The ship appears in a calm, not in a storm, and sailing without, rather than against, wind and tide; and instead of a crew of dead men it carries only Death and Life-in-Death.

Possibly he was acquainted with a form of the legend found in Bechstein's _Deutsches Sagenbuch_ (pointed out by Dr.Sykes), in which "Falkenberg, for murder of his brother, is condemned to sail a spectral bark, attended only by his good and his evil spirit, who play dice for his soul." 185--*Are those her ribs*, etc.

Instead of this stanza the first edition had these two: "Are those _her_ naked ribs, which fleck'd The sun that did behind them peer?
And are those two all, all the crew, That woman and her fleshless Pheere?
"His bones are black with many a crack, All black and bare, I ween; Jet-black and bare, save where with rust Of mouldy damps and charnel crust They're patch'd with purple and green" And again after line 198 the first edition had this stanza: "A gust of wind sterte up behind And whistled thro' his bones; Thro' the holes of his eyes and the hole of his mouth Half-whistles and half-groans." But this crude grotesquerie of horror--quite in the taste of that day, the day of "Monk" Lewis and Mrs.Radcliffe--Coleridge's finer poetical judgment soon rejected.
190--*Her lips were red*, etc.

Life-in-Death--who wins the Mariner, while Death wins his shipmates--is conceived as a witch, something after the fashion of Geraldine in "Christabel" or Duessa in "The Faerie Queene," but wilder, stranger than either; a thing of startling and evil beauty.

Spenser's pages of description, however, give no such vivid image of loathsome loveliness as do the first three lines of this stanza.