The Ancient Mariner (Archaic Terms)

loon

madman, worthless fellow

eftsoons

immediately

kirk

church (Northern/Scots dialect)

minstrelsy

band of musicians

storm-blast

personified as a winged tyrant

aye

ever, continually

ken

see, discern

swound

swoon, faint

shroud

rigging rope (funereal pun)

vesper

evening prayer

vespers nine

nine evenings

fiends

demon

averred

declared

furrow

the wake of a ship

hot and copper sky

equatorial haze

death-fires

corposants; St Elmo’s Fire; eerie electrical glow taken as an omen

fathom

six feet deep

the Polar Spirit

an intermediate being invented by Coleridge; neither ghost nor angel

wist

knew

tacked

zigzagged

unslaked

unquenched

Grammercy

grand merci

weal

benefit, good

keel

ship’s spine

charnel-dungeon

vault for corpses

gossamers

filmy cobwebs that drift in air

Night-Mare

demon that suffocates people in sleep

Life-in-Death

an invention of Coleridge that is a fate worse than death

spectre-bark

ghost ship

clombe

climbed

horned Moon

crescent moon

star inside crescent

astronomical impossibility; sailor’s omen of doom

nether

lower

eastern bar

horizon line

star-dogged

haunted by the stars

ribbed sea-sand

sand ridged by tide

the balls like pulses beat

eyeballs throb

elfish light

phosphorescence (marine bioluminescence)

silly

plain, humble

sere

withered, dry

fire-flags

sheets of lightning; aurora (southern lights)

sedge

coarse marsh grass

skylark

emblematic in English culture because of Shelley’s and Wordsworth’s poems

the Line

the equator

meadow-gale

land-scented breeze

harbour-bar

the sandbank at a harbor’s mouth

weathercock

the rooster-shaped windvane on a steeple

“by the holy rood”

“by the holy cross”

seraph

the highest angelic order; the “burning ones”

Pilot

a harbor pilot guides incoming ships

trow

believe

tod

bush

bower

garden shelter

vesper bell

the evening prayer bell

hoar

white with age