![]() Sailors looked upon them as “good luck,” not because of some superstition, but because it was lucky to get warm meat after a few days of eating salted ship’s provisions. To kill one (or several) was not to declare one’s independence of nature, or of a God’s provision, and thus mount up on waxen wings, but was instead an effective way to get fresh meat at sea. The albatross was never taken commonly to be a symbol of Christian piety, nor were they “tutelary spirits” of a particular region, as Coleridge’s friend Wordsworth somewhere suggests, and as guides of a voyage they were perfectly useless. As even casual readers in the history of English literature will know, a sailor’s shooting the great sea-bird is the central action in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and as one can probably deduce, that poem is the subject of Malcom Guite’s new book Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Hodder and Stoughton, 2017). Let’s get one thing straight: there is nothing wrong with shooting an albatross. ![]() I’m pleased to publish this guest review by Dr. ![]()
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