Kubla Khan Essay

Born in 1772 in Ottery. St., T.S.Coleridge lead a very disquiet smell in his early childhood. After his mystifys death he was sent to the Christs hospital school. There he had felt a great emotional vacuum, which was the start of his continuos ill health. Charles Lamb, his schoolmate, gave us an account of this period affirming that Coleridge was highly imaginative, who sought mental institution in reading old ro homosexualtic tales as well as Homer, Virgil, and Shakespeare.Perhaps the most influential period in Coleridges life was the period when he met Wordsworth in 1795, after he had left Cambridge. It seemed that in the company of Wordsworth, Coleridge found the mental peace, security, and environmental harmony. This had resulted in the sudden heyday of his genius, a sudden release of his notional impulses, and he wrote The Ancient old salt, The Christ subject, and Kubla khan.Much about the composition and subject matter of Kubla Khan can be detected from Coleridges Pre face to that verse form This fragmentise with a good deal more, not recoverable, composed, in a pattern of reverie brought on by two grains of opium taken to check a dysenteryThis fact raises the issue of the drugs effect on the poets creative imagination. Early critics assumed that there was a direct and prompt correlation between opium and imagination. In 1934 M.H. Abrams declared that the great gift of opium to men like Coleridge was to access to a pertly knowledge base as variant from this one and one which is ordinary mortal. According to Elizabeth Schneider, opium can lonesome(prenominal) work on what is already there in a mans mind and memory and if he already has a creative imagination and a decenniumdency to recall inhalations and visions. Then opium may come forward and focus his perceptions.This last interpretation seems to be the most acceptable one, because this is what truly happens to Coleridge. Before he began to dream he had been reading the following h aggle of the same substance, in Purchass Pilgrimage Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a dread tend thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed within a wall. These words, it is quite apparent, organise the background upon which opium worked, encouraging Coleridges mind for imagination.The effect opium had on Coleridges mind manifests itself while examining the structure of the poem itself. It quite obvious that the tercet stanza is entirely different from the offshoot two ones, as if was indite by a human being whereas the other earlier stanzas seem to had been written by a demon or some divine hand. Coleridge himself confesses that he couldnt revive the interrupted composition of the first two stanzas that were written under the influence of opium, and that when he returned to his writing all the rest had passed off like images on the surface of a stream. Perhaps thats why we find it a fragmentary work, filled with strange, unusual im agery, and abstracted a rational structure its rhythms suggest a mind hover between conscious and unconscious modes of being.Matter of fact Kubla Khan is dependable to different levels of interpretation. First, the poem could be approached as a descriptive poem that shares the common beautiful characteristics and techniques of most amatory poets, especially when describing natural elements. alleviate Coleridge described the founding of Kubla Khan in terms of the ancient Platonic idea of Dualism where the world of material existence is described as the world of shadows, and the world of holy persons as the elevated one.Accordingly, Kubla Khan could be regarded as a beautiful expression of the poets longing for some ultimate dish aerial combining the work of man with those of nature and those of pure imagination to renovate lost archetypal worlds within the imagination. In this way the pleasure atticd stadium that has been established in fulfillment of the orders of the Tarta r Prince can be regarded as an attempt to reach such an ideal world. Thats why the first stanza opens with a carefully constructed image of a walled garden containing incense coach trees and forests enclosing sunny spots of greenery a description that adds a paradisal spirit into the place Kubla has created. The ideal spirit and holiness of this world has been emphasized in a variety of expressions in affirming that in this stately pleasure dome did Alph, the set apart river, ranThrough caverns measureless to man polish to a sunless oceanThe sacredness of this world has been further affirmed by the fact that it is girdled round and protected from undesirable or unharmonious influences.This persuasion that has been described in the first stanza stands in contrast to the opening lines of the assist stanza where the poets But contrasts the planned classical artifact of Kubla with the romantic chasm the provenience of poetic genius and true creativityBut oh That deep romantic chasm which slantedDown the green hill athwart a cedarn coverNow the atmosphere is different the rational order of the garden has been replaced by a scene outside the walls, which is savage, wholly, and please. This natural scene is, indeed, a more perfect image of the satisfaction of oppositions in the world of imagination, thereby more eternal.In this stanza we are, also, introduced to the source of that sacred river- Alph- which is seen as symbolizing Platos theory of Dualism in terms of human beings journey through life in search for the Ideal world it flows from a mysterious source- ( gentlemans birth)- through a mazy course- (the complexities of life poetically symbolized by the mighty fountain that burst bittie stones as if breathing)- to sink tumultuously into a lifeless ocean-(the sea of death). Between birth and death Man is overwhelmed by a dream of permanence- (the shadow cast by the dome of pleasure). This very last symbol has been developed in representing the dome in dream-like terms inaccessible to ManIt was miracle of rare devise,A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of iceThats to say the dome itself- by possessing sunny weather and caves of ice- represent a reconciliation of opposites which is insufferable to human life.With the beginning of the third stanza the poem seems to take a new tern of thought. Now it gives us a vivid picture of a poet caught in a spell of poetic inspiration, who, once in a vision, cut an abyssinian maid playing on her dulcimer and singing of the wild splendor of get on with Abora.At this point the poem becomes reliable to another level of interpretation. It is a poem about poetic creation. With this consideration in mind Kubla Khan, who caused a pleasure-dome and elaborated gardens to be constructed in Xanadu, is a type of the artist whose brainy creation becomes a balanced reconciliation of the natural and artificial. Similarly the poet enters the poem- victimisation first person pronoun- in an attempt to establis h his own dome. If only, Coleridge laments, he could revive within him the maids lost symphony and tenor, if only he could recapture the whole original vision quite of just a portion of it, then he would be able to establish that dome in air so that his witnesses would declare him to be divinely inspired and form a circle of worship about him. Being filled with holy dread they would cry