The “goney” or albatross in Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” (1851)

When Ishmael in Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" (1851) sees a “a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness” on the deck of a ship sailing near Antarctica, he is stunned by this "prodigy of plumage" and has to ask a sailor what the bird is called: a "goney". Later, he finds out that is another name for the albatross, and even later, he reads what he calls "Coleridge's wild Rhyme": Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798). For him, as perhaps for Melville himself on his own maritime voyages, the experience of the living bird both predates and anticipates the experience of the literary bird in Coleridge's narrative poem. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 16 December 2023)