“God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus!—
Why look’st thou so?”—“With my crossbow
I shot the Albatross.”

These lines occur early in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s narrative poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” first published in 1798 in Lyrical Ballads (with Wordsworth). The Mariner has stopped a Wedding-Guest to tell his tale. After the ship is driven into polar seas and an albatross appears—initially welcomed as a good omen—the Mariner inexplicably kills it with his crossbow. The quoted exchange captures the Wedding-Guest’s alarm at the Mariner’s haunted appearance and the Mariner’s blunt confession, which sets in motion the poem’s central theme of transgression against the natural and spiritual order and the ensuing curse.

The passage dramatizes the poem’s pivot from wonder to moral catastrophe. The Wedding-Guest’s invocation—“God save thee”—frames the Mariner as one afflicted by supernatural or psychological torment, while the Mariner’s stark admission (“With my crossbow / I shot the Albatross”) reveals the source of that torment: an unmotivated act of violence against an innocent creature. Coleridge uses the abruptness of the confession to emphasize senseless guilt and the Romantic idea that nature is morally charged. The albatross becomes a symbol of violated harmony; the Mariner’s crime is not merely practical (endangering the voyage) but spiritual, initiating a chain of punishment, repentance, and hard-won insight.