We listened and looked sideways up!
Fear at my heart, as at a cup,
My lifeblood seemed to sip.

These lines occur in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s narrative poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (first published in 1798 in Lyrical Ballads). They belong to the episode in which the Mariner and his shipmates, after the killing of the albatross and the ensuing curse, endure supernatural dread at sea. The crew’s anxious listening and furtive glances convey the mounting sense that an unseen presence is near, as the poem shifts from physical hardship (heat, thirst, stagnation) into psychological and metaphysical terror—one of the poem’s signature Romantic effects.

The speaker’s fear is rendered as something bodily and invasive: terror does not merely accompany him, it drinks from him—"my lifeblood seemed to sip." The simile "as at a cup" suggests fear as a parasitic force, draining vitality and agency. The sideways looking and strained listening dramatize guilt and apprehension: the Mariner’s transgression has made the world uncanny, so ordinary perception becomes suspicious and defensive. Coleridge’s language fuses sensation with moral consequence, turning inner dread into a palpable, almost supernatural predator.