Ramblings through 'Kubla Kahn'

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

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!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
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 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.
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,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

This is the poem "Kubla Khan" in case any of you are interested. I remembered that Sexson had set us a challenge to see if we could find the romance within the poem itself. To begin with, it may be easiest to note that only once within the 55 or so lines is a form of the word romance actually used: "that deep romantic chasm." That being said I will try in the next few paragraphs to at least pull together a semblance of an answer to the question of what makes "Kubla Khan" a romance. Not to say that my answer is the definitive solution, or that I have come in any sense close to what the true meaning or "answer" to such a query might be, but I will make my own stunted attempt and leave the judgement of its worth to my readers.

Let us begin then with the beginning. "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea". The very start of the poem brings us to a magical land far away, a world of the faerie where anything is possible. It is, perhaps, the same world that Gawain traversed in his search for the Green Knight and that Conn-eda wandered through with his pony companion. But this Kubla Khan character is new, a Kingly figure, perhaps a fisher king. Whatever his origins he has ordered the construction of a "stately pleasure-dome." From the lines that follow in the second stanza, the reader can almost see a paradise, a world that had not fallen into sin at the choices of Adam and Eve.

It is a beautiful place to be sure, a land, as it were, in perpetual spring. Yet perhaps the most interesting aspect of this landscape comes in the third line of the poem with the "sacred river" Alph. What to say about the river? To begin with let us start with the most obvious reference to the Alpha, the first letter of the alphabet in Greek and perhaps a reference to the very foundations of life in a place where "forests [are as] ancient as the hills". Yet it also echoes words from the Bible with a God that is both Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end," for the river travels from the land of plenty into a world that can only be described as barren and dark "a sunless sea" reflecting the chaotic void at the beginning of the bible before God spoke the world into creation.

As the play continues Kubla constructs his utopia, and the perfection of it is described for us in the next several lines. Finally, we arrive to what I consider to be the "meat of the matter" that is to say the third stanza, for not only is it here that we, for the first and last time, hear the word romantic: "That deep romantic chasm" we are told, and for the life of me I could not decipher what the poet could have been talking about. He had, after all, just finished recounting to us the splendor of the court of Kubla Kahn. Yet, the more I thought about it, the more I came to think that this chasm referred to the river Alph itself, for we know already that it is sacred from the first stanza. The "holy" aspect in the third stanza would seem to strengthen this case. It is also interesting that the poet uses the term enchanting, a word that seems to denote the presence of magic. Within the next few words we are told of a woman and her "demon-lover" and the remainder of the stanza up to the point that begins "Five miles" seems to describe almost a playful aspect of the river, jumping up in a fountain. Yet soon the river makes its way down to the caves and to a "lifeless ocean." I will only argue here that the river seems to have made a full course, from the beginning of its life to the frivolity and happiness of youth, to the long meanderings of age, and finally to the vast halls of death to which we all must go in the end.

At this point then, it would seem that the river is nothing more than a representation of each of our paths along the road of mortality. Yet, that does not make it romantic For, as Dr. Sexson has pointed out to me on several occasions, there can be no death in a romance, only apparent death, which I will eventually argue is nothing more than a path that the hero must take on a road to metamorphosis in order to achieve his ultimate goals. But I digress. We must look then for something deeper, and perhaps it is hinted at in the next stanza where a "miracle of rare device, a sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice" is put before us. In my own opinion this seems to reflect the very duality of the concept of life and death that we have been dancing around throughout the entire semester. That is to say, we can see from the image that Coleridge places before us at once a world of both light and dark, heat and cold, happiness and sadness, demons and lovers, the beginning and the end.

Without going into too much depth, for I do not wish to spoil any points that I may find particularly useful for my final paper, I will say only that I believe that the poem "Kubla Khan" is romantic because it contains within itself the quintessential dualities that must exist in order for a romance to function. There must always be opposites weaving in and out of each other, supporting one another in the enormous web of life that breeds such stories. In Coleridge's poem we have it all.

In the end, it is the narrator's journey into this other world, this land of magic and faerie, his desire to find something deeper, that leads him to what he has written. There he finds all manner of dualities, these coexisting opposites that bring about his verse. He has made his quest. And yet that quest continues further into the land of the dead, where Alph meets the lifeless ocean. The narrator does not die, however, but rather sees for the first time the intricacies of a far subtler world than he imagined. He returns from his journey a man changed into something other than what he was. He has "drunk the milk of Paradise" and returned from those far lands to tell his story to the world. Here then we have all five aspects of the romance for within the narrator's return is a sense of the happy ending. He has already seen Paradise and knows that he may one day return there. As he tells his tale to the reader, however, he is transformed into an otherworldly being for he has, in a sense, found the nugget of his own immortality within the mortal flesh of his being. Thus, even his return to this world is much like that of the King in "The King and the Corpse" for both are here only so long as their allotted time to humanity remains. Then the narrator will, it can be assumed, return to paradise.

I sincerely hope that my ramblings have not been too confusing at any point during this entire blog. If so I apologize in advance. The more I wrote about this subject, the deeper I wanted to go, and I think that is dangerous before my final paper. I will say in parting that if there was anything at all helpful or enlightening to any one of you that read this, then I will consider my attempts a success.