It is after this degree of recovery, and after the spell of the curse in the eyes of the dead has finally been broken, that the most ominous verse of the whole poem is placed. "The curse is finally expiated," explains the gloss; yet some condition to which the stasis itself had betrayed him remains to be faced -- unless, as the verse laconically suggests, it will be found to be unfaceable. I "looked far forth," says the Mariner, "yet little saw / Of what had else been seen";

Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread. (440-51)

Whatever this verse means, it implies that the condition of stasis may be attended by some worse horror; no passage elsewhere in the poem either explains it or suggests that the Mariner was able to resolve the dread. This verse is the more disturbing for being placed so late in the story of the Mariner's recovery, and for seeming so arbitrary in relation to its context. Some light on the fiend's creation from the terrors of stasis is available from another of Coleridge's notes. This is also concerned with despair, but this time its stasis is seen as the step before some horrifying implosion of the self: "reprobate Despair," he wrote in 1807, "snatches at the known Poison, that suspends -- alas! to aggravate the Evil" (the reference is almost certainly to opium), which is "the pause that defers the blow to make it the more forceful."

O who shall deliver me from the Body of this Death? Meanwhile the habit of inward Brooding daily makes it harder to confess the Thing, I am, to any one. . . . But the one ineradicable Idea, and unquenchable Yearning! -- and the Fear, that Death itself will but increase it! for it seems to have an affinity with Despair! (NB.ii.3078)

Coleridge's "ineradicable Idea" in 1807 was his love for Sara. This helps to show us that the Mariner's trauma involves not only isolation and fixity, but also the judgment implicit in his death-guilt -- he has failed in love. Coleridge's despairing note and the Mariner's fiend both seem to be saying that such failure is followed by the threat of psychic self-destruction (cf. Freud, The Ego and the Id).