“Ha! ha!” quoth he, “full plain I see,
The Devil knows how to row.”

These lines occur in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s narrative poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (first published in 1798 in Lyrical Ballads). They are spoken by the Mariner as he watches the ghostly “skeleton ship” approach across a windless sea. The ship is crewed by the allegorical figures Death and Life-in-Death, who have come to gamble for the Mariner’s fate after his killing of the albatross has brought a curse on his vessel. The eerie, unnatural motion of the approaching craft prompts the Mariner’s grim, half-hysterical exclamation that even the Devil can row—i.e., propel a boat without wind or ordinary means.

The remark compresses the poem’s central atmosphere of supernatural dread into a sardonic, almost comic outburst. In a dead calm, the Mariner sees movement where nature offers none, so he attributes the ship’s progress to infernal agency: evil (or the uncanny) can “row” when the natural world is stalled. The line also underscores the Mariner’s growing recognition that he is trapped in a moral universe where unseen powers intervene and judge. Coleridge’s archaic diction (“quoth”) and the abrupt laughter (“Ha! ha!”) heighten the sense of psychological strain: the speaker’s mind tries to master terror with a bitter joke, even as the scene signals that the crisis of punishment is arriving.