Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of The Ancient Mariner deals in its own metaphoric way with obsession and guilt, with the kind of trauma that simply demands attention and goes on demanding it even when it seems the occasion is long past and its ripples and ramifications should have succumbed to the mitigating processes of time.
The Ancient Mariner is haunted by his story and doomed to repeat it. So when he waylays the Wedding Guest outside the church, 'He holds him with his glittering eye/The Wedding-Guest stood still/And listens like a three years' child:/The Mariner hath his will.'
It is like the world of our dreams in which bizarre logic rules and ghostly, weirdly recognisable figures dominate. 'I pass, like night, from land to land,' says the Ancient Mariner, 'I have strange power of speech;/That moment that his face I see/I know the man that must hear me:/ To him my tale I teach.'
No one could have been further from the world of the Romantic poets than holocaust survivor Primo Levi (pictured, circa 1950s). In the final chapter of his book, The Truce, which is the sequel to his magnificent but harrowing Auschwitz 'memoir', If This is a Man, Levi recounts details of a recurring dream in which he is back in the concentration camp at Auschwitz.
The realities of the camp are so overwhelming, so pressing that they still, years later, dominate his mind, his imagination, his memory, even his sleep.
... a dream full of horror has still not ceased to visit me, at sometimes frequent, sometimes longer, intervals ... I am sitting at a table with my family, or with friends, or at work, or in the green countryside; in short, in a peaceful relaxed environment, apparently without tension or affliction; yet I feel a deep and subtle anguish, the definite sensation of an impending threat.
And in fact, as the dream proceeds, slowly and brutally, each time in a different way, everything collapses, and disintegrates around me, the scenery, the walls, the people, while the anguish becomes more intense and more precise. Now everything has changed into chaos; I am alone in the centre of a grey and turbid nothing, and now, I know what this thing means, and I also know that I have always known it; I am in the Lager [Auschwitz] once more, and nothing is true outside the Lager.
"Levi was haunted by his story and only death