Now that I've got your attention, let’s talk about a dead poet and a 200-year
old poem. First, introductions are
probably in order. The man in question
is Samuel Taylor Coleridge (famous for that classic shaggy dog joke, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner) and the
poem is, as Mr. Coleridge himself described it, “a mere fragment,” called
Kubla Khan.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree;
One nice feature of this poem is its brevity… a mere twelve run-on sentences. Nothing else in history as short as this poem, except perhaps Napoleon,
has had so many things said, written about, or spat upon it with such ferocity.
Since the day it was first published, everyone has had something to
say, for good or evil, about it. Given all the films, paintings, and songs this
poem has inspired over the years, one would think it contains more passion,
creativity, and inspiration than all the great works of the western world
combined… and perhaps it does. But,
in spite of that, it’s still a pretty scrawny little poem.
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
When Kubla Khan was first printed
in 1816, it spawned powerful emotions deep within the hearts of those who
read it, and as if with one voice, they all responded to it with a resounding:
“What the hell is this?” In 1817 the
Monthly Review said, “The poem itself is
below criticism,” and in 1828 the London
Weekly Review said, “We cannot name one considerable poem of his that
is likely to remain on the thresh-floor of fame.”
Due to the early reviewers’ relative inexperience with this unique
new style of poetry, there were very few worthwhile interpretations given
of the poem… actually there were none. Today,
however, with years of academic analysis behind us, we have made Sherlock-Holmesian
strides towards unraveling this puzzling piece. We still don’t have a clue what it is about,
but we now know that it’s a really neat poem.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
If you have already discovered the poem (I hid it, cleverly, in the text)
then by now you must be thinking that it is about something.
I’m going to warn you, however, that I have already read it a few times
and I’m not sure that it is. Luckily
for both of us, no one else seems to know much more about it, either.
“What?” you ask. “If no one
can honestly say for sure what this thing is about, wouldn’t that be the same
as if Mr. Coleridge just made up a whole bunch of strange words and just…
just threw them on a page?” Most critics
would have to hang their heads in shame and admit that this is a very real
possibility—but I would never admit to such ignorance!
Instead, I’m just going to make up a bunch of cool stuff about the
poem (some of it might even be true) and, hopefully, something will grab your
interest, and you’ll be forced to learn more about it on your own.
And there were gardens bright with sinuous
rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree:
One thing we do know about this composition is when it was written… well,
we know when Coleridge said he wrote it. When it was first published (1816, remember?)
Coleridge scrawled a short preface where he claimed that it was written “in
the summer of the year 1797.” Some
time later he gave the correct time as, “the fall of the year 1797.”
I have read several exhaustive and convincing arguments from some very
serious-minded people who have devoted entire lifetimes to figuring out exactly
when this thing was written, and the only conclusion that everyone can agree
on with any degree of certainty is that it was definitely not written any
time in the year 1797. I hope this helps.
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
The following passage is my favorite. It’s
as though my brain becomes a canvas, my heart is the brush, and Coleridge’s
words become some sort of magical-mystery paint. See if this next section
doesn’t stir up primeval pictures in your head too:
But oh! That
deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! As holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
Not to detract from the power and beauty of this poem, but just for the record,
I count four exclamation points and two sentence fragments in this stanza
alone, and our poem still isn’t generating huge quantities of meaning. Now, if I had turned in something like this
to my editor, he would politely but firmly remind me that, “extra exclamation
points do not replace actually making a point,” and then make me do it all
over again.
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil
seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were
breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced;
This would be the climax of the poem (Har!).
I can remember snickering at
this when I first had to read it back in high school. Granted, it’s not as titillating as your average
girlie-mag, but back then I took what I could get. However, if we could get over our Victorian-induced
embarrassment from witnessing the Earth ejaculate all over the Sky for a moment,
we would see that in terms of graphically depicting nature simply doing what
comes naturally, this is very similar to another famous phrase of his, “the
birds and the bees.” Yep, he wrote
that oft-quoted phrase as well. Coleridge, like all the Romantics, believed that nature was a sexual
goddess. This graphic exposé of nature-gone-wild
was almost like a religious thing for him. For Coleridge, it’s all about nature, and nature
is all about sex. Something to keep
in mind the next time you stop to smell the flowers or take a walk through
some woods.
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
It sounds like that geyser is really blowing chunks!
I’m sorry. I’ll stop. Seriously,
everyone I know reads something different into this.
If you see it as a literal fountain, then it’s simply the source of
a five-mile-long river, bursting out of the ground, meandering around for
a while and then finally going back underground. However, if you feel that
this is a sexual metaphor then the “fountain” could be strong emotions, or
nature, filled with the seeds for new life, spewing out all over everything. I know that some psychologists like to think
of it as a model of the subconscious mind bursting into consciousness, in
which case it is the source of new thoughts, new ideas… the wellspring of
creativity. No one way of looking
at it is right, or wrong. But any
way you look at it, that fountain is definitely spewing something.
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail
And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
OK… sacred river… Coleridge called it Alph. According to Microsoft Encarta, “The river
Alpheus does in fact disappear underground.”
So there you have it, scientific proof that Alph was a real river. (It’s located somewhere in Greece.) Let’s see… more useless facts: Khubilai Khan,
born in 1214, was one of about a gazillion grandsons to the great Genghis
Khan. After Khubilai took over China,
his biggest accomplishment seems to have been several failed attempts to conquer
the rest of the world. He did, however,
build a beautiful palace complete with lush gardens and a bevy of Hollywood
starlets, models, and groupies. He
called it K’ai-p’ing, which translates (very loosely mind you) into something sounding not entirely unlike
Xanadu. So all this stuff Coleridge
wrote about really did exist, he just misspelled everything. (I don’t get it. He misspells stuff and gets labeled a genius. I misspell things all the time and nobody thinks
I’m even close to being that smart.)
Five Miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man.
I don’t know why, but whenever I hear that phrase ‘caverns measureless to
man,’ I imagine this group of scientists spending their entire lives trying
to unravel, map-out, and measure this vast subterranean maze.
I see these guys working day and night for years getting absolutely
nowhere, until someone finally realizes that no one has ever made a ruler
big enough to measure the whole thing. I
know, it sounds pretty weird. But
it isn’t that far off from professors who have spent their whole academic
careers trying to unravel, map-out, and measure the mysteries of this poem. Coleridge, by the way, never bothered to tell
anyone what it was about. He called
it a “psychological curiosity,” hinted that it had no poetic merit, and left
it for everyone else to figure out. No
one has yet discovered a ruler big enough to measure the whole thing.
The best thing about this poem, coincidentally, is also its greatest flaw;
Coleridge’s overly enthusiastic use of symbols.
By their very nature his symbols can have from one to as many meanings
as anyone can possibly think of, all simultaneously.
Consequently this relegates most of his readers to a kind of primitive
guesswork in trying to figure them out. (I
recommend the Magic Eight-Ball technique myself.) The best part about making stuff up about Coleridge’s
symbols is that no matter what you say about them, you’re always kind of right.
The down side? You’re never completely right. So the next time you’re stuck trying to determine
a meaning to one of his ‘measureless’ symbols without a ‘big ruler’ nearby,
do what I always do… call it a symbol for fascism and get a good night’s sleep.
And sank in tumult
to a lifeless ocean:
And ‘mid this tumult
Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying
war!
Ancestral voices, eh? I’ll bet it
was Kubla’s architect who took one look at the plans for Xanadu and said,
“Man! You’re going to have to conquer all of China
to pay for this thing!”
The shadow of the dome
of pleasure
Floated midway on the
waves;
Q: Why a dome?
A: What?
Q: Well, it’s just that I’ve noticed that Coleridge
talks about this “Pleasure Dome” thing a lot and I want to know why?
A: Maybe he couldn’t think of anything romantic
that rhymed with “Love Shack.”
Q: Could you please be serious and just answer
my question?
A: Perhaps Coleridge thought the dome was the
perfect geometric shape. You know,
the antithesis to a straight line. You
don’t find very many straight lines in nature, and Coleridge was a big fan
of nature, remember? Or maybe because
the sky is dome shaped (kinda,) he was just trying to recreate a piece of
heaven in his own man-made universe… Get it?
Q: Not really.
A: Maybe it was one of those Freudian phallic
things.
Q: I think it is a symbol for fascism.
Where was heard the
mingled measure
From the fountain and
the caves.
It was a miracle of
rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome
with caves of ice!
A tiny-but-ever-so-crucial detail about this poem, in case you haven’t guessed
it by now: Coleridge was completely stoned when he wrote this thing. He was what one might call a frequent flyer
on the Poppy-Seed Express (We could also call him a sad and pitiable opium-addict,
but that’s not quite as pretty.) In
Coleridge’s defense, however, you must remember that back in his day you could
run down to the local drug store and buy highly addictive narcotics the way
we buy aspirin. They certainly helped
the headaches, but there were a few less-than-desirable side effects, such
as turning Coleridge into a drug-addicted junkie whose final years ended in
loneliness, failure, and miserable despair.
So one day, when Coleridge was in his mid-twenties, suffering terribly
from a neuralgia and desperate for relief, he took a few drops of laudanum
(like breath drops but made out of pure opium.) The mind-altering experience that quickly ensued forever put him
into the ranks of other well-known, drug-inspired artists like Keith Richards,
John Lennon, and Jim Morrison (pretty much everyone from the sixties). The next thing he knew, he was several lines
into what looked to be a very promising new poem when, according to Coleridge’s
account, a mysterious “man from Porlock” (we’ll call him Art) knocked on his
door and asked for help. Well, Art
truly deserves the Wrong-Place-at-the-Wrong-Time award for this one. By the time Coleridge got back to his room,
the whole drug-induced vision was gone… lost… forgotten. Most of the poem was never written down, and
Kubla Khan has forever been known
as the great Unfinished Poem. These
last few lines may have been written after he got back from helping Art, which
would explain the poem’s sudden change in both person and tone. On the other hand, Coleridge may have made
the whole story up in a pathetic attempt to justify to his editor why he missed
yet another deadline.
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
I know that no one really cares, but since I took the time to look it up:
Abyssinia is the country we now call Ethiopia.
Mount Abora may or may not be a reference to Mount Amera, (remember
Coleridge’s little problem with spelling?) which can be read about in John
Milton’s hilarious sit-com, Paradise Lost.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ‘twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
I have been to enough rock concerts to know that if you play certain music
loud and long enough you really will start seeing floating pleasure domes! Ok! Ok! I’m the first one to admit that a dulcimer,
even one played really loud, is not exactly your typical Friday night head-bangin’,
heart-pumpin’, slam-dancin’ Rock-and-roll-style experience. So what is he saying here? The music is going to help him build something.
It’s his inspiration!
Let’s quickly review some key points about the poem:
·
Sex and Nature (as I pointed out earlier, Coleridge had a hard
time separating the two) are twin fountains of creativity.
·
Drugs obviously played a major role in the creation of this
poem, or else he wouldn’t have bothered publishing that little bit of information
right alongside it. It was the opium
that opened up his mind enough to receive that powerful vision and write this
poem.
·
And finally, rockin’ away on her dulcimer was that Abyssinian
maid. She wasn’t just playing good
music however; she was his muse (music/muse… get it?) inspiring Coleridge
to create his beautiful poetry. Something
great artists know all about.
No matter what it is in life you’re creating; poetry, art, or great big,
magical, flying pleasure-domes… you still need to start with the same basic
ingredients: passionate feelings, an open and creative mind, and a muse for
inspiration. In case you missed it, it’s all about sex,
drugs, and rock ‘n roll!
That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
Beware of people who cry over this poem because he never finished it.
They will tearfully mourn about how great it might have been, how much
has been irrevocably lost, and the tragedy of it all when the rest of us don’t
get it. “This is a great poem!” we
say. “It’s fun. It’s full of symbols. What more do you want?” To resolve this most poignant debate, let us
turn to the penultimate resource of life’s toughest questions: George Lucas’
Star Wars. Here we have an excellent example of a movie that is part of a much
larger whole (five other movies if Mr. Lucas would ever finish writing them)
and yet simultaneously is complete in itself—some would even go so far as
to say that Lucas should have stopped writing early on, much like Coleridge
so wisely did with his Kubla Khan,
thus sparing us the agony of The Return
of the Jedi. Coleridge doesn’t
have to finish his poem in order to give us something complete. Undeveloped fragments of great ideas can say
more in their stammering, half-matured way than any fully-grown frivolity
ever did. In some ways, this poem
is a tribute to the undeveloped greatness in everything we do.
Just like his poem, Coleridge’s whole life was an example of undeveloped
greatness. He never amounted to what others thought he
could have been, but always had such fantastic potential. So add to everything else the fact that this
poem foreshadows the life of its creator.
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
Ironically, the only reason that anyone even thinks of this as an unfinished
poem is because Coleridge said it was. If
he hadn’t said it, I doubt whether anyone would’ve thought it. There is much too much brain-food here for any reasonable person
to get to the end and say, “Is that it?”
Enjoy the feast!
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
