nother instance of the sound
fitting the sense. The rocking rhythm of the line is the rhythm of his
fevered pulse. The poem is full of this quality.

13, 297--*silly*. This word meant in Old English timely (from _soel_,
time, occasion) hence fortunate, blessed. From this was developed, under
the influence of medieval religious teaching, the meaning innocent,
harmless, simple; and from this again our modern meaning, foolish,
simple in a derogatory sense. Chaucer has the word in all these
meanings, and also in another, a modification of the second--wretched,
pitiable. Another shade of the same meaning appears in Spenser's "silly
bark," i.e. _frail_ ship, and in Burns's "To a Mouse":

"Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin!
Its silly wa's the win's are strewin'!"

"The epithet may be due either to the gush of love that has filled the
Mariner's heart, or to his noticing the buckets, long useless, frail,
now filled with water" (Sykes); very likely to both together.

14, 314--*fire-flags*. The notion of the "fire-flags" "hurried about"
was probably suggested to Coleridge by the description of the Northern
Lights (_aurora borealis_) in Hearne's "Journey ... to the Northern
Ocean," a book printed in 1795 and known to both Wordsworth and
Coleridge before 1798. Hearne says: "I can positively affirm that in
still nights I have frequently heard them make a rustling and crackling
noise, like the waving of a large flag in a fresh gale of wind." See
also Wordsworth's "Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman" (Cooper).

15, 358--*Sometimes a-dropping*, etc. The Mariner's sin was that in
wanton cruelty he took the life of a friendly fellow-creature; his
punishment is to live with dead men round him and the dead bird on his
breast, in such solitude that "God himself scarce seemed there to be,"
until he learns to feel the _sacredness of life_ even in the
water-snakes, the "slimy things" that coil in the rotting sea; and the
stages of his penance are marked by suggestions of his return to the
privilege of human fellowship. The angels' music is like the song of the
skylark, the sails ripple like a leaf-hidden brook--recollections of his
happy boyhood in. England; and finally comes the actual land breeze, and
he is in his "own countree." Observe the marginal gloss to line 442.

17, 407--*honey-dew*. See note on "Kubla Khan," line 53.

416--*His great bright eye*, etc. Dorothy Wordsworth in her Journal,
February 27, 1798, describes the loo