SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
(1772-1834)
KUBLA KHAN
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea. 5
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills, 10
Enfolding sunny spots of
greenery.
But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover !
A savage place ! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted 15
By woman wailing for her demon-lover !
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently
was forced :
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst 20
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail :
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion 25
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean :
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war ! 30
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device, 35
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
40
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 't would win me,
That with music loud and long, 45
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome ! those caves of ice !
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware ! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair! 50
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
BY
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
The poem Kubla Khan was inspired by the great Kublai Khan (this
is an example of one of the author's numerous spelling errors in this poem).He
was, historically, a thirteenth-century descendant of Genghis Khan who had
built the palace of K'ai P'ing, which is translated to a homophone of Xanadu.
This poem is
divided into two parts. First one, (written in third person), the author talks
about the place that Kubla Khan wanted to build his palace. It is a description
of a dome and large garden. This is portrayed as earthly heaven, surrounded by ancient
forests, blooming and bright. It begins with the allusion to the sacred river
Alph. All related to nature. So that is the explanation of the born, life and
death of that river into the sea.
One of
the topics that we found in the poem is paganism against Christianity, related
to the river Alph too. That means referring to an underground river that passed
through dimensions that could not be understood by any man, and then emptying
into an underground sea. Another topic that the poem introduces is biblical
reference when it talks about the garden. It is referring to the Garden of
Eden: 'gardens bright with sinuous rills.' (line 8) ‘Sinuous rills’ can be
represented as two different metaphors: 'rills' can mean either a stream or a
valley on the moon. The moon is seen as the source of all creativity in
romantic idealism, and so this first metaphor is significant in the poem. On
the contrary, when it speaks of 'forests ancient as the hills,/ Enfolding sunny
spots of greenery.' (lines 10-11), this reference to the sun contrasts with the
valleys on the moon. The second metaphor refers to that of the snake in the
Garden of Eden. The word sinuous implies snakelike, and the connection of these
small tributaries to the river Alph. The author is talking about a woman who is Eve, and she is 'wailing' for the source of
her desires, literally her demon lover, but figuratively the apple that got her
threw out of Eden.
Another
symbolical characteristic that we found in the poem is the number five. It can
be found twice in Kubla Khan, the first time when speaking of Khan's palace of
Xanadu. Coleridge says 'twice five miles' instead of simply saying ten. The
second use of the number five is after the pleasure dome has been subdued by
nature's wrath. The significance of the number five is huge in paganism. The
number five refers to the fifth element, spirit, which in pagan belief is the
source of all magic and life on Earth. Another number that we found in the poem
is number three. The three circles that they 'weave' around him are both an
ancient, superstitious ritual to keep an evil spirit at bay, and a reference to
the holy trinity.
In
the second part of the poem, there is a change in subject, writing and tone.
While in the first line of the poem begins ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan’ (line 1)
referring to a male, the second part of the poem is referred to a female
character ‘A damsel with a dulcimer’ (line 37), emphasizing the change in
sections and the difference between paganism and Christianity, as well as
continuing Coleridge's obsession with sex in nature. The poem closes talking
about ‘And drunk milk of Paradise’ (line 54), here the author maybe tries to
say that his life has been very luxury and he was a powerful man. But can not
forget that Coleridge was an opium addict, and maybe in one of that ‘trips’
that he had, saw that land Xanadu, with its leader Kubla Khan, and later wrote
that poem to have constancy of what he have lived. It seems that was his
addiction what made the poem of only one topic and the lack of succession on
the facts that he explains, because the poet could write what he thoughts at
that moment[1].
Another point to
consider is the society of Coleridge’s time. Actually he lived in a period
called the Napoleonic era. At this time, the French Revolution was in its final
period, and also the Industrial Revolution could influence his writings, as it
took place in the late XVIII century. The Industrial Revolution brought several
changes in society that affected people, for example the urbanization, changes in
agriculture, introduction of railways, new machineries etc. Like Coleridge’s
personality, his writings have a loose and disorganised connection. His
philosophy of unity is one of the fundamental contexts of his writings. At that
time, there are many political and social changes in Britain and Europe. He
moves from radical to conservative, from necessitarian rationalist to
philosophical idealism and Anglican Christianity. So that this representative
qualities give importance to Coleridge’s successes but more to his failures.
But his most considerable influence knew his closest friend, William
Wordsworth. The poetry that produce in that period of intimacy with the
Wordsworth family, constitutes perhaps his least claim to greatness. The
‘Conversation’ poems were mainly written at this time, as were ‘The Ancient Mariner’, conceived
as Coleridge’s principal contribution to the ‘Lyrical Ballads’, and also both ‘Kubla Khan’ and the first part of ‘Christabel’.
We appreciate
several irregularities through the text.
We have found some
stylistic resources throughout the poem. First, we can see the predominance of
nature over many other topics, so the semantic field of the poem is nature.
Some words related to it are: “river”(l.3), “sunless sea”, “tree” (l.9),
“forests” (l.10), “sunny” (l.11), “hill” (l.13), “earth” (l.18), “fountain” (l.
19), “rocks” (l.23), “ocean” (l.28), “waves” (l.32), “air” (l.46). We can found
many parallelisms, same word beginning many lines, in that poem is the word
“And” (l. 8, 10, 17, 23, 28, 29, 40, 48, 49, 52 and 54). Other resource found
is a comparison using the link “like”: “Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding
hail” (l. 21). On the second part of the poem we can appreciate another
stylistic resource, the hyperbaton: “A damsel with a dulcimer / In a vision
once I saw:”, that is not the correct form of writing, because the first line
has to go besides the second one, there is a change of lines. The text uses many exclamations to make the
reader feel the musicality of the poem. Repetition of words like “sacred river”
(l. 24, 26), “tumult” (l. 28, 29), and the repetition of the word
‘Beware!’(l.49), is an example of a common device in romantic writing. It is
when an author wants to stress an image or a feeling that a word is using, he
would repeat the word, drilling it into the reader's mind.
According to the
relation of this poem with the rest of the poet’s poetic production, we can
explain that ‘Kubla Khan’
together with ‘Christabel’,
are two of the uncompleted Coleridge’s poems.
This was because, according to Coleridge, the parts that have been not
found, were lost in the transition between the dream and the awake. That poem
is written like a chant and uses the Coleridge yambic tetrameter and the
rhythmical alteration.
It is
important to mention the situation of the author when he wrote this poem. In
fact, it was in the summer of the year 1797, when the author retired himself to
a lonely farm house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of
Somerset and Devonshire, because of an illness. In consequence of a slight
indisposition, and anodyne had been prescribed, from the effect of which he
feel asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following
sentence, or words of the same substance, in ‘Purchas’s Pilgrimage:’ ‘here the
Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be build, and a stately garden thereunto: and
thus ten miles of fertile ground were enclosed with a wall.’ The author
continued for about three hours to a profound sleep, at least for the eternal
senses, during which time he was the most vivid confidence, that he could not
have composed from less than two or three hundred lines; if that indeed can be
called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a
parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation of
consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct
recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and
eagerly wrote down the lines that are preserved. At this moment he was
unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock and detained by
him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small
surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim
recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of
some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had past away[2].
Nowadays
we can make a relation between the poem and people who take drugs. Actually,
when you swallow some hallucinogenic substances, you get into a “world” where
all seems perfect and “fantastic” for you. No worry neither nostalgia could
invade your brain. In other words, you do not take control of anything. Totally
the contrary, drugs take control of you.
§BIBLIOGRAPHY:
-
Jackson, H. J., ed. Samuel Taylor Coleridge Selected Poetry. Great Britain:
Oxford, 1997.
-
Newlyn, Lucy, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge. United
Kingdom: Cambridge, 2002.
§WEBGRAPHY:
-
Poemas.
Colección de poesías – poemas, 2007. 17 Nov. 2007 http://www.poesiaspoemas.com/samuel-taylor-coleridge/kubla-khan
-
Wikipedia. The Free Encyclopedia. 18 Nov. 2007 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubla_Khan
-
El
Sueño de Coleridge. Jorge Luís Borges. 16 Nov. 2007 http://www.caressa.it/testi/borges01.html
-
Cosa
Fácil. 20 Nov. 2007 http://cosafacil.blogspot.com/2006/08/kubla-khan-el-extasis-de-lo-macabro.html
-
Dictionary. From late 18th/Early 19th – Century
English, Classical Greek, and Coleridge Inventions to late 20th –
Century American. 16 Nov. 2007 http://etext.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/resources/dictionary.html#momently