The Symbolism of the Cross-Bow, Swedenborgian Correspondences, and the Function of the Marginal Glosses in Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

The aim of this brief study is to introduce the reader to an interpretation of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner that is innate to the work itself—through the language of correspondences in which the poem was originally written, in accordance with Coleridge’s reliance on Neoplatonism and Swedenborg, as well as his statements in the Notebooks and theoretical writings in which he seeks a correspondent image to express his inner, spiritual state. The paper demonstrates the crucial lexical distinction between shooting the Albatross with a cross-bow, which is found in the poem itself, and its killing, which does not exist in the original text at all but was later attributed to it. Furthermore, it shows that the marginal glosses from 1817 do not represent Coleridge’s authorial truth, but rather a parodic stylization of a pedantic literary critic who lexically falsifies the original text.