Coleridge’s remarkable achievement is that when he was still quite young, he imagined this poem about a voyage—and a life—told by an old man about the young man he was. As the mariner I am becomes older, I struggle to push into my own past. The ancient sailor’s story tells of an innocent youth who feels as if he and his friends are 'the first that ever burst / into that silent sea.' On the ship, he committed one impulsive, destructive act and his friends all fell away, to his lifelong regret.

But in the years of obsessive retellings that follow, his act and its presumed consequences become fetishised guilt, a false resolution, an excess of misdirected moral sentiment thwarting the possibilities of pure imagination. Forever spinning the same yarn, he can never go beyond regret. Nor can we, it seems. Tragically, individuals, leaders, and nations all too often share the mariner’s failure to understand his own history.

Colin Dewey