Kubla Khan- Coleridge

Kubla Khan by Coleridge is very different from Blake. When I first read it, there was a lot of confusion. I took it stanza by stanza. The poem is supposed to be a vision he had in his dream. The way Coleridge expresses this poem does seem to have a melodious dream like state, which is created by the rhyme scheme. After reading some background on the poem, he writes in a tetrameter, which is common in poetry and gives it a chanting feeling.

The diction used in this poem is elegant and descriptive. It really helps bring out the imagination such as from lines 6- 11 stanza,

“So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round:

And here 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.”

the setting is made clear and the reader feels as if he/she is almost there with the Kubla Khan. The whole poem is very fantastical which is on surprise because dreams tend to be filled with supernatural elements. Reason why I say that the poem hold those traits it because in line 30, “Ancestral voices prophesying war!” shows that the King hears the calling of spirits and the woman who is wailing for her demon-lover. That line about the demon-lover gave me the chills and left an impression. Personally, I took that two ways one her lover is demonic being that he was aggressive and bellicose and the other was that she was in love with a real demon from Hell, a red imp creature.  She is not the only woman that is mention in the poem unless the pronoun she refers to her. But I think there a few more women in the poem such as the Abyssinian maid who I believe is a muse that is why she is singing in the poem to that is an allusion to possible Greek mythology.

There is juxtaposition in the poem such as in line 14, “A savage place! as Holy and enchanted” and in line 36, “A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!” those juxtapositions really make it mysterious and the reader can tell without any background information that this is all happening in another realm.

Coleridge was an opium addict and the poem and his dreams definitely reflect his current conditions. Throughout his poem is he telling a story that gets interrupted the poem was suppose to be 200 to 300 lines but it stops at 54.

At the end of the poem going back to the woman crying out for her demon lover there I believe she is calling for Kubla Khan because “his” is used and “His flashing eyes, his floating hair” which reminds mean of a creature from the horror movies. On the contrary Coleridge might talk be talking about himself especially since he was on drugs.

The poem evokes all of the senses and emphasizes the imagination which I believe was also a huge characteristic of romantic writers. This poem was very different from Blake’s in the sense that Coleridge focused on a different romantic idea. There is still a lot I have to understand about this poem and about Romanticism. After finding out that this poem was not finished I am curious to know what else Coleridge was going to write.