Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Kubla Khan:
Although written sometime between 1797 and 1800, Kubla Khan was not published until 1816. At that time, Coleridge subtitled it "A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment" and added a prefatory note explaining the unusual origin of the poem. The preface describes who Coleridge, after taking some opium as medication, grew drowsy while reading a passage about the court of Kubla Khan in Samuel Purchas' Pilgrimage, a seventeenth-century travel book recounting the adventures of early explorers. Soon he fell into a deep sleep which lasted about three hours. During this period, he composed from 200-300 lines of poetry based on the vivid images in his dream. When he woke, he remembered the entire poem and immediately began to write it down. Unfortunately, however, a visitor interrupted him, distracting him for about an hour. When Coleridge returned to his writing, the vivid images had fled, leaving him with only vague recollections and the fifty-four lines of this poetic fragment.
Creativity and Imagination:
Along with our other elements of Romanticism, focus also on Coleridge's fascination with the poetic vision here. Here, the "Alph, the sacred river," suffuses consciousness with creative "energy." This overwhelming creativity generates 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 Khan's 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 hat fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise." Not surprisingly, many critics have commented that his "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, Coleridge's dependence on drugs cut short his poetically most productive period.
Style:
Kubla Khan is an intricately structured poem, using a amazing variety of metric and rhythmic devices. Lines 1 to 7 and 37 to 54 are written primarily in iambic tetrameter.
In order to analyze the rhythm or meter of a line of poetry, the line is divided into syllables. Iambs are units of two syllables, where the first syllables is unstressed, or not emphasized, and the second syllable is stressed. Notice the syllable in the first line of "Kubla Khan":
In Xa / na du / did Ku / bla Khan
When the line is read aloud, the emphasis falls on every second syllable. The meter is iambic tetrameter because there are four of these units in each line (a total of eight syllables). Between lines 8 and 53, the meter shifts to other meters, primarily iambic pentameter.
The poem uses an equally elaborate rhyme scheme. Lines 1, 3, and 4 rhyme, as do lines 2 and 5. The next two lines, 6 and 7, are a couplet. In the following four lines, an alternating rhyme pattern is used: rills, tree, hills, greenery. This variety continues throughout the poem.
The complicated use of rhyme is not limited to the last words in each line. A close examination of the first line provides examples of the intricate rhyme within a line. Each of the eight syllables is involved some type of internal rhyme: xa / na / bla; du / ku. Note also the syllabic alliteration of do and did. The only syllables left, in and Khan, contain a half rhyme. The elaborate rhyme continues throughout the poem. For example, each of the first five lines ends with alliteration: Kubla Khan, dome decree, river ran, measureless man, sunless sea. These shifts in meter, along with clever word play, help to reinforce the poem's theme of creativity and poetic vision.
Other interesting themes in the poem are:
Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the first poem in Lyrical ballads, the collaborative effort of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth designed to explore new directions in poetic language and style, and move away from the formal and highly stylized literature of the eighteenth century. Coleridge editied this poem several times after its original 1798 version. Our book contains the 1817 edition from his collected poems, Sybilline Leaves. In this edition, Coleridge added notes in the margin and replaced some of the poem's original supernatural elements.
Paper topic: how does Coleridge's narrative technique immediately introduce the reader to supernatural level?
Other interesting themes in this narrative poem and in Shelley's novel, Frankenstein:
Content for the above was copied and gleaned from a great teaching resourse: Poetry for Students, Volumes 1-12. Comp. and Ed. Elizabeth Thomason. Michigan: Gale Group, 1999.