Does anyone know of an earlier usage?
Apparently so.
Big Bird (3/4 down the page).
AFAIK, the two aren’t actually what you’d call equated. It’s more that the albatross was used as a metaphor for a burden of, AFAIK again, guilt, in the Rime, and *that *metaphor later became part of the cultural, what, symbology?
I know that the meaning in the poem isn’t quite that of a useless encumbrance, lissener, but I’ve always though of that meaning being a vast oversimplificition of the symbolism of the poem. I’m wondering if the usage predate Coleridge.
What flavor is it?
Did you miss Serenity? The albatross was a ships luck until some fool shot it.
::sighing::
“Yes, I HAVE read a poem.”
Edward Armstrong in The Folklore of Birds says:
“Far out in the ocean where the albatrosses glided in the wake of sailing ships similar beliefs [as those about storm petrels and shearwaters] were transferred to them. . . . The incident on which Coleridge, at Wordsworth’s suggestion, based his poem occurs in Shelvock’s Voyage (1726). Seamen are said to have believed that albatrosses sailing around a ship brought bad weather and that killing them was unlucky, but this belief was not as widespread as has been supposed, for sailors used to slay these birds to make tobacco pouches from the webbing of their feet.” (page 214)
ETA: If there were a pre-Coleridge tradition of albatross-as-encumbrance, I’d think Armstrong would have mentioned it here.
But if they bring bad weather and killing them is unlucky, aren’t you sort of damned if you do and damned if you don’t?
Yeah, I thought that was odd, too. Maybe it’s one of those “you can’t change your fate, so don’t try” things.
Yeah, it was the corpse of the slain albatross that was hung round the mariner’s neck. It was thought that killing an albatross was bad luck, but Coleridge chose instead to make the point that all life is sacred because it is part of God’s creation, and should be treated as such.
As far as I know, albatrosses didn’t exactly bring bad weather, they were thought to bring the wind. Wind might bring a storm. But even a storm is better than being becalmed, as the mariner found out.
Martin Gardner doesn’t mention any previous instances in his (extremely good) The Annotated Ancient Mariner.
He does, however, mention that Coleridge obviously never saw an albatross, and must have thought it a much smaller bird. He, too. menttions Wordsworth’s suggesting something like this, based on Shelvock. But if you consider the size of the albatross, the idea of hanging one around someone’s neck is absurd – it’d be dragging on the ground, grotesquely heavy, and you’d be tripping every step. Gustave Dore was a skilled engraver who mafde this ludicrous idea seem plausible in his illustrations of the poem, but he had to cheat by making the albatross smaller.
Simple solution, they took some of the twine that sailors always carry, and trussed up the wings prior to hanging the tangible sign of the Ancient Mariner’s sin around his neck. 
I read somewhere that it was a popular superstition that Albatrosses and some other sea birds were believed to be the souls of drowned sailors though I have no cite.
Other then that can I just say that ROTAM is and always has been IMHO the best poem ever written,why cant modern poets even approach this excellence?
I guess it depends how you define “modern poets,” but I know a number of excellent 20th-century writers who easily approach or surpass the Rime. As with everything though, that’s a matter of opinion, of what sort of poetry you like.