Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide, wide sea. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide, wide sea.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798)

Part IV · spoken by The Mariner

Context

The Mariner has just witnessed his entire crew of two hundred men collapse dead around him after the killing of the albatross. He alone survives, cursed to drift on a windless, motionless sea surrounded by corpses, with no companion but his own guilt.

How the repetition works

Coleridge piles "alone" upon "alone" until the word itself becomes the experience. "All, all" intensifies the totality. The doubled "wide, wide" extends the horizon outward — there is no edge to this isolation. The line is a small lesson in how repetition can perform meaning rather than merely state it.