........ eventually, the ship encounters a ghostly vessel. On board are Death (a skeleton) and the "Night-mare Life-in-Death" (a deathly-pale woman), who are playing dice for the souls of the crew......
Samuel Taylor Coleridge walked along the Somerset coastline many times in the two years he lived at Nether Stowey with his friends the Wordsworths'. Nearly 200 years later I walked the same coast myself for the first time and like Coleridge found that it has an unnatural, magical and ethereal fascination. Neither pretty, nor unspoilt, it exhibits a spiritual attractive remoteness I can't explain.
Sandwiched between the carbuncle that is Bridgwater and Minehead this 30 odd mile stretch of coastline has a Nuclear power station, a blizzard of caravan parks, and Butlins yet, as Coleridge found, as we walked along Blue Anchor Bay today it feels isolated, strange, a place to not linger too long, yet somehow it's atmosphere of strangeness is a comfort. I know of no other place like this. Julie's reactions today were as mine when first coming here in 1994, I didn't like it, nor did she. I could tell Julie was uneasy being there, and yet 4 hours later the atmosphere here envelops you and provides a stillness of calm that only a landscape of many trod can provide.
Coleridge many times traversed this area in his drug fuelled perambulations, composing some of literatures most astounding poetry, Kubla Kahn and from where the above comment elides to, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. He also composed one of my favourites, the Frost at Midnight in the cottage now owned by the National Trust. I made a radio programme which included this a few years back.
I didn't compose any poetry today but as I sat by some truly weird wooden posts impaled into the beach, hulks of rotten teeth belonging to a green monster from the sea, the landscape glittered and shone in a melancholic beauty. A lone fisherman broke the reverie. I felt the fingers of Coleridge's imagination envelop me in that Frost of Midnight,
"Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon."
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