Coleridge successfully illustrates the qualities of imagination in his poem, Kubla Khan, through the sound of words, the creative content and his ability to create and recreate. Coleridge turns the words of the poem into a system of symbols that are suspended in the reader’s mind. Coleridge uses creative powers to establish the infinite I AM, a quality of the primary imagination. Coleridge mirrors his primary and secondary imagination in the poem by taking apart and recreating images. The qualities of imagination discussed in the poem exist independently but also work together to create an imaginative world. It is important to understand how the poem works to achieve these qualities, but also how the poem works to bring the reader back to reality. The powers and qualities of imagination are present in Kubla Khan and it is through Coleridge’s extraordinary writing that the reader is able to experience an imaginative world, in which we alternate between reality and imagination.
Through alliteration and imagery, Coleridge turns the words of the poem into a system of symbols that become unfixed to the reader. Coleridge uses alliteration throughout the poem, in which the reader “hovers” between imagination and reality. As the reader moves through the poem, they feel as if they are traveling along a river, “five miles meandering with a mazy motion” (25). The words become a symbol of a slow moving river and as the reader travels along the river, they are also traveling through each stanza. This creates a scene that the viewer can turn words into symbols while in reality they are just reading text. Coleridge is also able to illustrate a suspension of the mind through imagery; done so by producing images that are unfixed to the r...
... middle of paper ...
...ridge’s longing brings the reader back to reality, in which we see real emotions at play. Another way the final stanza portrays reality is the use of the word “I.” The first three stanzas are in third person, but the last stanza is in first person. Coleridge is describing “Paradise” but transitions to seeing:
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw: (...)
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air, (37-46).
“Xanadu” is a wonderful “Paradise” of fantasy, but Coleridge draws the readers back to reality with the word “I.” He immediately transitions from describing visionary objects to explaining his own poetic challenge. The “pleasure-dome” mirrors the poem and Kubla Khan mirrors Coleridge. The poem ultimately becomes a “vision in a dream,” where the reader recognizes the images that Coleridge recreates through imagination.
There are multiple examples of visual imagery in this poem. An example of a simile is “curled like a possum within the hollow trunk”. The effect this has is the way it creates an image for the reader to see how the man is sleeping. An example of personification is, “yet both belonged to the bush, and now are one”. The result this has is how it creates an emotion for the reader to feel
Imagery uses five senses such as visual, sound, olfactory, taste and tactile to create a sense of picture in the readers’ mind. In this poem, the speaker uses visual imagination when he wrote, “I took my time in old darkness,” making the reader visualize the past memory of the speaker in “old darkness.” The speaker tries to show the time period he chose to write the poem. The speaker is trying to illustrate one of the imagery tools, which can be used to write a poem and tries to suggest one time period which can be used to write a poem. Imagery becomes important for the reader to imagine the same picture the speaker is trying to convey. Imagery should be speculated too when writing a poem to express the big
...he imagery of the more intensely-felt passages in the middle of the poem. Perhaps the poet is like someone at their journey's end, `all passion spent', recollecting in tranquillity some intimations of mortality?
In his preface to "Kubla Khan," Samuel Taylor Coleridge makes the claim that his poem is a virtual recording of something given to him in a drug-induced reverie, "if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things . . . without any sensation or consciousness of effort." As spontaneous and as much a product of the unconscious or dreaming world as the poem might seem on first reading, however, it is also a finely structured, well wrought device that suggests the careful manipulation by the conscious mind.
Despite the beauty described in the first few stanzas of the poem, it was the feeling of doubt and pondering that approached at the end of the poem that truly was the most thought provoking. Instead of just writing of beauty, Poets must realize that they may be leading people to false ideals, and in doing so that they may actually be causing individuals to believe in something that is nothing more than a dream. This realization makes the image of the questioning poet by far the most important in the piece.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Kahn” is an example of imaginative poetry due to an opium addiction. This poem creates its own kingdom and paradise while Colridge expresses his ideas of Heaven and Hell through his own drug induced thoughts and opinions.
The Christabel collection is thus riddled with the anxiety of irresolution that runs through the majority of Coleridge 's poetic career, and this is never more pronounced than in the case of 'Kubla Khan '. Thomas McFarland claims 'Kubla Khan ' is "as fully terminated as any poem in the language": this in turn suggests that to define the poem as a fragment must be a thematic and biographical comment rather than a structural observation. Yet the use of the word 'terminated ' suggests a rather ominous, self-contained resolution which 'Kubla Khan ' does not
At the beginning of the poem, the speaker starts by telling the reader the place, time and activity he is doing, stating that he saw something that he will always remember. His description of his view is explained through simile for example “Ripe apples were caught like red fish in the nets of their branches” (Updike), captivating the reader’s attention
He uses powerful imagery and onomatopoeia to achieve the desired effects that make the poem more realistic. All this combined together produces effective thought provoking ideas and with each read, I gradually get an improved understanding and appreciation of the poem.
When Kubla Khan was first published in 1816, contemporary reviewers noted the poem’s fragmentary nature and spoke of its nonsensical style, imagery, and content. The poem was, in a sense, viewed as not a “wholly meaningful poem, but only meaningless music.” More recent studies by scholar E. S. Shaffer asserted that Coleridge intended for Kubla Khan to be a part of his project to create “a new kind of epic poem” that was to be called The Fall of Jerusalem. Shaffer believes that Coleridge was unable to complete this epic project, and consequently, left Kubla Khan as “an epic fragment” that has bred a myth of fragmentation that has followed the poem since its initial publi...
with the alliteration of the frst five lines : "Kubla Khan'', ''dome decree'', and ''sunless sea''. Coleridge interlaces short exclamations (''but oh!'', ''a savage place!'') and exageratedly long exclamations (''as holy and enchanted as e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted by a woman wailing for her demon lover!'') reinforces the feeling of flowing which is related to the time ''ticking'' irregularly away, creating a sense of timelessness.
Mileur, J. 1982. Coleridge and the Art of Immanence. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
There are a myriad of critical theory lenses that can be applied and utilized to closely observe pieces of literature. One of these theories is John Keats’s Negative Capability theory which consists of an idea of “…when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason…” (Keats 968). Ultimately, this signifies that, in poetry, the emphasis be placed on the significance of inquisitiveness and the asking of questions of the life and scenery around one’s self rather than employing importance on strongly searching for answers. This theory can be applied to a multitude of works, but for these sakes and purposes what will be critiqued is Samuel Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. Keats’s personal opinion involving this is that “…Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge” (Keats, 968). This elevated language is stating plainly that Keats does not believe that Coleridge exemplifies his theory in his works, and that Coleridge is always reaching for the full truth and never content with the unknown. Interestingly enough, this is not exactly true. Coleridge creatively does embody this theory, even if it does contains slight gaps. Though this work does occasionally disembody Negative Capability, through his content matter in Kubla Khan, Coleridge ultimately displays this theory through the opportunity for his readers to pursue the concept, as well as cultivating this theory a step further past Keats’s intents and purposes.
In “Kubla Khan,” Coleridge expresses his desire to use the inspirations from nature to create his own “Paradise” of poetry (54, p.1634). In the first stanza, Coleridge creates an exotic oriental garden, where the trees, gardens, hills, and the “Alph” river, together present the beauty of Mother Nature (3, p.1633). Here, the poet carefully observes his surroundings, as the nature will serve as the source of inspiration for his poetry. The “pleasure dome” (2, p.1633) in line two has two functions, one representing the creation of human beings on earth, and the other being the foundation of Coleridge’s poetic paradise. As the clash between nature and humans takes place in the second stanza with a “woman wailing for her demon-lover” (16, p.1633) the poet calls upon nature for his inspiration, represented by the powerful activity of nature. The energy of nature is released in forms of “a might fountain” (19, p.1633), “rebounding hail” (21, p.1633), or “dancing rocks” (23, p.1633) and eventually the natural disasters will accompanied by man-made destruction as “Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war” (29-30, p.1634)! Coleridge on one hand reinforces that man and nature are inseparable and one the other uses the energy of nature to represent the spontaneous spurring of emotions in the poet’s mind.
In two works by Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, both works regard the imagination as vitally important. In the Ancient Mariner, the imagination (or rather, the lack of it) condemns the Mariner to a kind of hell, with the fiends of sterility, solitude, and loneliness: “’God save thee, Ancient Mariner, from the fiends that plague thee thus! Why look’st thou so?’ ‘With my crossbow I shot the Albatross’”. In Kubla Khan, the imagination of an external being, the narrator that Coleridge created, the ideal critic, can create a masterpiece that far outstrips the meager piece of work that even the emperor of a huge, rich civilization can produce: “I would build that dome in air, a sunny dome! Those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, and all should cry, Beware! Beware!” In Kubla Khan, the imagination can even make people fear an otherwise inconsequential event, sequence, or organism.