Albatross

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The word albatross is sometimes used to mean an encumbrance, or a wearisome burden.^[1] It is an allusion to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798).

In the poem, an albatross starts to follow a ship — being followed by an albatross was generally considered an omen of good luck. However, the titular mariner shoots the albatross with a crossbow, which is regarded as an act that will curse the ship (which indeed suffers terrible mishaps). To punish him, his companions induce him to wear the dead albatross around his neck indefinitely (until they all die from the curse, as it happens). Thus the albatross can be both an omen of good or bad luck, as well as a metaphor for a burden to be carried (as penance).

The symbolism used in the Coleridge poem is its highlight. For example:

Ah ! well a-day ! what evil looks
Had I from old and young !
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.

This sense is catalogued in the Oxford English Dictionary from 1936 and 1955, but it seems only to have entered general usage in the 1960s.

Also, the word albatross is used in Letter II, Volume One of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, in which Robert Walton is speaking to his sister and states, "…but I shall kill no albatross…", an allusion quite clearly referring to the poem by her close acquaintance, Coleridge. The novel was first published in 1818, long before the term was introduced into the Oxford Dictionary.

Charles Baudelaire's collection of poems Les Fleurs du mal contains a poem entitled L'Albatros about men on ships who shoot the birds with bows and arrows for sport. In the final stanza, he goes on to compare the birds to poets — exiled from earth and weighed down by their giant wings.

Television

The Monty Python team, exploiting absurdist associations of ideas, gave life to the image of having an albatross around one's neck. In their sketch "Albatross", set in a cinema, an irritated man (John Cleese) dressed as an ice-cream girl tries to sell a dead albatross, the only item he has got on his ice-cream tray.

Film

• Malcolm Reynolds, the captain of Serenity (in the movie Serenity) defends the notion that River Tam is an albatross to the crew and later to the Operative. He says that the Albatross was good luck until "some idiot killed it". When Malcolm is speaking, he then adds to Inara, "Yes, I've read a poem. Try not to faint." in an obvious reference to the Coleridge poem. At the end of the film, he calls River "Little Albatross."

• 'Mac' MacClaren's sturdy little wooden cutter, which weathers a hurricane in the John Cusack / Wendy Gazelle classic movie Hot Pursuit, is named Albatross.

Music

• The Indie band Guided By Voices reference wearing an albatross around the neck on the song "Peep-Hole" from the album Bee Thousand

References

External links

• A cartoon appearing in The Economist newspaper that alludes to the described metaphor