A fateful, unfathomable bolt from a crossbow sends the sailors in Coleridge’s epic poem into a terrible, endless ocean-bound purgatory, one that could be straight out of the weird maritime tales of the Edwardian writer William Hope Hodgson, in which becalmed ships encounter ephemeral, rot-imparting islands; or weed-bound hulks besieged by slimy, unnatural crawling things.

The poem’s now-cursed, nameless vessel hopes for salvation in the form of a ship on the horizon, but which turns out to be a spectral Flying Dutchman steered by a skeleton crew – a charnel-crusted Reaper and his even more fearsome female companion. The awful pair gamble for the sailors’ souls in a scene reminiscent of the chess game in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Death is soon visited upon the crew, transformed into phantoms like Hope Hodgson’s Ghost Pirates. And yet, among this unremitting supernatural horror, what haunts the most is that, two centuries on, Coleridge’s warnings remain unheeded.

Edward Parnell