Was the Ancient Mariner a Conservative party member? Coleridge tells us several times that he had a ‘glittering eye’, an infallible sign of a screw loose somewhere. The S.T. Coleridge school of political psychiatry came into its own last weekend when the newspapers were told that Tory party ‘associations are all mad, swivel-eyed loons’. The Wedding Guest in Coleridge’s rime had his own ideas about care in the community: ‘Get thee hence, thou grey-beard Loon,’ he cried, to little enough effect, it must be admitted. But what did he mean by loon?
The Ancient Mariner was not being ‘diagnosed with lunacy’, as Coleridge would certainly not have put it. The poet, adopting a deliberately archaic vocabulary for his ballad, knew from Shakespeare of the ‘cream-fac’d’ variety of loon. Iago, in a drinking song learnt in England (he said), attributes the use of the insult loon to King Stephen himself, whose ‘breeches cost him but a crown, / He held them sixpence all too dear, / With that he called the tailor lown.’
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