Coleridge wrote at a time when European debate focused on the ‘natural law' in terms of the rights of men and nations freely to navigate and to fish the world’s seas. In 'The Rime', the ocean is ruled by a more archaic, more authoritative ‘law of nature’. The crime at the centre of the ballad is against animal life; the weather metes out punishment; and redemption only begins when the Mariner appreciates the beauty of radically nonhuman creatures.

As I hear it now, the most insistent question of the ballad is: how will the laws of nature help us agree a natural law for humanity? I'm struck by the way Coleridge’s image of death-fires joins today’s devastating fires in Australia and their scientific link to the disruption of the natural order of the Indian Ocean. The poetics of natural law in ‘The Rime’ take on a new urgency.

Stephanie Jones