Kubla Khan Essay Example for Free

Kubla caravansary EssayBorn in 1772 in Ottery. St., T.S.Coleridge lead a very disquiet life in his early childhood. After his fathers expiration he was sent to the Christs infirmary school. There he had felt a great emotional vacuum, which was the beginning of his continuos ill health. Charles Lamb, his schoolmate, gave us an score of this period affirming that Coleridge was highly imaginative, who sought refuge in reading old ro universetic tales as comfortably 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 jerky flowering of his title-holder, a sudden release of his creative impulses, and he wrote The Ancient Mariner, The Christable, and Kubla Khan.Much about the makeup and subject matter of Kubla Khan can be detected from Coleridges Preface to that metrical composition This fragment with a good deal more, not recoverable, composed, in a sort of reverie brought on by twain grains of opium taken to check a dysenteryThis fact raises the issue of the drugs order on the poets creative imagination. Early critics fancied that there was a direct and immediate correlation between opium and imagination. In 1934 M.H. Abrams declared that the great pass on of opium to men like Coleridge was to access to a new world as diverse from this nonpareil and one which is ordinary mortal. According to Elizabeth Schneider, opium can only work on what is already there in a mans judgement and memory and if he already has a creative imagination and a tendency to ring dreams and visions. Then opium may intensify and focus his perceptions.This tolerate interpretation seems to be the most acceptable one, because this is what unfeignedly happens to Coleridge. Before he began to dream he had been reading the fol lowing words of the same substance, in Purchass transit Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile g bit were inclosed within a w wholly. These words, it is quite apparent, formed 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 third stanza is entirely different from the first two ones, as if was written by a human being whereas the other anterior stanzas seem to had been written by a demon or some divine hand. Coleridge himself confesses that he couldnt resort 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 away like images on the surface of a stream. Perhaps thats why we find it a fragmentary work, filled with strange, unusual imagery, and lacking a rational structure its rhythms suggest a mind vacillating between conscious and unconscious modes of being.Matter of fact Kubla Khan is reliable 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 romantic poets, peculiarly when describing natural elements. Still Coleridge described the world of Kubla Khan in terms of the ancient Platonic bringing close together of Dualism where the world of material existence is described as the world of shadows, and the world of Ideals as the elevated one.Accordingly, Kubla Khan could be regarded as a beautiful expression of the poets longing for some ultimate beauty cartel the work of man with those of nature and those of pure imagination to resurrect lost archetypal worlds within the imagination. In this way the pleasure dome that has been established in fulfillment of the orders of the Tartar 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 bearing 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 sacred river, ranThrough caverns measureless to manDown to a sunless seaThe sacredness of this world has been further affirmed by the fact that it is girdled round and protected from undesirable or unharmonious influences.This scene that has been described in the first stanza stands in air to the opening lines of the second stanza where the poets But contrasts the planned classical artifact of Kubla with the romantic chasm the birthplace of poetic genius and true creativityBut oh That deep romantic chasm which slantedDown the green hill sideways 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 enchanted. This natural scene is, indeed, a more perfect symbol of the rapprochement 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 possibleness of Dualism in terms of Mans journey through life in search for the Ideal world it flows from a mysterious source- (Mans birth)- through a mazy course- (the complexities of life poetically symbolized by the mighty fountain that belch small 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 atonement of opposites which is impossible 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, saw an abyssinian maid playing on her dulcimer and singing of the wild splendor of mount Abora.At this point the poem becomes reliable to another level of interpretation. It is a poem about poetic creation. With this servant in mind Kubla Khan, who caused a pleasure-dome and elaborated gardens to be constructed in Xanadu, is a type of the artist whose empyrean creation becomes a balanced reconciliation of the natural and artificial. Similarly the poet enters the poem- using first person pronoun- in an attempt to establish his own dome. If only, Coleridge laments, he could revive within him the maids lost symphony and song, if only he could recapture the whole original vision instead 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 around him. Being filled with holy savvy they would cry