Part III

Marginal gloss by Coleridge (1817); notes by Frederick H. Sykes, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems (Scribner, c. 1908).

1. Stanza 1 Gloss: The ancient Mariner beholdeth a sign in the element afar off.
2. Stanza 2, line 4 I wist. "Wist" is properly the past tense of an old verb "wit," to know. But Coleridge seems to use "I wist" here as equivalent to "I wis" (see "Christabel," l. 92), which is a form of "iwis," an adverb meaning "certainly."
3. Stanza 4, line 1 with throats unslaked, etc. A remarkable instance of onomatopoeia.
4. Stanza 5 Gloss: At its nearer approach, it seemeth him to be a ship; and at a dear ransom he freeth his speech from the bonds of thirst.
5. Stanza 5, line 3 gramercy. An exclamation, meaning originally "much thanks" (Old French grand merci), and so used by Shakespeare ("Merchant of Venice" II., 2, 128, "Richard III" III., 2, 108). But in the ballads it is often a mere exclamation of wonder and surprise, and so Coleridge uses it here,--grin. Coleridge says ("Table Talk" May 31, 1830): "I took the thought of 'grinning for joy' from my companion's remark to me, when we had climbed to the top of Plinlimmon [in Wales, in the summer of 1794], and were nearly dead with thirst. We could not speak from the constriction, till we found a little puddle under a stone. He said to me: 'You grinned like an idiot.' He had done the same." To "grin" was originally to snarl and show the teeth as animals do when angry. "They go to and fro in the evening: they grin like a dog, and run about through the city," Ps. LIX., 6, Prayer-Book Version, where the King James Version has "make a noise like a dog." Hence idiots, stupid people, foolish people, all who are or who demean themselves below the dignity of man, grin rather than smile; and so the Mariner's companions, their muscles stiffened by drought, could show their gladness only by the contortions …
6. Stanza 6 Gloss: And horror follows. For can it be a ship that comes onward without wind or tide?
7. Stanza 6, line 3 Without a breeze, without a tide. The Phantom Ship is a wide-spread sailor's superstition that has been often used in the romantic literature of the nineteenth century. See Scott's "Rokeby," Canto II. xi; Marryat's "Phantom Ship;" Poe's "MS. Found in a Bottle;" and Longfellow's "Ballad of Carmilhan" (in "Tales of a Wayside Inn," Second Day). It is seen in storms, driving by with all sails set, and is generally held to be an omen of disaster. Coleridge has shaped the legend to his own purposes. The ship appears in a calm, not in a storm, and sailing without, rather than against, wind and tide; and instead of a crew of dead men it carries only Death and Life-in-Death. Possibly he was acquainted with a form of the legend found in Bechstein's Deutsches Sagenbuch (pointed out by Dr. Sykes), in which "Falkenberg, for murder of his brother, is condemned to sail a spectral bark, attended only by his good and his evil spirit, who play dice for his soul."
8. Stanza 8 Gloss: It seemeth him but the skeleton of a ship.
9. Stanza 10 Gloss: And its ribs are seen as bars on the face of the setting Sun. The Spectre-Woman and her Deathmate, and no other on board the skeleton-ship.
10. Stanza 10, line 1 Are those her ribs, etc. Instead of this stanza the first edition had these two:
    
    "Are those her naked ribs, which fleck'd The sun that did behind them peer? And are those two all, all the crew, That woman and her fleshless Pheere?
    
    "His bones are black with many a crack, All black and bare, I ween; Jet-black and bare, save where with rust Of mouldy damps and charnel crust They're patch'd with purple and green"
    
    And again after line 198 the first edition had this stanza:
    
    "A gust of wind sterte up behind And whistled thro' his bones; Thro' the holes of his eyes and the hole of his mouth Half-whistles and half-groans."
    
    But this crude grotesquerie of horror--quite in the taste of that day, the day of "Monk" Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe--Coleridge's finer poetical judgment soon rejected.
11. Stanza 11 Gloss: Like vessel, like crew!
12. Stanza 11, line 1 Her lips were red, etc. Life-in-Death--who wins the Mariner, while Death wins his shipmates--is conceived as a witch, something after the fashion of Geraldine in "Christabel" or Duessa in "The Faerie Queene," but wilder, stranger than either; a thing of startling and evil beauty. Spenser's pages of description, however, give no such vivid image of loathsome loveliness as do the first three lines of this stanza. "Her skin was as white as leprosy" is a feat in suggestion.
13. Stanza 12 Gloss: Death and Life-in-Death have diced for the ship's crew, and she (the latter) winneth the ancient Mariner.
14. Stanza 13 Gloss: No twilight within the courts of the Sun.
15. Stanza 13, line 1 within the courts of the Sun. Between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.
16. Stanza 14 Gloss: At the rising of the moon.
17. Stanza 15, line 5 with one bright star Within the nether tip. An interesting case of poetical illusion. No one, of course, ever saw a star within the tip of the horned moon. Yet a good many readers, until reminded of their astronomy, think they have seen this phenomenon. Coleridge apparently knew that the human mind would receive it as experience. The phrase is no slip on his part; the earlier editions had instead "almost atween the tips," which is astronomically justifiable, but in "Sibylline Leaves" and later he wrote it as in the text.
18. Stanza 16 Gloss: One after another,
19. Stanza 17 Gloss: His shipmates drop down dead.
20. Stanza 18 Gloss: But Life-in-Death begins her work on the ancient Mariner.
21. Stanza 18, line 3 And every soul, it passed me by, Like the whizz of my cross-bow! It was an ancient belief, imaginatively revived by romantic poets, that when a person died his soul could be seen, or heard, or both, as it left the body, Cf. Keats's "Eve of St. Agnes," first stanza; Rossetti's "Sister Helen;" and Kipling's "Danny Deever."