Kubla Khan (5570 words) Essay Example For Students

Kubla Khan (5570 words) Essay Kubla KhanKubla KhanIf a man could pass thro Paradise in a Dream, ; have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his Soul had really been there, ; found that flower in his hand when he awoke Aye! and what then? (CN, iii 4287)Kubla Khan is a fascinating and exasperating poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (. Almost everyone who has read it, has been charmed by its magic. It must surely be true that no poem of comparable length in English or any other language has been the subject of so much critical commentary. Its fifty-four lines have spawned thousands of pages of discussion and analysis. Kubla Khan is the sole or a major subject in five book-length studies; close to 150 articles and book-chapters (doubtless I have missed some others) have been devoted exclusively to it; and brief notes and incidental comments on it are without number. Despite this deluge, however, there is no critical unanimity and very little agreement on a number of important issues connected with the poe m: its date of composition, its meaning, its sources in Coleridges reading and observation of nature, its structural integrity (i.e. fragment versus complete poem), and its relationship to the Preface by which Coleridge introduced it on its first publication in 1816. Coleridges philosophical explorations appear in his greatest poems. Kubla Khan, with its exotic imagery and symbols, rich vocabulary and rhythms, written, by Coleridges account, under the influence of laudanum, was often considered a brilliant work, but without any defined theme. However, despite its complexity the poem can be read as a well-constructed exposition on human genius and art. The theme of life and nature again appears in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, where the effect on nature of a crime against the power of life is presented in the form of a ballad. Christabel, an unfinished gothic ballad, evokes a sinister atmosphere, hinting at evil and the grotesque. In his poems Coleridges detailed perception of nature links scene and mood, and leads to a contemplation of moral and universal concerns. In his theory of poetry Coleridge stressed the aesthetic quality as the primary consideration. The metrical theory on which Christabel is constructed helped to break the fetters of 18th-century correctness and monotony and soon found disciples, among others Walter Scott and Lord Byron. Opium and the Dream of Kubla KhanColeridges use of opium has long been a topic of fascination, and the grouping of Coleridge, opium and Kubla Khan formed an inevitable triad long before Elisabeth Schneider combined them in the title of her book. It is tempting on a subject of such intrinsic interest to say more than is necessary for the purpose in hand. Since the medicinal use of opium was so common and wide-spread, it is not surprising to learn that its use involved neither legal penalties nor public stigma. All of the Romantic poets (except Wordsworth) are known to have used it, as did many other prominent contemporaries. Supplies were readily available: in 1830, for instance, Britain imported 22,000 pounds of raw opium. Many Englishmen, like the eminently respectable poet-parson George Crabbe, who took opium in regular but moderate quantity for nearly forty years, were addicts in ignorance, and led stable and productive lives despite their habit. By and large, opium was taken for granted; and it was only the terrible experiences of such articulate addicts as Coleridge and Dequincy that eventually began to bring the horrors of the drug to public attention. Coleridges case is a particularly sad and instructive one. He had used opium as early as 1791 (see CL, i 18) and continued to use it occasionally, on medical advice, to alleviat e pain from a series of physical and nervous ailments. But the opium cure proved ultimately to be more devastating in its effects than the troubles it was intended to treat, for such large quantities taken over so many months seduced him unwittingly into slavery to the drug. And his life between 1801 and 1806 (when he returned from Malta) is a somber illustration of a growing and, finally, a hopeless bondage to opium. By the time he realized he was addicted, however, it was too late. He consulted a variety of physicians; he attempted more than once (with nearly fatal results) to break off his use of opium all at once; and, at last, in 1816, when he submitted his case to James Gillman (in whose house he was to spend the rest of his life), he was able to control his habit and reduce his doses, although he was never able to emancipate himself entirely. But to return to the 1790s: what can we say about Coleridges experience of opium at the time of composing Kubla Khan? The effects produced by opium in the early stages were soothing and seductive: Laudanum, he wrote his brother George in March 1798 (in terms which recall the imagery of Kubla Khan), gave me repose, not sleep: but YOU, I believe, know how divine that repose is what a spot of enchantment, a green spot of fountains, flowers trees, in the very heart of a waste of Sands! (CL, i 394). Opium, it seems (to cite an earlier letter, of October 1797, which may well be describing a drug experience), tended to raise spiritualize his intellect, so that he could, like the Indian Vishnu, float about along an infinite ocean cradled in the flower of the Lotos (CL, i 350). Such an experience and such a mood are reflected in Kubla Khan. As we know from the Crewe endnote, Coleridge took two grains of Opium before he wrote Kubla Khan; and this fact naturally raises the issue of the drugs effect on the poets creative imagination. Early critics, guided by Coleridges statements in the 1816 Preface, assumed that there was a direct and immediate correlation between opium and imagination. In 1897 J.M. Robertson could not bring himself to doubt that the special quality of this felicitous work is to be attributed to its being all conceived and composed under the influence of opium; and in 1934 M.H. Abrams declared that the great gift of opium to men like Coleridge and Dequincy was access to a new world as different from this as Mars may be; and one which ordinary mortals, hindered by terrestrial conceptions, can never, from mere description, quite comprehend. More recent criticism, however, grounded on modern medical studies, controverts such conclusions decisively. According to Elisabeth Schneider, it is widely agreed now t hat persons of unstable psychological makeup are much more likely to become addicted to opiates than are normal ones and that, among such neurotic users of opium, the intensity of the pleasure produced by the drug seems (on the evidence of medical case-studies) to be in direct proportion to the degree of instability. The explanation (she continues) of the supposed creative powers of opium lies in the euphoria that it produces: With some unstable temperaments the euphoria may be intense. Its effect is usually to increase the persons satisfaction with his inner state of well being, to turn his attention inward upon himself while diminishing his attention to external stimuli. Thus it sometimes encourages the mood in which daydreaming occurs. The narcosis of opium has been popularly described as having the effect of heightening and intensifying the acuteness of the senses. This it quite definitely does not do. If anything, the effect is the reverse. Alethea Hayter, although she wishes to avoid the extremes of the positions of Abrams and Schneider, nevertheless comes much closer in her conclusions to the latter than to the former. Opium, she argues, can only work On what is already there in a mans mind and memory, and, if he already has a creative imagination and a tendency to reverie, dreams and hypnologic visions, then opium may intensify and focus his perceptions. Her final verdict which can be no more than a hypothesis is that the action of opium, though it can never be a substitute for innate imagination, can uncover that imagination while it is at work in a way which might enable an exceptionally gifted and self-aware writer to observe and learn from his own mental processes. The most reasonable conclusion to be drawn from these various explorations of the relationship between opium and the operation of the creative imagination is that, while Kubla Khan might well not have been produced without opium, it most assuredly wo uld never have been born except for the powerfully and innately imaginative mind of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Interpretative Approaches to Kubla KhanThere is an observation Never tell thy dreams, and I am almost afraid that Kubla Khan is an owl that wont bear day light, I fear lest it should be discovered by the lantern of typography clear reducting to letters, no better than nonsense or no sense. (Charles Lamb)In a moment of rash optimism a notable scholar once began an essay by declaring that We now know almost everything about Coleridges Kubla Khan except what the poem is about. The truth of the matter, however, is that we know almost nothing conclusive about Kubla Khan, including what it is about. In fact, by far the most intriguing question about this most intriguing of poems is What does it mean? if, indeed, it has or was ever intended to have any particular meaning. For the overwhelming majority of Coleridges contemporaries, Kubla Khan seemed (as Lamb foresaw) to be no better than nonsense, and they dismissed it contemptuously. The poem itself is below criticism, declared the anonymous reviewer in the Monthly Review (Jan 1817); and Thomas Moore, writing in the Edinburgh Review (Sep 1816), tartly asserted that the thing now before us, is utterly destitute of value and he defied any man to point out a passage of poetical merit in it.While derisive asperity of this sort i s the common fare of most of the early reviews, there are, nevertheless, contemporary readers whose response is both sympathetic and positive even though they value the poem for its rich and bewitching suggestiveness rather than for any discernible meaning that it might possess. Charles Lamb, for example, speaks fondly of hearing Coleridge recite Kubla Khan so enchantingly that it irradiates brings heaven Elysian bowers into my parlour while he sings or says it; and Leigh Hunt turns hopefully to analogies in music and painting in an effort to describe the poems haunting but indefinable effect: Kubla Khan is a voice and a vision, an everlasting tune in our mouths, a dream fit for Cambuscan and all his poets, a dance of pictures such as Giotto or Cimabue, revived and re-inspired, would have made for a Storie of Old Tartarie, a piece of the invisible world made visible by a sun at midnight and sliding before our eyes. Throughout the nineteenth century and during the first quarter of the twentieth century Kubla Khan was considered, almost universally, to be a poem in which sound overwhelms sense. With a few exceptions (such as Lamb and Leigh Hunt), Romantic critics accustomed to poetry of statement and antipathetic to any notion of ars gratia artis summarily dismissed Kubla Khan as a meaningless farrago of sonorous phrases beneath the notice of serious criticism. It only demonstrated, according to William Hazlitt, that Mr Coleridge can write better nonsense verses than any man in England and then he added, proleptically, It is not a poem, but a musical composition. For Victorian and Early Modern readers, on the other hand, Kubla Khan was a poem not below but beyond the reach of criticism, and they adopted (without the irony) Hazlitts perception that it must properly be appreciated as verbalised music. When it has been said, wrote Swinburne of Kubla Khan, that such melodies were never heard, such dreams never dreamed, such speech never spoken, the chief thing remains unsaid, and unspeakable. There is a charm upon which can only be felt in silent submission of wonder. Even John Livingston Lowes culpable, if ever anyone has been, of murdering to dissect insisted on the elusive magic of Coleridges dream vision: For Kubla Khan is as near enchantment, I suppose, as we are like to come in this dull world. While one may track or attempt to track individual images to their sources, Kubla Khan as a whole remains utterly inexplicable a dissolving phantasmagoria of highly charged images whose streaming pagent is, in the final analysis, as aimless as it is magnificent. The earth has bubbles as the water has, and this is of them. Callahan Chronicals EssayThis is not to say, of course, that the poem is unrelated to the theory: it is only to insist that Kubla Khan, rather than being a material anticipation of later critical precepts, is a part of the process that leads eventually to the development and articulation of those ideas in a systematic way. And it is not surprising, therefore, that the meaning of the poem should be obscure and ambiguous for Kubla Khan records an early, perhaps largely unconscious, exploration of critical perceptions united only loosely in an inchoate theory of literature. Freudian Analysis A poem such as Kubla Khan so provokingly enigmatic and so deliciously suggestive also provides an irresistibly fertile ground for psychological speculation, especially on the part of Freudian critics. When Coleridge called the poem a psychological curiosity in his 1816 Preface and confessed that Kubla Khan was the record of an actual dream, he unwittingly opened wide the door to analysts anxious to expound the latent psychological implications of his symphony and song. One of the earliest of the Freudian readings was offered in 1924 by Robert Graves, who proposed that Kubla Khan expressed Coleridges subconscious determination to shun the mazy complications of life by retreating to a bower of poetry, solitude and opium a serene refuge beyond the bitter reproaches of Mrs Coleridge (the woman who is wailing for her demon lover) and almost beyond the gloomy prophecies of addiction uttered by the ancestral voices of Lamb and Charles Lloyd. By comparison with recent Fr eudian interpretations, this is pretty tame stuff. Nevertheless, it was enough to alert I.A. Richards almost immediately to the chilling possibilities of such an approach: The reader acquainted with current methods of analysis, he warned, can imagine the results of a thorough going Freudian onslaught. In general, the Freudians treat Kubla Khan as an unconscious revelation of personal fantasies and repressed, usually erotic, urges; but there is little agreement about the precise nature of these subliminal drives. Douglas Angus argues that the poem illustrates a psychoneurotic pattern of narcissism that reflects Coleridges abnormal need for love and sympathy; Eugene Sloane, however, is convinced that Kubla Khan is an elaborate development of a birth dream, expressing an unconscious desire to return to the warmth and security of the womb (the hair in line 50, for example, is floating in amniotic fluid); and Gerald Enscoe finds the core of the poems meaning in the unresolved struggle between two conflicting attitudes toward the subject of erotic feeling, i.e. the attitude . . . that the sexual impulse is to be confined within a controlled system is opposed to the anarchistic belief that the erotic neither should nor can be subjected to such control. Still other readers prefer to follow Robert Graves by concentrating on what the poem implies about Coleridges experience with opium: James Bramwell reads Kubla Khan as a dream-fable representing conscience in the act of casting him out, spiritually and bodily, from the paradise of his opium paradise; and Eli Marcovitz, who sets out to treat as we would a dream in our clinical practice, confidently concludes that Kubla Khan is almost a chart of the psychosexual history of a personality ineluctably embarked on the road to addiction: It depicts the life of the poet his infancy and early childhood, the pleasures and deprivations of the oral period, the stimulation and dread of his oedipal period, the reaction to the death of his father at nine, the fear of incest and genitality with the regression to passive-femininity and orality, and the attempt to cope with his lifes problems by the appeal to the muse and to opium. Who would have supposed, without guidance, that so much repressed meaning was compressed into fifty-four lines?Even this brief sampling illustrates clearly enough the limitations and liabilities of using Freudian keys to unlock the mysteries of Kubla Khan. In the first place, of course, there is no received consensus (as we have just seen) about precisely what the poem reveals about Coleridges subconscious mind. Nor is there agreement about the symbolic significance of the major images: is the stately pleasure-dome to be identified as the female breast (maternal or otherwise), or does it represent, as some think, the mons veneris? Similarly, what are we to make of the violent eructation of the fountain forced with ceaseless turmoil from the deep romantic chasm the ejaculation of semen, or the throes of parturition? And then there is the hapless Abyssinian maid, who has been variously identified as Coleridges muse, as his mother, as Mary Evans (an early flame), as Dorothy Wordsworth, and (since Abyssinian damsels are negroid) as the symbol of Coleridges repressed impulse toward miscegenation. A second and more serious problem with many Freudian readings, as the foregoing examples make clear, is a tendency to ignore basic rules of evidence and to indulge, as a consequence, in strained and unwarranted speculation. In one account, for example, we are asked (without irony) to believe that the last two lines of Kubla Khan point by indirection to fellatio, cunnilingus and deep oral attachment to the mother. Another analyst, James F. Hoyle, interprets Coleridges enforced retirement to the farmhouse near Porlock as the neurotic persons vegetative retreat to para-sympathetic preponderance with overstimulation of gastrointestinal functions, resulting in diarrhea and then, as if this were not enough, goes on to conclude that the costive opium taken to check the attack of dysentery probably helped in converting depression to hypomania and so was instrumental in transformi ng the diarrhea of failure in poetry and life to the logorrhea of Kubla Khan. A third problem with Freudian analysis is that, in general, it is more interested in the poet than in the poem and, in addition, often accords the 1816 Preface a stature at least equal to that of Kubla Khan itself. As with the source-studies examined in the previous section, Freudian readings use the poem largely as a pretext for exploring extrapoetic matters: the roads of psychological criticism customarily lead away from Xanadu into the charted and uncharted realms of the poets biography and subconscious psychosexual history. Jungian interpretationsUnlike the Freudians, who stress the psychological particularity of Kubla Khan, Jungian critics focus on the way in which the poem draws upon and perpetuates traditional images in which the age-long memoried self is repeatedly embodied. Often the results of such an approach are illuminating and useful largely because Jungian criticism, when it resists the reductivist temptation to explain away images with psychological tags, allows for ambiguities and the existence of half-seen truths. As Kathleen Raine points out in an engaging essay, Kubla Khan was written in that exaltation of wonder which invariably accompanies moments of insight into the mystery upon whose surface we live. The earliest (and still probably the best) Jungian interpretation is found in Maud Bodkins Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934). Her argument, in essence, is that Kublas pleasant gardens and the forbidding caverns under them correspond in some degree to the traditional ideas of Paradise and Hades: the image of the watered garden and the mountain height show some persistent affinity with the desire and imaginative enjoyment of supreme well-being, or divine bliss, while the cavern depth appears as the objectification of an imaginative fear. In Kubla Khan the heaven-hell pattern, presented as the vision of a poet inspired by the music of a mysterious maiden, evokes in the reader an organic response (through the collective unconscious) to these atavistic emotional archetypes. Subsequent Jungian critics have undertaken (with various degrees of success) to extend Bodkins thesis by developing the implications of the Edenic archetype, by invoking Platos doctrine of anamnesis or recollectio n, and by analysing Kubla Khan as a descriptive illustration of Jungs individuation process. There are, too, less respectably, some extreme Jungian (or pseudo-Jungian) interpretations: for example, Robert Fleissners catachrestic argument for Kubla Khan as an integrationist poem. The summary of criticism in the preceding pages has not, of course, exhausted the diversity of approaches to Kubla Khan. It has also been read as a landscape-poemand as a poetical day-dream; there are provocative interpretations of it as a political statement contrasting the profane power of the state with the sacred power of the poet; and there are theological readings quite important ones, in fact which explore the visionary and apocalyptic theme of fallen mans yearning to recover the lost Paradise. What, then, shall we say of Kubla Khan? that it has too much meaning, or too many meanings, or (perhaps) no meaning at all? Grammatici certant et adhuc sub iudice lis est: critics dispute, and the case is still before the courts (Horace, Ars Poetica, 78). In the circumstances, I will not presume to render a verdict, but merely to offer some advice. Literary criticism has more and more become a science of solutions. When a lurking mystery is discovered, analytical floodlights are trai ned upon it to dispel the shadows and open its dark recesses. But Kubla Khan, as Charles Lamb acutely perceived, is an owl that wont bear daylight. We must learn to take the poem on its own terms and, instead of attempting to salvage it by reducing it to a coherent substratum of symbols, we must reconcile ourselves to the fact that no single interpretation will ever resolve the complexities of so protean a product of the human imagination. Mystery and ambiguity, verisimilitude and teasing suggestiveness, are essential ingredients in Kubla Khan a poem which reflects, though darkly, Coleridges largely subconscious ruminations on poetry, paradise, and the heights and depths of his own unfathomable intellectual and spiritual being. Kubla Khan is one of those ethereal finger-pointings so prized by Keats; it is a poem that has no palpable design upon us, and it provides at least one instance of an occasion on which Coleridge did not let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from th e Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledgePoetry Essays