National Poetry Month: Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

[tardis_stowaway]

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, like many of the Romantic poets, was a larger-than-life character.  He's well known for his opium addiction and mental health problems, but he wasn't just some crazy stoned poet.  He was an influential literary critic, a friend to Wordsworth, planner of a failed utopian movement, and more.  I can think of at least three fantasy/sci-fi novels where Coleridge is a character:  The Somnabulist by Jonathan Barnes (featuring ZOMBIE Coleridge), The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers (which also includes a brainwashed clone of Lord Byron), and Dirk Gently's Holistic Agency by Douglas Adams.  Most important for our purposes today is Coleridge's identity as a poet.  He was especially adept with the feel of words:  meter, rhyme, alliteration, and all that goes to making a poem fascinating to read out loud or hear, even if you haven't a clue what it means.

My favorite Coleridge poem is probably "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," but its length makes it unwieldy for an LJ post.  "Kubla Khan" is fascinating and considerably shorter.  I love the vivid imagery and the way the meter and alliteration draw you relentlessly onwards like the current of Alph, the sacred underground river.  It's a strange, fragmentary poem. (I chose my LJ icon to commemorate how Coleridge apparently dreamed a much longer version of this poem, but was interrupted before finishing.)  Still, it keeps popping up in literature textbooks for a reason.

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Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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.

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,
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
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
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
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!

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,
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,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me
That with music loud and long
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!
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.

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Here's a dramatic reading, because this poem is only half-alive as text:

Comments

[sylvansafekeepe.livejournal.com]

Coleridge is awesome.