The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.

These lines come from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s narrative poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," first published in 1798 in the first edition of *Lyrical Ballads* (with Wordsworth). They occur early in the voyage, as the Mariner’s ship is driven southward and then suddenly finds favorable winds and open water. The crew experiences a moment of exhilaration and apparent triumph as they push into an eerie, unpeopled polar seascape—just before the poem turns toward transgression (the shooting of the albatross) and supernatural punishment. The passage helps establish the poem’s ballad-like momentum and its atmosphere of ominous wonder.

On the surface, the stanza celebrates swift, effortless motion: wind fills the sails, foam streams past, and the ship’s wake (“furrow”) trails cleanly behind. Yet the boast—“the first that ever burst / Into that silent sea”—also signals a Romantic fascination with exploration and the sublime: nature appears vast, pristine, and uncannily quiet. The word “burst” suggests both conquest and intrusion, hinting that human entry into this “silent” realm may be disruptive. In the poem’s larger moral arc, this early confidence foreshadows the crew’s later helplessness; the sea that seems to yield so readily will soon become a stage for guilt, isolation, and uncanny retribution.