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Question
What is the discordant note heard at the end of the third stanza? Can we relate this to the grandeur and turmoil that are a part of an emperor’s life?
Solution
In the third stanza, the speaker calls up Xanadu along with a queer spirit, stranger than the surrounding palace, caverns, and the ocean. The speaker is overwhelmed by the images and imagines to have been turned into real and concrete. So, he cries out “Beware, Beware!” while describing the creature possessing “flashing eyes” and “floating hair”. There is a dichotomy as to who this strange creature refers to. Thus, it marks the upcoming event of something sinister. This song and his vision become overpowering enough, so much so that the speaker turns into some “God”, consuming “honey-dew” and “the milk of Paradise”. Critics argue this image to be the resultant effect of intake of opium while others have negated this and tried to explain it as a final vision of Kubla Khan, turned into some sort of a strange, mysterious creature. Thus, an inexplicable, bizarre atmosphere of mysticism is created at the end of the third stanza.
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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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- What does the phrase By woman wailing for demon-lover mean?
- 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"?
