JOURNAL OF CRITICAL REVIEWS
ISSN- 2394-5125 VOL 7, ISSUE 19, 2020
VERSE FROM THE DREAM FABRIC: COLERIDGE AND OPIUM REVERIE
Nitul Su
Expert Academy, Guwahati
Email: [email protected]
Received: 14 April 2020 Revised and Accepted: 8 August 2020
ABSTRACT: Coleridge's interest in dreaming and nightmares inform his writing as a poet and his speculation on a range of issues in psychology and metaphysics. It also affords clues to his own troubled inner world. Coleridge originally took opium in its medicinal form but his sustained use created a dependency on it. Coleridge claimed that the poem "Kubla Khan" had come to him under the influence of Opium. His an another poem “The Pains of Sleep” wrote in the midst of long walk alone across Scotland in 1803 during which he was probably suffering from the withdrawal symptoms of opium addiction. In 1953 in "Coleridge, Opium and Kubla Khan" Elizabeth Schneider noticed that the most of his comparison of the states of dreaming and dramatic illusion was derived from Erasmus Darwinian. Coletidge himself never actually analyzed his own dreams from an interpretative prospective. How we dream is a hope compelling question than what we dream. Coleridge's dream may seem less astonishing than that of his precursor. "Kubla Khan" is a remarkable composition, and the nine line hymn dreamed by Caedmon barely displays any virtues beyond its oneiric origin; but Coleridge was already a poet while Caedmon's vocation was revealed to him. There is, however, a later event, which turns the marvel of the dream that engendered "Kubla Khan" into something nearly unfathomable. If it is true, the story of Coleridge's dream began many centuries before Coleridge and has not yet ended.
KEYWORDS- Imagination, Dream, Opium, Illusion, Mystery, Pain
I. INTRODUCTION "For he honey -dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise" (Kubla Khan) For the generally anxious modernist poetry, illusion or dream vision ought to be one in every of the thematic tools rejecting the other earlier mode of illustration. As up-to-datedness isn't essentially a sole school of recent literary movements, therefore will the dream vision might not be a narrative meant to be incised solely in representative texts. As such, it's difficult to work out what may are the drive for literary traditions to use dream vision. allow us to assume Yeats‟s „vast image out of Spiritus Mundi‟ could be a troubled image from the unconscious disturbed by the concern of annihilation of this civilization brought out by a „rough beast slouched towards Bethlehem‟. it's one in every of those „thousand sordid images‟ constituting a modernist soul, desolate and so seen „flickering against the ceiling‟. The frost at the side of the raptorial bird activity „secret ministry‟ in a very „phantom light‟ attracts USA to a labyrinth once making an attempt to know Coleridge. The mysterious frost could are a college of the unconscious with undisclosed secrets, or it should are a labyrinth wherever each identity gets dissolved. Imageries from dream could seem elsewhere, and during this case, this paper would attempt to figure it call at Coleridge‟s poetry and can attempt to perceive if these illusions were an outcome of narcotic habits.
Verse from the dream Fabric: Coleridge and Opium Reverie: Opium, as a drug was prescribed by the doctors to answer violent hysteria or diseases like epidemic cholera, malaria, rickettsial disease and chronic pains like rheumatism. Used either as a sedative or stimulant, abuse of narcotic conjointly semiconductor diode to diseases and disorders like hallucination, respiratory illness and sleep disorder. withal, it ought to are a comforting substance for those that were subjected to acute
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ISSN- 2394-5125 VOL 7, ISSUE 19, 2020 pains even though it absolutely was defendant for enslaving them into a „servile captivity‟. Thomas DE Josiah Quincy defends why an inexpensive being would subject himself to such „sevenfold chain‟. “True it's that for nearly 10 years I did sometimes take narcotic for the sake of the exquisite pleasure it gave me; however goodbye as I took it with this read i used to be effectually protected against all material unhealthy consequences by the need of interposing long intervals between the many acts of indulgence, so as to renew the pleasant sensations. it absolutely was not for the aim of making pleasure, however of mitigating pain within the severest degree, that I 1st began to use narcotic as a writing of daily diet.”(Quincey,8) Piranesi‟s jail of contradiction that Coleridge explained to be a record of the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever. Like Quincey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge too was not merely a dreamy romantic laying leisurely on his crouch chewing opium. His power of imagination didn‟t need to be accelerated by opium, albeit it had something to do with the creative process. The habit may not confer imaginative stimulus or fantastic dreams and visions, all facts attributed to it might be the cause of previous mental and emotional make up. Buried deep in the unconscious, these mental or emotional set up might have driven by opium to create a dream reverie of its own with paradox and ambiguities.In this context, Quincey Coleridge's account of a vision of paradox which he found resemblance with sketches of an Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi. M.H Abrams, in his The Milk of Paradise had this idea of tracing a pattern of dream imagery- images of lights, sounds, movements and variations in the consciousness of time and space.With a „framework of plot, the pre- existing fabric of dream phenomena‟ was woven accordingly. “….in my belief that this theme was not a happy accident of the imagination, but had its source and development in Coleridge‟s opium hallucination. We have seen that this dreams had already influenced Coleridge‟s poetry,and might be very likely to do it again.(Abrams,36). Similar argument has been made by critics like Althea Hyter and Elizabeth Schneider. Reading the text keeping these patterns in mind should help tracing out the glimpses of the memory of the dream world. Having habituated to opium, Coleridge was troubled with a sense of guilt, remorse, rage and shame which ended Humanity terrified nightmares that stupefied him in his waking moments. Nevertheless, he confessed that though opium darkened his days and night with horror and nightmares, it was necessary for his protection against pain.This resulted in the absence of exuberance and celebrations of chivalry demanded by Romantic tradition in his poems. 2"In the later stages of addiction, a man‟s sensibilities are so immune to all deep feelings that heis in a buried alive condition. No warmth or glow of passion or genial feeling can be aroused. Hence the poetical faculty becomes a sort of vitrifying process that chills all sensibility, whatever is done is done in pale cold strength of intellect”.(Lefebure,180) But he would eventually surrender into the habit only to be guilty of what he had subjected himself into. 3"I cannot pretend that I have not received countless warnings and for my neglectand for the habits, and all the feebleness and wastings ofthe moral will which unfit the soul for spiritual ascent,and must sink it,of moral necessity, lower and lower, ifit be essentially imperishable, my only ray of hope is this,that in my inmost he art, as far as my consciousness can sound its depths, I plead nothing but my utter and sinful helplessness and worthlessness on one side, and the infinite mercy and divine Humanityof our Creator and Redeemer crucified from the beginning of the world, on the other!” ( Letter to J H Green, 25th May, 1820) It is noticeable that the tug of war between sin and redemption in his private life is the central theme in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The surreal world of the Ancient Mariner has no place for transcendent truth and beauty, it is a world infested with a life-in-death question. Every temporal and spatial perception is lost upon the „painted ship on a painted ocean‟. The nightmarish spectre of the white faced yellow haired woman had its „icy terror‟ deeply rooted in the unconscious, a metonymy radiating the petrified whole of the poets unconscious. At this juncture, opium as a catalyst brewing out poetic inspiration comes to the light of argument. The personification of „life-in-death‟ with the yellow haired woman is a personification of the sedative, so does his fear for the sedative rests on the fact that it would lead him into a life-in- death stage literally. The preface to Kubla Khan invites not of critical responses but a look on the psychological domain that it administers. “at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity, and as far as the authors own opinions are concerned, ratheras a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits”.(1,1816) Composed from the memory of a dream after a profound sleep, the poem holds the darker side of the soul with gothic imageries and insistence to demons and savagery echoing The Ancient Mariner. The finite capital Xanadu is surrounded by walls and the river Alph runs through infinite cavern measureless to man ending up in a lifeless ocean. The suggestion to death is so strong in the first stanza that it surpasses any romantic sensibility that should have been inspired by the Eden image postulated by the city of Xanadu. Drawing the argument conducive toopium
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ISSN- 2394-5125 VOL 7, ISSUE 19, 2020 reading, Xanadu is only the tip of the iceberg. What constitutes the character and actions in the poem is a realm of the dream world shaped by the agencies from the unconscious. The paradox „measureless cavern‟ is contrasted with the river Alph, which ends up in a„lifeless ocean‟. We have now two worlds, the world of understanding and the world of imagination. The first encompasses what the conscious mind can capture; the romanticized image of the city of Xanadu, the sunny dome, the river Alph etc. What constitutes the world of imagination are the previously articulated mental or emotional setup in the poets mind: which insists that they are agencies from the unconscious.
II. CONCLUSION
As for the world of imagination, the poem holds the mysticism, exoticism and darkness of the orient as perceived by the western traditions. The idea of the orient is mixed up with a sense of fear with insistence upon a lifeless, sunless ocean. The Abyssinian maid wails for her demon lover, the waning moon is hunted down, the flashing eye of the barbarian circling his hair overhead drinks the milk of paradise. Having the fear brewed up from the milk of paradise, a phantasmal world of opium and the dark orient is established, striking a similar effect with The Ancient Mariner.In both the poems, a chain of linked up images reveal one by one. Shifting away from the typical romantic tradition, these images are ghastly, distorted and apprehensive rather than just being supernatural.With absence of warmth, glow of passion and genial feeling, it is a poetic faculty that was distorted by a sin and redemption battle to be visualized in dream induced by opium and then recorded in a later stage.
III. REFERENCES
[ 1] Abrams, M.H. The Milk of Paradise.New York:Octagon Books,1971. Web. Accessed 13th July,2020. [ 2] Coleridge, S.T. Kubla Khan, Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment. [ 3]
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