"Kubla Khan" as Symbol Author(s): WARREN STEVENSON Source: Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Winter 1973), pp. 605-630 Published by: University of Texas Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40754231 Accessed: 15-11-2015 11:15 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of Texas Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Texas Studies in Literature and Language. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.184.220.23 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 11:15:23 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WARREN STEVENSON "Kubla Khan" as Symbol CRITICISM OF "KUBLA KHAN" HAS COME OF AGE ONLY DURING THE pastdecade or so. This is owingpartly to thepoem's inner compactness and subtlety,and partlyto thebizarre circumstances which, according to Coleridge'sprefatory note publishedwith the poem in 1816, sur- roundedthe poem's composition. Too longto be quotedin itsentirety, theprefatory note is in theform of an apologyin whichthe poet says he has been prevailedupon to publishthe "fragment,"and has done so "ratheras a psychologicalcuriosity, than on theground of any supposed poeticmerits." The defensivetone has to do withColeridge's constitu- tionaldiffidence where his own best poetry was concerned,rather than withobjective self-criticism. As such, it maybe largelydiscounted. The notegoes on to ascribecomposition of the poem to thesummer of 1797 in "a lonelyfarm-house between Porlock and Linton,on the Exmoorconfines of Somersetand Devonshire,"where the author had retiredon accountof ill health,and wherehe fellasleep from the effects of an "anodyne,"while reading the account in Purchashis Pilgrimage of the constructionof a palace and surroundinggardens by Kubla Khan,the Mongol ruler of thirteenth-century China. There followed "a profoundsleep, at leastof the external senses," lasting about three hours, duringwhich the poet "has themost vivid confidence, that he couldnot havecomposed less than from two to threehundred lines." Upon awak- eninghe wrotedown the fifty-fourlines we have,whereupon he was interruptedby a "personon businessfrom Porlock," with the result thathe was never able to remember the rest of the poem. For overa centurythis account of thepoem's genesis was takenat facevalue, and readerswho should have known better were lulled - one mightalmost say "conned" - intoregarding it as a beautifulbut mean- inglessfragment, thus incidentally discovering a new literarygenre. Herematters stood when Lowes wrote The Road toXanadu ( 1927) , in the latterpart of whichhe appliedto "Kubla Khan" the same tech- niquesof source-huntingthat had been so brilliantlysuccessful with "The AncientMariner" in the firstpart. On the premisethat "The AncientMariner" and "Kubla Khan" are "builtof essentially the same materials,"Lowes extended our knowledgeof thepoem's sources. But Texas Studiesin Literatureand Language XIV.4 (Winter,1973) This content downloaded from 128.184.220.23 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 11:15:23 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 6θ6 WARRENSTEVENSON like his predecessors,Lowes acceptedColeridge's prefatory note un- critically,and lamelyconcluded that "Kubla Khan" is an aimless pageant.1 The firstbook successfully to broachthe poem's inner meaning was Maud Bodkin'sArchetypal Patterns in Poetry(London, 1934), witha Jungianreading which recognized that the poem is structuredupon the archetypesof heavenand hell.Next came Knight'sThe StarlitDome, whichproposed a symbolicreading of the poem involvingFreudian elementsin thedescription of the landscape. According to Knight,the sacredriver, which "runs into an infinityof death," is "a symbolof life." "As forKubla Khan himself... he becomesGod: or at leastone of those'huge and mightyforms' ... in Wordsworth.. Comparethe two levelsof meaningin The Tempest,where Prospero performs a some- whatsimilar role ... or Yeats'semperor in Byzantium,"Knight also usefullyobserves that "The dome'sshadow falls half-way along the river. [The dome]is directlyassociated with the 'mingled measure' ofthe sounds coming from the two extremes The 'mingledmeasure' suggeststhe blend and marriageof fundamentalopposites: life and death,or creationand destruction.These 'mingle' under the shadow of thegreater harmony of the crowning dome-circle." Knight concludes: "The poemhas a barbaricand orientalmagnificence that asserts itself witha happypower and authenticitytoo oftenabsent from visionary poemsset within the Christiantradition."2 The poem'srelation to the Christiantradition is a matterto whichI shallreturn. Meanwhile, one maysafely observe that, in commonwith "The AncientMariner" and "Christabel,""Kubla Khan" has itssetting, for the most part, in the laterMiddle Ages. Scholarshipwas notlong in catchingup withand vindicatingcriti- cism.The discoveryin 1934 of the CreweMS of the poem in Cole- ridge'shandwriting, with its minor but significant variations from the publishedversion and itsindependent account of how thepoem came to be written,freed criticism once and forall fromthe incubus of Cole- ridge's1816 pieceof prefatory exotica, which, we are nowbeginning to realize,is bestregarded as an imaginativeadjunct to thepoem,3 like the proseglossary added to "The AncientMariner" in SibyllineLeaves, or Shelley'spreface to "Epipsychidion."The Crewenote, which follows 1 JohnL. Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Studyof the Ways of the Imagina- tion(London, 1951: 1stpub. 1927), pp. 410, 412. 2 G. WilsonKnight, The StarlitDome: Studiesin thePoetry of Vision (London, Toronto,and New York,1941 ) , pp. 91-97. 3 bee Irene (Jhayes, Kubla Khan and the CreativeFrocess, Studies m Ro- manticism,!(1966), 1-21. This content downloaded from 128.184.220.23 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 11:15:23 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions "Kubla Khan33as Symbol 607 ratherthan precedesthe textof the poem,reads much morelike a sober,factual account of the poem's genesis : Thisfragment with a gooddeal more, not recoverable, composed in a sort ofReverie brought on bytwo grains of Opium, taken to checka dysentery, at a FarmHouse betweenPorlock & Linton,a quarterof a milefrom GulboneChurch, in thefall of the year 1797. s. t. goleridge.4 ElisabethSchneider, working with this and otherevidence relating to the effectsof opium,has establishedbeyond serious doubt that Cole- ridgedid notcompose the poem in an opiumdream : "Verylikely Cole- ridgewas in a sortof 'Reverie' as hisholograph note says, and no doubt he had been takingopium. Perhaps too the euphoriceffect of opium renderedhis process of composition more nearly effortless than usual."5 One recallsthat the second part of "Christabel" was begun the morning afterColeridge had consumeda considerablequantity of wine. Returningnow to theproblem of thepoem's "meaning" : criticism duringthe past two decadeshas consistedlargely of refinementand elaborationof the symbolical exegesis of Bodkin and Knight,with some disagreementas to the role of the Khan, the natureof the poem's "unity"(though on thispoint there is moreagreement than disagree- ment),and the tone (hence,the meaning)of certainpassages, most notablythe conclusion. In 1951 an influentialarticle R. H. entitled"The appeared " by Fogle RomanticUnity of 'Kubla Khan.' Continuingwhere Knight left off, Fogle sees the poem as embodyinga Coleridgean"reconciliation of oppositeor discordantqualities" accomplished by the Imagination. Accordingto Fogle,the pleasure-dome is thefocal point of the physical setting and is correspondinglyimportant. Withinthe bounds of the encircledgarden, the pleasure-dome and the riverare theopposites to be reconciled.. The imageof thedome sug- gestsagreeable sensations of roundnessand smoothness;the creationof Man,its quasi-geometrical shape is simpler than the forms of Nature which surroundit, yet blends with them. This dome,however, also evokesthe religious- it is in somesort a temple,if onlyto themere mortal Kubla Khan.And thus there is alsoa blendingor interfusion with its opposite, the sacredriver Alph. The pleasure-dome... is aboveand beyondNature, a 'miracleof rare device'in whichMan transcendsand circumventsmere natural processes. It standsamid an enormousgarden in whicha considerablesegment of wildnature is isolated and imprisoned for the delight of Kubla.6 4 Brit.Mus. Add. MS 50,847. 5 " "The Dream of 'Kubla Khan/ PMLA, 60 ( 796. 6 " 1945), "The RomanticUnity of cKubla Khan,' College English,13 (1951), 13-18. This content downloaded from 128.184.220.23 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 11:15:23 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 6θ8 WARRENSTEVENSON I have quoted Fogle at lengthbecause his remarksare a salutary correctiveto the view sometimesexpressed, that Kubla is a typical eighteenth-centuryman of reason,trying to imposehis rationalorder upon a recalcitrantlandscape.7 About all thatneeds to be said of this viewis thatif Kubla's aim was to imposea rationalorder upon nature, and towall out all theintractable and irrationalelements, he hasneither chosennor built very well. Rather, the poem emphasizes the fusion of oppositeswithin both the natural and humanorders, and thelandscape ofthe