the ship, so that pressure of the air from behind pushes the ship forward.

line 440: a “charnel-dungeon” was the place where in medieval times dead bodies were put before burial.

line 445: een = eyes.

line 450: “else” here has the sense of “formerly” or “at another time”.

lines 451-456: in a copy of Sybilline Leaves (1817) annotated by Coleridge opposite this stanza are pencilled in the two words “From Dante”. He seems to be referring to Inferno XXI lines 25-30 which read (in Carlyle’s translation) “Then I turned round, like one who longs to see what he must shun, and who is dashed with sudden fear, so that he puts not off his flight to look; and behind us I saw a black Demon come running up the cliff”.

line 460: perhaps Coleridge is referring to the fact that wind-rippled water can thereby acquire a darker shade.

line 465: In the Odyssey, as Coleridge would have known, Ulysses is brought home to his native land in a fast ship whilst in a trance: “But now, when bending to their work they tossed the water with their oars, upon Odysseus’ lids deep slumber fell, sound and most pleasant, very like to death...Safely and steadily [the swift ship] ran; no circling hawk, swiftest of all winged things, could keep beside her. Running thus rapidly she cut the ocean waves, bearing a man of godlike wisdom, a man who had before met many griefs of heart...yet here slept undisturbed, heedless of all he suffered.” (XIII, 78-80 and 86-92, translated by G.H. Palmer).

line 472: countrée = country (an archaic form often used in old English ballads).

line 473: a harbour bar is a ridge of sand that sometimes forms across the mouth of harbours.

line 478: strewn = calmed.

line 480: shadow = reflected image.

line 490: the “holy rood” is the cross on which Christ died.

line 493: Lowes believes that the flaming right arms of the corpses may have been suggested to Coleridge by an old superstition known as the “Hand of Glory”. According to this belief, if a hand is cut from the corpse of a hanged man, then prepared in certain mysterious ways, it functions as a powerful talisman. For example, if the hand is set on fire like a torch, it has the power of temporarily paralysing anyone who views the flame.

line 510: “crimson” symbolises either or both of the blood of the Albatross and the blood of Christ by which the Mariner is cleansed of his sin.

line 512: by “crimson shadows” Coleridge probably intended nothing more than crimson reflections in the water, without realising that it is impossible to stand on a ship’s deck and see in the water a reflection of anything on the deck.

line 517: in Christian mythology, the seraphim are the highest order of angels, exceeding all others in the fervour of their love. In medieval art, they are traditionally given a red colour.

line 527: eftsones = immediately (archaic).

line 528: when a ship entered a large harbour in Coleridge’s day, it was often boarded by a pilot who took control of the ship to guide it efficiently into its assigned berth; or the pilot might have stayed in his own boat while leading the ship to its berth.

line 536: In a copy of Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge wrote the following variant of this stanza:

Then vanish’d all the lovely lights
      The spirits of the air
No souls of mortal men were they
      But spirits bright and fair.

He later decided, however, to drop the entire stanza except for its last line “On me alone it blew” which appears as line 463 of the final (1834) version.

 line 540: blast = destroy.

line 545: to shrieve someone is to hear their confession of sin and to grant absolution. This office can validly only be performed by an ordained priest, but in those days it would have been reasonable to assume that a hermit would have been ordained even if he subsequently renounced his call to the priesthood (a public vocation). Note, however, that although the mariner confesses his sin, no enactment of absolution actually takes place.

line 549: rears = raises.

line 557: trow = believe.

line 568: strictly speaking, an “ivy-tod” is a bunch of berries on an ivy bush, but here means the whole bush.

line 569: the owl was traditionally associated with the ivy-bush, perhaps because its dense foliage provided a convenient place for the bird to hide by day.

line 570: the male wolf was traditionally believed to kill and eat its own cubs.

line 578: the poem does not explain the supernatural event responsible for the monstrous sound that shakes the sea and sinks the ship.

line 585: after about a week or more, the gases of putrefaction can cause drowned bodies to rise to the surface.

line 592: telling of = echoing.

line 608: crossed his brow = made the sign of the cross on his forehead, to protect himself against the Devil or his agents.

line 610: the Hermit, before he grants forgiveness, wants to know if the mariner really is a man and not a drowned body reanimated by a daemon, or indeed (as suggested by the Pilot’s boy) the Devil himself incarnate.

line 628: vesper-bell = the bell announcing the evening service of vespers.

line 656: forlorn = deprived.