Sun, and moon, and storm-wind, and ocean are in folk-song sun and moon and wind and water and nothing more; but in "The Ancient Mariner" they are living beings.
"And now the Storm-blast came, and he Was tyrannous and strong: He struck with his o'ertaking wings, And chased us south along." "And straight the Sun was flecked with bars, (Heaven's Mother send us grace!) As if through a dungeon-grate he peered With broad and burning face." "Still as a slave before his lord, The ocean hath no blast; His great bright eye most silently Up to the Moon is cast-- "If he may know which way to go; For she guides him smooth or grim.
See, brother, see! how graciously She looketh down on him." This is the most noticeable of the "modifying colours of imagination" in "The Ancient Mariner." The practice might be classed as a sort of personification; but how utterly different in its effect from the conventional "literary" personifications of the eighteenth century--of Gray in the "Elegy," for instance! Grandeur, and Envy, and Honour, in that admirable poem, are not real persons to the imagination; the abstraction remains an abstraction.

But in Coleridge's poem all nature is alive with the life of men.

Other elements of "that synthetic and magical power to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination," and which blends "the idea with the image" and "the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects" will be felt as the poem is studied.
Wordsworth related in after years that the suggestion for the poem came from a dream of a phantom ship told to Coleridge by a friend, and that he (Wordsworth) proposed the shooting of the albatross, the revenge of the "tutelary spirits," and the "navigation of the ship by the dead men," and contributed the fourth stanza of the poem and the last two lines of the first stanza of Part IV.

He had been reading Shelvocke's "Voyages," a book in which he had found a description of albatrosses as they are seen in far southern waters.

Other reading that may have suggested some of the scenery is described in the "Notes" to the Globe edition of Coleridge's poems.