How much noise does this poem make? We have heard a merry din, but those early stanzas make us wonder what its volume really is. The mariner’s tale is broken off by a ‘loud bassoon’ but, as Nicholson Baker nicely pointed out, no instrument was less fitted to the task of blaring fanfare. Bassoons are quiet and comic: Wallace Stevens wryly imagined ‘the revenge of music on bassoons’.

This may be less a continuity error than a sign of tumult. In a letter to Lord Liverpool of 1817, Coleridge recalled Plato’s warning: ‘the modes of music are never disturbed without the unsettling of the most fundamental political and social conventions’. How pitchy much of the establishing action is, from the primal breast beating, to the sun ascending like a merman, to this last loud uproar. Coleridge was an avid listener rather than maker of music, and as we attend warily to his sounds, it is often as if we are switching between two poems at once.

Will May