The Cycle of Creativity: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Samuel T. Coleridge’s Kubla Khan

In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan”, the narrator offers a host of fantastic imagery relating to a fictional “pleasure dome” constructed by the Mongolian emperor Kublai Khan. Coleridge professed ignorance of the poem’s meaning, saying only that it was a fragmented memory of a dream, but an analysis of the symbolic imagery of the poem through the lens of psychoanalytic interpretation will show that the poem is a study of the nature of creativity and imagination and the dangers associated with it. This interpretation of the poem takes into account Coleridge’s personal psychological profile, as well as endowing the poem with a more generalized illumination of the human condition.

Coleridge’s first two stanzas describing the beautiful pleasure dome are not only a description of nature as seen by the romantic idealist, but also point out a disturbing flaw in this ideal. The gardens and woods and meadows are all portrayed as still. They lack the vital energy that manifests itself in a dynamic setting. Rivers are traditionally symbols of life and of vital energy, but the river Alph is portrayed as flowing through a set course down into a measureless sunless sea, the water that it supplies to the land around it being only a fraction of its potential. This image represents a state in which one is bound to stagnation by one’s own system for viewing and ordering the world (Lawall 813-815).

In this pleasure dome there is a chasm described as “holy and enchanted” but also as “savage”. Typically, underground spaces are a reference to the subconscious, and this chasm is such a space. As a cleft in the earth, it offers access to something much deeper than the superficial reality that is offered by the ordered gardens and ground...

... middle of paper ...

...is a sacrifice that will be destroyed after only a brief time.

Works Cited

Allen, N. B. A Note on Coleridge's "Kubla Khan”. The John Hopkins University Press. MLN, Vol. 57, No. 2, Feb. 1942, pp. 108-113. http://0-www.jstor.org.library.uark.edu/stable/2911139

Bahti, Timothy. Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and the Fragment of Romanticism. The John Hopkins University Press. MLN, Vol. 96, No. 5, Comparative Literature, Dec. 1981, pp. 1035-1050. http://0-www.jstor.org.library.uark.edu/stable/2906232

Heninger, S.K. A Jungian Reading of "Kubla Khan”. Blackwell Publishing. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , Vol. 18, No. 3, Mar. 1960, pp. 358-367. http://0-www.jstor.org.library.uark.edu/stable/428160

Lawall, Sarah, ed. The Norton Anthology of World Literature Volume E: Kubla Khan. 2nd. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 2002. 813-815. Print.