Two centuries on, and the ice is no longer 'all around'. The cryosphere is melting. Ice's cries—its 'cracks' and 'growls', its 'roars' and 'howls'—are now those of a substance in retreat. Antarctica disassembles, drifts off, dissipates; the Larsen B ice-shelf, Thwaites Glacier (with a melt-void at its heart). In the North-West Passage, ships' navigation devices scream alarm as vessels pass unhindered through areas of sea that the GPS registers as frozen, impassable. In the Greenlandic village of Kulusk, the local glacier has retreated so far that the noises of ice calving from its face can no longer be heard in the houses.

What would Coleridge have made of this Anthropocene of ours, with its vanishing glaciers, drowned islands, surging storms, silent oceans thickened by plastic, not sea-weed? He would have recognised it for the horror it is—and written into it, against it.

Robert Macfarlane