The Rime comes roaring out of the future and the past, a founding fable, full of symbolic birds, slimy crawling things, and a wedding-party guest accosted by a madman who won't let go. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem shifts backwards and forwards in time, from Shakespeare's The Tempest and its man-made storm, to a young teenage girl crouching behind the sofa as a wild-eyed poet recites this gothic horror to her parents; Mary Shelley will go on to write Frankenstein (1818) out of that fear. Edgar Allen Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) an imaginary journey to the Antarctic, populates the ice with humans with needle teeth and red eyes. And Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851) picks up that appalling whiteness and invests it in another eerie animal, the white whale.

Coleridge's 18th century science-fiction spins on to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey with its piercing alien signal, and Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth, whose voyager comes from his destroyed planet to warn us of the consequences of abusing ours. Where will the new Mariner's story be written, in the 21st century? All these signs and wonders—Shakespeare's Prospero, Shelley's Creature, Poe's red-eyed beings, Melville's white whale, Kubrick's embryo in space, Roeg's flame-haired alien—they all radiate out from the lonely Mariner, caught in the dark backward abysm of time, sailing on into the otherworld, where we are now bound...

Philip Hoare