2nd
SEM English Honours,
CEH 4 British Romantic Literature
A critical appreciation
of Kubla Khan:
Kubla Khan: or A
Vision in a Dream: A Fragment is a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
published in 1816. Modern critics view Kublan Khan as one of the
three great works of Coleridge including Rime of the Ancient Mariner and
Christable. It is one og the most famous example of Romanticism in English
poetry. The poet himself in his preface to the Kubla Khan comments that “ if
that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before
him as things, with a parallel production of correspondent expressions without
any expressions with any sensation or conscious effort.”
According
to Coleridge’s preface to Kubla Khan, the poem was composed one night after he
experienced an opium-influenced dream after reading a work describing Xanadu,
the summer palace of the Mongol ruler Kubla Khan. Upon waking, he set about
writing lines of poetry that came to him from the dream unti he was interrupted
by a person from Porlock. The story of poem’s composition, while thematically
rich in and itself, often overshadows the poem, but with Coleridge’s mastery
over expression and images infused, the poem shines out.
The
major themes of the poem are creative power of imagination, man and the natural
world, and time. The “pleasure-dome in air” is an instance of power of
imagination. The interaction between man and nature is all over “Kubla Khan” as
we go from the dome to the river and then from the garden to sea. Time is
another important theme which raises the question: Is Coleridge recalling the
Kubla Khan of the past, or someone who transcends our linear notion of time?.
The chant like musical incantation of Kubla
Khan results from Coleridge’s use of iambic tetrameter and alternating rhyme
schemes of ABAABCCDEDE. There is variation of rhyming schemes in each stanza.The
first three stanzas are product of pure imagination: the pleasure-dome in the
poem is a metaphor for the unbuilt monument of imagination. After the second
stanza the meter suddenly tightens: the resulting lines are terse and solid,
almost beating out sound of the war drums,
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves
The fourth stanza starts the theme of
the poem as a whole though the poem exists only as a fragment. The speaker says
that he once had a vision of the damsel singing of Mount Abora. He insists that
if he could only “revive” within him “her symphony and song”, he would manifest
itself in his “flashing eyes” and “floating hair”. But, awestruck, they would
nonetheless dutifully take part in the ritual recognising that “he on honey-dew
hath fed,/ And drunk the milk of Paradise.”
The pleasure-dome , the river Alph,
mighty fountain, mazy motion, tumult, ancestral voices and mingled measure are
the major symbols in the poem. The pleasure dome symbolises immortality and
majesty, the river Alph is a symbol of life and force. The ceaseless turmoil of
the earth, the fountain forced out with half intermitten burst, the fragments
rebounding like hail and the dancing rocks represent agony and power. The mazy
motion suggests uncertain and blind progress of the human soul and the
complexities of human life. The tumult is associated with war, the ancestral
voices stand for that dark compulsion that bind the race to its habitual
conflicts. The mingled measure suggests the blend of fundamental opposities,
creation and destruction.
