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Question
The poem is a product of the subconscious fusion of dream images and ideas from Coleridge’s wide reading. Which of the details in the poem do you think are factual, and which imaginary? Surf the internet to get interesting details.
Solution
Coleridge’s Kubla Khan is a poem perceived in a dream under the effect of opium intake. However, the poet has adopted certain historical and contemporary facts and transformed or provided them with a space that is completely woven through his sublime and romantic imagination.
The poet talks about “a stately pleasure-dome”, which was actually built in the Mongolian summer capital by the Emperor of Tartary, Kubla, who was the grandson of Genghis Khan. But Coleridge moves beyond this concrete dome and perceives it as a form of beauty encapsulating the forces of nature. He is more drawn to the beauty and sublimity of the gardens, the magical brooks, and tinkling streams which are of course the products of his imagination. The setting is again a real one- Xanadu but the horrifying, chaotic picture of the tumultuous, violent, “savage” nature, full of “erotic” feeling of the “wailing woman crying for her demon lover” is again his own romantic fantasy.
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| 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! 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. 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! |
- How is the chasm described in these lines?
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- An apt antonym for the word ‘savage’ is ______.
- civilized
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Answer the following question in 120-150 words.
Comment on the significance of the river Alph in "Kubla Khan"?
