Kubla Khan

Kubla Khan is not a poetic fragment resulting from a dream, but a complex
and carefully organized work that illustrates Coleridges poetic principles.

Discuss the statement!
Kubla Khan is an excellent example. Nineteenth-century critics tended to dismiss it as
a rather inconsequential or meaningless triviality. In large part, this was due to
Coleridges own introduction to the poem. When it was first published in 1816, he
subtitled it A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment. Those poets and critics who admired
Kubla Khan, such as Algernon Charles Swinburne and Leigh Hunt, did so for its
marvelous melodic quality.
Arthur Symons called Kubla Khan: One of the finest examples of lyric poetry. It has
just enough meaning to give it bodily existence; otherwise it would be disembodied
music. We can see the music of the poem in the following lines:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea
The opening lines of Kubla Khan immediately thrust us into a strange world where the
remarkable is commonplace. Kubla Khan orders a pleasure-dome to be built next to a
sacred river that erupts from a chasm, flows in sinuous rills through gardens, then
descends in tumult into caverns measureless to man. Encircling the centrally placed
dome, walls and towers inscribe a defining limit around forests ancient as the hills.
These elegant and civilized structures actually enclose a deep romantic chasm ... A
savage place that spurts life-giving waters to the gardens like a spouting heart or a
birthing mother. In other words, despite human artifice, nature vivifies the whole and
gives it meaning. So Kubla Khan, the prototypical Romantic artist, in order to create his
masterpiece, merely defines a limit with his art around the uncontrollable magic of
untrammeled nature and allows it to feed and inform his art work. And this, in fact, was
the aesthetic Coleridge and other Romantic poets practiced. For them, poetry, as an
imitation of nature, merely delimits in image and form the divine beauty of raw
nature. But in Kubla Khan, as Coleridge informs us in the preface to the 1816 edition
of the poem, the wild nature of the gardens, the fountain with ceaseless turmoil
seething, and Alph, the sacred river, actually emerge from the poets dream
consciousness. The Romantics believed that, at its core, the self is one with nature.
Childhood and dreams fascinated them thematically in their poetry because both, like
nature, were simple, raw, and unrestrainable. They recognized that in all of its forms,
nature yearns with omnidirected desire. Just like a woman wailing for her demonlover, nature is, in William Blakes words, Energy. And what Blake says in The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell of this Energy also applies here in Kubla Khan:
Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward
circumference of Energy.... Energy is Eternal Delight. The outward circumference of
the Khans towers and walls circumscribes the Eternal Delight of untamed nature,
which is both holy and enchanted and certainly beyond human control.
In a vision once I saw:

It was an Abyssinian maid
Read as the beginning of a longer poem, Coleridges poetic fragment sets forth a
fantastic world, set both in the mysterious Orient and in the magical Middle Ages.
But read as a whole complete unto itself, Kubla Khan evokes the fleeting images of a
waking dream that speak not in words but in symbols. And although many critics point
to the Crewe manuscript version of Kubla Khan found in 1934 as proof that Coleridge
consciously revised the text, the poem as it stands successfully replicates the dream
state and unveils a genuine glimpse into an archetypal world, a world Carl Jung, a Swiss
psychoanalyst, called the collective unconscious. The first thirty-six lines of the poem
imagistically present a symbolic diagram of the self, in which consciousness strives to
find integration with the incalculably greater depth of the unconscious mind, while the
last eighteen lines reflect upon the power of the unconscious mind when Coleridge
finally realized that the full recollection of his dream work was impossible. By
demarcating a circular space from the forests ancient as the hills with protective walls
and towers, Kubla Khan creates a kind of mandala whose circumference is described
by the stately pleasure-dome at its center. A Sanskrit technical term from Tantric
Buddhism for a circular cosmogram used for centering and meditation, the mandala
is a map of the inner world (the microcosm) that mirrors the outer world (the
macrocosm). According to Jung, the mandala serves to define and protect the self as it
seeks to integrate with the unruly forces of the unconscious mind. But in Kubla Khan,
the sunny spots of greenery and the bright sinuous rills within the conscious world
of the self appear tenuous, fragile, and minuscule in comparison to the cavernous deeps
of the sunless sea. In fact, all of the paired opposites that appear within the poem (sun
and moon, light and dark, male and female, movement and rest, and good and evil)
struggle without success to find balance within this delicate world fed by the waters of
the collective unconscious.
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
As mentioned previously, Alph, the sacred river, suffuses consciousness with creative
Energy. This overwhelming creativity fecundates the conscious mind (twice five miles
of fertile ground) via the spouting chasm that flings up water and dancing rocks from
the underworld. This birth-giving chasm, clearly associated with the woman wailing for
her demon-lover, charges the visionary with almost frenzied inspiration. In the last
eighteen lines, the speaker recalls yet another female figure he had once seen in vision,
the damsel with a dulcimer. Her strange song, if he could but revive [it] within
himself, would so permeate him with numinous powers that he would be able to
recreate the Khans dome and the caves of ice in the air itself. Such magical powers,
the fruit of a kind of possession, would then make the speaker into an object of taboo,
both holy and dangerous to the common sort of humanity. Like the chasm, both holy
and enchanted, the inspired poet becomes an ambivalent figure beyond good and
evil, for he on honey-dew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise. Not
surprisingly, many critics have commented that this milk of Paradise might be nothing
more than laudanum, a solution of opium in alcohol, to which Coleridge was addicted
most of his life. Unfortunately, Coleridges dependence on drugs cut short his poetically
most productive period.
This complexity makes it difficult to fully believe that Kubla Khan is nothing more
than the remnant of a half-remembered dream. The thematic repetition, intricacy of
rhyme and metrical schemes, as well as the carefully juxtaposed images beautifully
harmonize and support the poems purpose and theme. In Kubla Khan, Coleridge
has created more than simple lyric poetry. He has fulfilled his poetic ideal of a
harmonious blend of meaning and form, which results in a graceful and intelligent
whole.

Kubla Khan

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Kubla Khan

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Kubla Khan

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Kubla Khan is not a poetic fragment resulting from a dream, but a complex

and carefully organized work that illustrates Coleridges poetic principles.

In a vision once I saw:

You might also like