Albatross (metaphor) 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. 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" (1798).
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner until Judgement Day for a terrible crime, found in Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, M. G. Lewis' "The Monk" (a novel Coleridge reviewed) and the legend of the "Flying Dutchman". It is argued that the harbour at Watchet in Somerset was the primary inspiration for the poem, although some time before, John Cruikshank, a local acquaintance of Coleridge's, had related a dream about a skeleton ship manned by spectral sailors. In September 2003, a commemorative statue, by Alan B. Herriot of Penicuik, Scotland, was unveiled at Watchet harbour. In "Biographia Literaria", Coleridge wrote: In "Table Talk", Coleridge wrote: Wordsworth wrote