Kubla Khan as epic

[radiantfracture]

A nice thing about being unable to focus is that I also can't focus on being miserable. Case in point: after a truly incomparable series of missed appointments and scheduling errors yesterday, I sat down wretchedly this morning, in true anxiety about my mnemonic capacity, to see if I could at least still recall two touchstone poems memorized in high school: Shakespeare's Sonnet 116, ("Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds") and "Kubla Khan".

The choice of sonnet is a bit mysterious to me now (the craft is exquisite; the marriage never materialized), but "Kubla Khan" makes perfect sense.

Writing it out again (all except the bit about the bouncing rocks in the middle, where I get hopelessly lost and always have) I could not help looking at "Kubla Khan" this time with my own fixations in mind, and before I knew it I had forgotten my forgetfuless and was happily sloshing around in the sacred river Alph.

Kubla Khan
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.

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.

I love the delay tactic of doubling up the A-rhyme here, so that the "caverns measureless to man" themselves increase our sense of the length of the river.

It would be almost impossible for Coleridge to have encountered Gilgamesh, since that epic was at the time still buried under the ruins of various magnificent and immortal libraries. But he read, you know, a lot of stuff. Well beyond the Greek and Roman classics, but those too.

Anyway, this opening reads like a proem to me.

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.

I am who I am, and I cannot help hearing "two thousand acres for the city, / two thousand acres for the orchards, / two thousand acres for the pits of clay, / and one thousand acres for the Temple of Ishtar" (Helle, I.18-21).

But beyond that, we begin with the magnificent construction of a palace that glorifies its king. Epic stuff.

The poem begins in iambic tetrameter, which is more ballad than epic, yeah? But then in this section, the meter transforms into iambic pentameter -- it slows down to survey the gardens and forests of Xanadu.

So: a proem. But the poem does not go on to glorify Kubla Khan. Instead, its attention shifts.

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!

-- the dramatic interruption of the chasm, which initiated twelfth-grade me into truly grown-up reading by suggesting that the poem might be talking about sex.

I'm into the sex reading, but we began with architecture, and in this sudden drop into the chasm I am also seeing the grandeur of human construction interrupted by the primal ferocity of nature.

Almost a tug-of-war here between the classical and the natural, for our Romantic?

(I checked, and there are cedar trees in Mongolia.)

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.

The use of sound and stress in this poem! Unequalled. "Ceaseless turmoil seething"! "Fast thick pants"!

Let's see. "And from this chasm" begins in iambic pentameter, which starts to crumble at the edge of the chasm / caesura. Then it gets reversed into the trochees of "ceaseless turmoil seething", and overflows the meter by a foot. The words are a whirlpool.

Then "as if this earth," all single-syllable words until "breathing": brilliant, as though the poem itself is panting.

And then, hmm, now I'm doubting myself -- I don't know, would you hear "in fast thick pants" as two iambs, or as an iamb and a spondee, stress stress stress? I want it to be like that, gasp gasp gasp = fast thick pants.

This is the bit I always have trouble remembering: particularly "amid whose swift half-intermitted burst," which is either one of the poem's few falterings or sheer genius, you pick, since it does do what it says, but is also almost impossible to speak aloud unless you're Gerard Manley Hopkins; and "mid these dancing rocks at once and ever" always drops out of my mind.

Nature erupts and flings the river from its banks, as if to say: whatever transformations you might make, human king, mine will always be greater.

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!

Again, just great sound stuff. The famously post-coital "five miles meandering with a mazy motion," followed by the brusquer, almost cliched "through wood and dale the sacred river ran." We resummarize the landscape, and finally our king comes back into the picture, only to be immediately eclipsed again by his palace and its sublime situation.

   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!

Back and forth between tetrameter and pentameter here, as though the poem isn't sure what it wants to say or how it wants to say it, and indeed this section seems a bit like stalling, though it is also beautifully lulling.

Although. We see not the palace but its shadow on the waves: we are moving from physical reality into the concept of representation that will take over our attention in Part Two.

Okay: Part Two, the dramatic shift in subject and tempo that marks the third act of the poem. The meter returns to tetrameter, but further, Coleridge often drops off the eighth syllable, making this section move extra swiftly.

   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.

I defy you to recite the end of this poem without leaping to your feet and crying out each exclamatory line. (Or I dare you to do it if you didn't.)

That final line -- how can he make the stresses land with such finality? The back-mouth sounds of u and k? Drunk and milk are both a swallow, front of mouth to back, and Paradise a final exhalation.

It seems to me that this turn to the poet himself, reflecting on his art, has something in it of the end of Gilgamesh, though ecstatic rather than sobered -- we turn from the great monument in stone (Xanadu, Uruk) to the incantatory architecture of language, and in both cases the speakers aspire to something beyond ordinary mortal existence through art; though Gilgamesh's poem is a wall of kiln-fired brick and a tablet of stone, meant to endure, and Coleridge's vision exists only in the air.

So: if you squint, you could see Xanadu as a sort of king's narrative, without the king having much to do: instead, the city and the land itself become the heroic figures.

The poem, sans interruptions, can be read here.

§rf§