Advice on what to do if you meet the Ancient Mariner on the High Seas

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is surely one of the greatest poems in English, worth reading again, again, and again. Odd that the main character has become a dreadful bore, but maybe that’s a risk for all who have an extraordinary experience. They must tell of it again, again, and again. In the passage below from The Edge of the Alphabet, which amuses, warms, and impresses me, Janet Frame imagines what a boat in the 1950s on its way across the Pacific from New Zealand to Panama (and later onto England) would do if it spotted the Ancient Mariner. The boat takes him onboard with an unfortunate outcome. Frame urges you if you if you meet the Ancient Mariner on the High Seas to let him continue his journey. “In these seas the Ancient Mariner has no hope of pursuing his voyage of doom. When he is sighted alone in his craft ‘all all alone’, the Matua steams to rescue him, he is taken aboard, put in the ship’s hospital, given a sedative. The passengers talk excitedly among themselves.…