Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea! And never a saint took pity on My soul in agony.

I fear thee, ancient Mariner! I fear thy skinny hand! And thou art long, and lank, and brown, As is the ribbed sea-sand.

The many men, so beautiful! And they all dead did lie: And a thousand thousand slimy things Lived on; and so did I.

Each turned his face with a ghastly pang, And cursed me with his eye.

In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.

A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket-- The sea was still breaking violently and night Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet, When the drowned sailor clutc…

Friends, wives and husbands, sons and daughters, dead Of plague, famine, and arrows: and the houses Battered unsafe by cannonades of stone Hurled in by the Ass…