DOCSLIB.ORG

Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772 Kubla Khan By Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772–1834 Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment. Of the Fragment of Kubla Khan2 [147] The following fragment3 is here published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity,4 and, as far as the Author's own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits. In the summer of the year 1797,5 the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne6 had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in "Purchas's Pilgrimage":7 "Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall." The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep,8 at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to 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 [148] 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 here 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 passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter! Then all the charm Is broken -- all that phantom-world so fair Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread, And each mis-shape's the other. Stay awhile, Poor youth! who scarcely dar'st lift up thine eyes-- 1 The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon The visions will return! And lo, he stays, And soon the fragments dim of lovely forms Come trembling back, unite, and now once more The pool becomes a mirror.9 Yet from the still surviving recollections in his mind, the Author has frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as it were, given to him. Sameron [h]adion asô:10 but the to-morrow is yet to come. As a contrast to this vison, I have annexed a fragment of a very different character, describing with equal fidelity the dream of pain and disease.11 (CPW i 295-7) Notes [Click on asterisk (*) at the end of a note to return to the point you left in Coleridge's text] 1. In 1934 the Marquis of Crewe loaned a manuscript copy of Kubla Khan to the National Portrait Gallery in London for a centenary exhibition commemorating Coleridge and Lamb. The manuscript, previously unknown to scholars, was in fact an autograph in STC's handwriting. Since its disclosure in 1934, the Crewe Manuscript (as it has come to be known) has very seriously affected critical assessment of [149] Kubla Khanfor two reasons: first, it contains a number of variants, some of which are extremely significant, not present in the poem as published in 1816 or thereafter (cf. Extract 3 nn); secondly, it gives a very different and much shorter account than the 1816 Preface of the date and circumstances of the composition of Kubla Khan: "This fragment with a good deal more, not recoverable, composed, in a sort of Reverie brought on by two grains of Opium, taken to check a dysentery, at a Farm House between Porlock and Linton, a quarter of a mile from Culbone Church, in the fall of the year, 1797". It needs to be added that this statement appears as a postscript to the poem in the Crewe Manuscript and not, as in 1816, as a preface introducing it. A number of scholars have described and discussed the textual variants in the Crewe Manuscript; in addition to Chapter 3 of my Coleridge Companion, see the following: A.D. Snyder, "The Manuscript of Kubla Khan," TLS (2 August 1934) 541; E.H.W. Meyerstein, "A Manuscript ofKubla Khan," TLS (12 January 1951) 21; J. Shelton, "The Autograph Manuscript of Kubla Khan and an Interpretation," REL 7 (1966) 30-42. 2 In the 1834 edition of STC's poems the title reads: "KUBLA KHAN: Or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment." * 2. The issue of whether or not Kubla Khan is a fragment has been often raised: see, for example, Lowes (1930) 363, 409; House (1953) 114- 16;Beer (1959) 275; Schulz (1963) 114. Since the disclosure of the Crewe Manuscript, the relevance and value of the 1816 Preface have been hotly (sometimes acrimoniously) disputed. Lowes (1930) took the Preface at face value, but he was writing before the Crewe Manuscript came to light. Beer, however, writing in 1959 argues that, although the prefatory account "has sometimes been criticized, in substance or in detail," it yet remains true that "the accumulation of various pieces of evidence has tended to confirm many features of it" (200). Bostetter (1963), on the other hand, sees the Preface as "one of [STC's] apologies for uncompleted work" (85); and W.U. Ober summarily dismisses it as a "Coleridgean hoax, albeit a harmless one" ("Southey, Coleridge, and Kubla Khan," JEGP 58 [1959] 414). In a more positive vein, Chayes (1966) argues that "the 1816 headnote to Kubla Khan is . largely a prose imitation of the poem it introduces, also serving in part as argument and gloss" (4). * 3. In the spring of 1816 STC had recited Kubla Khan to Lord Byron, who shortly thereafter (through the agency of the publisher John Murray) offered him 80 pounds for Christabel and 20 pounds for Kubla Khan; these two poems, together with The Pains of Sleep, were published by Murray towards the end of May 1816. * 4. On the date of Kubla Khan, see Extract 3, n 1. * [150] 5. As we know from the Crewe Manuscript, the anodyne was "two grains of Opium": cf. n 1 above. For the possible effects of opium on Kubla Khan, see chapter 3 of my Coleridge Companion and the following: M.H. Abrams, The Milk of Paradise: The Effect of Opium Visions on the Works of DeQuincey, Crabbe, Francis Thompson, and Coleridge (London: Milford, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1934); Schneider (1953) esp. 21-109; Hayter (1968) 214-24. * 6. For Purchas's exact words, see Extract 3, n 4. * 7. The disparity between "a sort of Reverie" (Crewe MS) and a vision occurring during "a profound sleep" (1816 Preface) is an important critical crux, and is discussed by many of the critics listed in nn 3 and 6 above, as well as those listed in Extract 3, n 1. * 8. Lines 91-100 of STC's The Picture; or, The Lover's Resolution (1802): CPW i 372. * 3 9. sameron hadion aisô: "Today I'll sing a sweeter song". The error was corrected in the 1834 edition, when sameron was altered to aurion: Aurion hadion aisô, i.e. "Tomorrow I'll sing a sweeter song". (Variant of Theocritus, Idylls i 145: Chairet', egô d' hummin kai es husteron hadion aisô, "Farewell, and I'll sing you even a sweeter song tomorrow".) * 10. I.e. The Pains of Sleep (cf. n 4 above), a poem describing the nightmares brought on by opium. * In Xanadu did Kubla Khan2 A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. ................................................ 5 So twice five3 miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round:4 And there5 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.6 But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted7 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,8 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:9 And 'mid this tumult Kubla10 heard from far 4 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!11 A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: [32] It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, ....................................
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Kubla Khan" Page 1 of 7
    Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" Page 1 of 7 Home | Current Issue | Editorial Board | Instructions for Authors | Contact Lethbridge Undergraduate Research Journal ISSN 1718-8482 Disclaimer: The work represented here is entirely the creation of the author. The L.U.R.J. does not in any way endorse the correctness of this article. Coleridge's "Kubla Khan": Creation of Genius or Addiction? Karen Mahar University of Lethbridge Lethbridge Alberta Canada Citation: Karen Mahar: Coleridge's "Kubla Khan": Creation of Genius or Addiction?. Lethbridge Undergraduate Research Journal. 2006. Volume 1 Number 1. In a 1950s study, an artist injected with a hallucinogen was asked to sketch pictures at various intervals throughout his high. Not only did his behavior deteriorate, but the style of the pictures he completed under the influence was completely different from his normal oeuvre. Although these works could probably still be considered “art,” their difference from his “natural” work raises an important question about their value and the genuineness of their authorship (“Acid Trip” 1, 1-9). A similar question might be posed about Samuel Taylor Coleridge's “Kubla Khan”: it is undoubtedly an excellent poem, but unique in his oeuvre, and created by a very different Coleridge indeed. Coleridge was a literary genius and a chief Romantic poet and theorist. His most famous poems—”Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Christabel,” and “Kubla Khan”—combine an element of fantasy with lyric genius, and have endured for over two centuries, providing testament to the poet's exceptional abilities. “Kubla Khan,” arguably his most anthologized poem, however, reflects a vision and style not consistent with Coleridge's other fantastical work.
    [Show full text]
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge John Spalding Gatton University of Kentucky
    The Kentucky Review Volume 4 Number 1 This issue is devoted to a catalog of an Article 6 exhibition from the W. Hugh Peal Collection in the University of Kentucky Libraries. 1982 Catalog of the Peal Exhibition: Samuel Taylor Coleridge John Spalding Gatton University of Kentucky Follow this and additional works at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kentucky-review Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Right click to open a feedback form in a new tab to let us know how this document benefits you. Recommended Citation Gatton, John Spalding (1982) "Catalog of the Peal Exhibition: Samuel Taylor Coleridge," The Kentucky Review: Vol. 4 : No. 1 , Article 6. Available at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kentucky-review/vol4/iss1/6 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the University of Kentucky Libraries at UKnowledge. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Kentucky Review by an authorized editor of UKnowledge. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Samuel Taylor Coleridge Gc car un1 To brc de~ In Wordsworth's judgment, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was "the most wonderful man" he ever met. Endowed with one of So1 the most brilliant and complex minds of his day, he would, like bUJ Chaucer's parson, "gladly .. learn, and gladly teach." If he an< squandered a wealth of thought in correspondence and wh conversation, and left unfinished or merely projected major poems, Rh lectures, and systematic expositions of his philosophical tenets, his pre critical theories, and his theology, he nevertheless produced a vast So1 and impressive array of poetry, prose, and criticism.
    [Show full text]
  • Imaginative Transference in Coleridge's Poetry
    W&M ScholarWorks Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 1984 Imaginative Transference in Coleridge's Poetry Kevin Coakley-Welch College of William & Mary - Arts & Sciences Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Coakley-Welch, Kevin, "Imaginative Transference in Coleridge's Poetry" (1984). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. Paper 1539625263. https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-nt8g-yn85 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. IMAGINATIVE TRANSFERENCE il IN COLERIDGE’S POETRY A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Department of English The College of William and Mary in Virginia In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts fey Kevin Coakley-Welch 1984 APPROVAL SHEET This thesis is submitted in partial fulfillment the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Author Approved, June 1980 vatu. < < . c . u r Nathaniel Y. Elliott Wayne ¥/. Glausser / ■/ Terry Meyers 7 ABSTRACT The purpose of this thesis is to trace the use of a poetic technique labeled "imaginative transference” in a series of poems written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Imaginative transference is identified as that process through which Coleridge, appearing as a character in each of the poems, transfers emotions or perceptions from himself to another chosen character in the same poem.
    [Show full text]
  • Kubla Khan: S.T
    Kubla Khan: S.T. Coleridge The Poet and His Poetry Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was not only a major Romantic poet, but he was also the foremost philosopher and literary critic of his age. His poetic output is erratic in comparison to Wordsworth‟s, but his contribution to English literary history also includes his literary criticism and his lively discussion of the ideas of the German Idealist philosophers, particularly Immanuel Kant. His theory regarding the cognitive and synthesising role of the imagination is one of the most important cornerstones of the Romantic Movement. John Stuart Mill summed up his influence on the age when he called Coleridge a “seminal mind”. Birth and the early years Comment [U1]: Uniformly bullet these sub-units Coleridge was born at Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, on October 21, 1772, the youngest son of John Coleridge, vicar, and Ann Bowdon, his second wife. A precocious boy, dreamy and introspective, he finished the Bible and the Arabian Nights before he was five. At ten, following the death of his father, he was sent to Christ‟s Hospital, London, as a charity boy. Though poor and neglected, he became an accomplished Greek and Latin Scholar. Here he met Charles Lamb. It was the first of many significant literary friendships. He entered Jesus College, Cambridge on a scholarship in 1791; but in spite of a brilliant career in classics, he finally left the college in 1794, without taking a degree. At University, he was interested in the radical political and religious ideas of his day. He had already been attracted by the motto of the French Revolution and Jacobin politics, though later he dismissed it as a youthful folly.
    [Show full text]
  • Kubla Khan” and Later Texts: Inspiration, Agency, and Interruption
    Connotations Vol. 16.1-3 (2006/2007) The Person from Porlock in “Kubla Khan” and Later Texts: Inspiration, Agency, and Interruption LAURA M. WHITE Of late, literary criticism has focused on the socio-cultural agency of artistic production, writing in the material elided by the classical tradition of the Muse on the one hand and the Romantic figure of the autonomous genius on the other. We no longer read inspiration by the light of the Muse’s presence, or by the wan light cast by the candle in Chatterton’s garret; “inspiration” as a concept has come to seem an illusion that covers up the full story of the processes by which art comes into being, in which artists respond to large currents within their culture. Thus, older ideas about inspiration have been overshad- owed by a focus on artistic production as a complex series of negotia- tions between an artist and his or her culture, a turn much at odds with twenty-four centuries of thought about inspiration in the Western tradition. The gap between current explanations and those of the past reveal a central problem in aesthetics—how is art really created? Coleridge’s 1816 “Kubla Khan,” with its accompanying narrative about how the poem came into being and how its writing was prematurely stopped by a knock on the door, offers a figure that represents the cessation of inspiration: the person from Porlock. The person from Porlock stands for the interruption of inspiration, and this figure’s popularity in many subsequent narratives by authors writing in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries shows that the issue of inspiration and its agency continues to vex our collective imagination.
    [Show full text]
  • The Kubla Khan Manuscript and Its First Collector
    THE KUBLA KHAN MANUSCRIPT AND ITS FIRST COLLECTOR HILTON KELLIHER COLERIDGE'S Kubla Khan, Or, A Vision in a Dream, first printed with Christabel The Pains of-Sleep in 1816, has long been regarded as one of the great literary icons of the Romantic movement. Coleridge's famous account of its conception in the summer or autumn of 1797 - the lonely Exmoor farmhouse, the effects of an 'anodyne', and the poetical reverie interrupted by the arrival of 'a person on business from Porlock'- contributed in no small measure to the hypnotic sway that it has always exercised over the imagination of its readers. Awe and wonderment were, if anything, only increased by the researches of J. L. Lowes and others into its sources, which proved to have stretched far beyond the simple sentence in Purchas his Pilgrimage that was allegedly the immediate inspiration.^ Yet these fifty-four verses were, the author later insisted, merely 'A Fragment'' rescued from a broken trance in which images, rising up before him 'as things', had shaped themselves into a poem of two or three hundred lines. Some scholars have been sceptical, seeing in Coleridge's insistence on the dream-origins of the poem a mere fiction masking his inability to complete it, though this line of argument is nowadays little regarded. Rather surprisingly for an author who left such a mass of papers behind him, the only manuscript text of the poem that is known to survive is the autograph fair copy publicly displayed for many years now in the British Library galleries.^ This first came to the notice of scholars in 1934, and was acquired for the nation in 1962 from the widow of the Marquess of Crewe who had inherited it from his father, the bibliophile Richard Monckton Milnes (1809-85), first Baron Houghton.^ Milnes had bought it at auction at Puttick and Simpson's premises in Leicester Square on 28 April 1859, where it was lot 109 (fig.
    [Show full text]
  • Kubla Khan': the Poet in the Poem
    SYDNEY STUDIES 'Kubla Khan': The Poet in the Poem GEOFFREY LITTLE For many readers 'Kubla Khan: or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment' (the full title is important) has offered indulgence in a magical mystery tour ofexotic places and erotic imagery which, like such tours, leads nowhere. Others have found enticing symbolic equations, sometimes abandoned as unresolvable; and others again have discovered in the poem verbal clues which may be assembled in a variety of solutions, much as anagrams, puns and incomplete quotations may be made to fit into a multiple crossword puzzle. One strong tradition of readers to find the poem marvellous but meaningless begins with Lamb and Hazlitt. Lamb thought it 'irradiates and brings heaven and Elysian bowers into my parlour while he sings or. says it' (the picture of Coleridge singing the poem, with or without dulcimer, has its own charm) but that it made no sense. 1 Hazlitt remarked that it proved Coleridge was one of the best writers of nonsense poems in English.2 It is not far from those contemporary responses to characterizing the poem as merely the product ofopium; or, indeed, as an unwritten poem. T. S. Eliotsaid acidly that 'faith in mystical inspiration is responsible for the exaggerated repute of Kubla Khan'; however its im~gery sank in and then rose from Coleridge's consciousness, 'it is not used: the poem has not been written,.3 A recent critic has been still more contemptuous; for her, the mounting final lines are 'a total non sequitur . .. a small masterpiece of confidence trickery' in a poem which may well have started in the romantic habit of ballad­ mongering for money, or 'piss a canto'.4 The solutions of other critics, following more or less Peacock's blithely confident 'simplex et unum from first to last',5 have varied widely.
    [Show full text]
  • A Political Reading of S. T. Coleridge's the Raven
    International Journal of Education and Research Vol. 2 No. 7 July 2014 A Political Reading of S. T. Coleridge's The Raven Marjan Amrollahi (Corresponding Author) Department of English, Vali-e Asr University of Rafsanjan, Kerman, Iran E-mail:[email protected] Dr. Anita Lashkarian Department of English, Maybod Branch, Islamic Azad University, Yazd, Iran E-mail: [email protected] Abstract: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) is famous as the English poet who wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) and Kubla Khan (1816) but today is almost forgotten as one of the greatest political thinkers of his time. His political orientation can be traced in many of his poems, political pamphlets and journalistic writings. Many of his poems such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan are studied from a political point of view but the contribution of Coleridge's political beliefs to the poem The Raven has not been studied. Although a few studies have been done on this poem, it has been neglected to a great extent by scholars. This study tends to explore the symbolism manifested in The Raven in order to illustrate the political dimensions implicit in this poem. Certainly 'The Raven' has none of the political allusions and this has led most critics to concur that the poem exhibits a total lack of politics. Yet given the circumstances which gave rise to 'The Raven" as a political poem, is the very absence of political content which is itself political. Key Words: Samuel Taylor Coleridge; The Raven; Political Poetry; Symbolism 149 ISSN: 2201-6333 (Print) ISSN: 2201-6740 (Online) www.ijern.com 1.
    [Show full text]
  • Opium in Nineteenth-Century England
    Bridgewater State University Virtual Commons - Bridgewater State University Honors Program Theses and Projects Undergraduate Honors Program 5-14-2020 Opium in Nineteenth-Century England Hannah Hutchinson Bridgewater State University Follow this and additional works at: https://vc.bridgew.edu/honors_proj Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Hutchinson, Hannah. (2020). Opium in Nineteenth-Century England. In BSU Honors Program Theses and Projects. Item 332. Available at: https://vc.bridgew.edu/honors_proj/332 Copyright © 2020 Hannah Hutchinson This item is available as part of Virtual Commons, the open-access institutional repository of Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Opium in Nineteenth-Century England Hannah Angelina Hutchinson Submitted in Partial Completion of the Requirements for Departmental Honors in History Bridgewater State University May 14, 2020 Dr. Sarah Wiggins, Thesis Advisor Dr. Erin E. O’Connor, Committee Member Dr. Paul Rubinson, Committee Member Hutchinson 1 Over the course of nineteenth-century England, opiate use and the attitudes towards its use shifted and changed. Opium and the consumption of opiates stems back thousands of years and has been utilized in countless ways. Opium has always existed and has always played an effective role in society. Whether for enjoyment or pain relief, for pleasure or for pain, opiates remained a key player in society all over the world. The study of the history of drug use in nineteenth-century England is important because it adds a vital perspective into the changing attitudes towards opium. Many of the changes that happened physically to opium in the nineteenth century and the attitudes towards it have great effect on the meaning and reception of opium today.
    [Show full text]
  • Coleridge and Opium Reverie
    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.
    [Show full text]
  • Kubla Khan Samuel Taylor Coleridge
    Kubla Khan Samuel Taylor Coleridge background Coleridge wrote “Kubla Khan” in 1797 after taking opium prescribed to relieve pain. Affected by the powerful narcotic, he fell into a deep sleep while reading about the 13th-century Mongol emperor Kublai Khan. In his sleep, he composed 200 to 300 lines based on fantastic images that rose up as he dreamed. Awakening hours later, Coleridge began to write the poem down, but a visitor interrupted him, and later Coleridge could not recall the rest of the lines. He called the poem “a fragment” and “a vision in a dream.” In Xanadu did Kubla Khan 1 Xanadu (zBnPE-dLQ): Shangdu, one A stately pleasure dome decree: of Kublai Khan’s residences in what is now northern China. Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man 5 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, 8 sinuous rills: winding streams. Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; 10 And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. a a SOUND DEVICES Read lines 1–11 aloud. What sound devices do you notice, and what mood do they help create? But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! 13 athwart a cedarn cover: across a A savage place! as holy and enchanted grove of cedar trees. 15 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: 19 momently: at every moment.
    [Show full text]
  • Romanticism and Orientalism: Orientalizing the Orient in Romantic Poetry
    ROMANTICISM AND ORIENTALISM: ORIENTALIZING THE ORIENT IN ROMANTIC POETRY A Thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree Master of Arts In English: Literature by Parminder Kaur Johal San Francisco, California August 2018 Copyright by Parminder Kaur Johal 2018 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL I certify that I have read Romanticism and Orientalism: Orientalizing the Orient in Romantic Poetry by Parminder Kaur Johal, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thes’s submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Arts in English: Literature at San Francisco State University. -------------------- Wai-Leung Kwok, Ph.D. Associate Professor of English Lawrence Hanley, Ph.D. Professor of English ROMANTICISM AND ORIENTALISM: ORIENTALIZING THE ORIENT IN ROMANTIC POETRY Parminder Kaur Johal San Francisco, California 2018 This thesis examines Eastern representations in the works of Romantic poets that contributed to Orientalism. Even though there were many provocateurs that fueled stereotypes of the East, my study hones in on the poems Dy Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Through a literary analysis of Coleridge's Kubla Khan and Sheliey’s Ozymandias, efforts are made to reach the conclusion whether Coleridge and Shelley misrepresent the Orient. 1 argue that the works of these highly celebrated poets adhere to the underlying stereotypes popular during the Romantic Era, thus raising issue with the reliability—or raiher unrenai'-liiy—of their works. In addition to analyzing representations, I examine travel literature within the cultural and historical context of their lives to better understand influences that shaped their perspectives and informed their writing.
    [Show full text]