Albatross (metaphor)


The word albatross is sometimes used metaphorically to mean a psychological burden that feels like a curse.
It is an allusion to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In the poem, an albatross starts to follow a ship — being followed by an albatross was generally considered a sign of good luck. However, the titular mariner shoots the albatross with a crossbow, which is regarded as an act that will curse the ship. Even when they are too thirsty to speak, the ship's crew let the mariner know through their glances that they blame his action for the curse. The bird is placed on the sailor's neck by shipmates to show the guilt in killing it. Therefore, 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:
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, or possibly as early as 1959.
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 catch the albatrosses for sport. In the final stanza, he goes on to compare the poets to the birds — exiled from the skies and then weighed down by their giant wings, till death.
Finally, in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Here is a reference to Coleridge's albatross which is extended to fit the narrative's focus on the symbolic connotations of whiteness.
See The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in popular culture.
D.H. Lawrence refers to Coleridge's poem when he wrote, "And I thought of the albatross" in his own poem "Snake", published in Birds, Beasts and Flowers.

Film

In music journalism, the term albatross is sometimes used metaphorically to describe the mixed blessing and curse of a song that becomes so popular it overshadows the rest of the artist's work.

Musical

The famous BBC TV comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus broadcast a sketch called "Intermission" in Episode 13 of series 1 on 11 January 1970. Although only 40 seconds long this sketch is amongst one of the most memorable and remembered. In it a man, played by John Cleese, is dressed as an ice-cream girl in a film theatre, although instead of the regular movie snacks she is selling a dead albatross. A man approaches her and asks for two choc ices. The girl aggressively makes clear she only sells an albatross and continues shouting to draw attention to her merchandise, while the potential customer keeps asking questions about the product, like "What flavour is it?" and "Do you get wafers with it?". Finally the man buys two albatrosses for nine pence each. The salesgirl then shouts she is selling "gannet on a stick." Later during the episode, several other characters in other sketches shout "Albatross" for seemingly no reason at all.

Books