Seabird sea and breeding in isolated colonies. However, some seabirds, particularly, the albatrosses and gulls, have broken into popular consciousness. The albatrosses have been described as "the most legendary of birds", and have a variety of myths and legends associated with them, and today it is widely considered unlucky to harm them, although the notion that sailors believed that is a myth that derives from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous poem, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", in which a sailor is punished for killing an albatross by having to wear its corpse around his neck. "Instead of the Cross the Albatross"
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner many opinions on why Coleridge inserted the gloss. Charles Lamb, who had deeply admired the original for its attention to "Human Feeling", claimed that the gloss distanced the audience from the narrative, weakening the poem's effects. The entire poem was first published in the collection of "Lyrical Ballads". Another version of the poem was published in the 1817 collection entitled "Sibylline Leaves" (see 1817 in poetry). On a surface level the poem explores a violation of nature and the resulting psychological effects on the mariner and on all those who hear him. According to Jerome McGann the poem is like