:1:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
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!
The shadow of the dome of pleasureIt was a miracle of rare device,
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
:2:
Tis Taindu's golden square and street
And Xandu's spacious vales and trees
Where many pilgrim travellers meet
All chanting for an end to peace.
“To war!” they cry
“All glory ay!
Where shields ring and arrows fly!”
Proud Kublai on a throne of jet
Beneath a canopy of gold
Nods one
Nod all
And ever and far off still grinds the sound
Of that unseen and mighty river
Whose deep sublime full fall
Passing far beneath the ground
Where rock and darkness aye dissever
To drive with force along its course
And gush unseen into unknown abysses
Home to forgetfulnesses of human wishes
Kubla himself approaches
Astride a Mongol steed
And eighty wooden coaches
Follow his imperial lead.
Who taught thee thus to venture down th' abyss
And ope the regions of primeval bliss?
A song, a song
Is borne along!
With melody as fine as its through-pulse is strong!
Whether thy Chinee orgies I behold,
Or Arimaspian rich with conquer'd gold;
Hymalian heights whereon delusive sprites
Of bitter frost and vagrant tempest play
Spout smoaks of snow through the day
And lead the wandering to their doom by night
Where'er
This air
Will travel there
And thrill my mind's true ear and lift me past despair!
The woodsman stands beneath the arch
Of drooping birch or feathery larch,
Or mountain-ash, that o'er it bends,
And sees some streamlet as it wends;
Some brook whose tune its course betrays,
As it is drawn to feed the hidden ways
Of mighty Alph the hidden.
The woodsman has his new command
To fell the trees that dot the land
To hew the timbers into mighty strips
That best can fit a navy's ships.
To planks of oak and planks of pine;
And water gives itself to brine.
All as the Khan has bidden.
To trace the rivers where they flow,
Serenely brawling, fiercely slow
Down to the sea where all streams go.
Streams that over summits leap,
Or in rock-scooped basins sleep;
Pools that deeper are than deep.
Bursting foam in bright cascade,
Thronged with lotus in the shade
Freighted with vessels timber-made.
Till earth and sky themselves grow mute,
The maiden's floating songs salute
The Khan's great armys route:
Such the flow and such the dance
Where soldiers strut and horses prance
Astrologer and Necromance
Provisioner and Royal Scribe
Forsworn and tied to Kublai's tribe
Advance! Advance!
A million men! A million men!
Dance stately out and through the glen
And pass beyond the homeland's ken.
Ten thousand ships! Ten thousand craft!
From galleon-yacht to simple raft,
With Kublai's horde as cargo draught!
***
Wouldst thou know the true most truly,
More than middling mortals find?
Drink close fragrance from the lily
Than faint odour on the wind?
Wouldst thou know why sunlight pauses
To cast its shadows on the mind?
Know of what the moon discourses
Looking down on humankind?
Then strike the cithar and the timbrel!
Pound at drums and shake the cymbal
Cast thy voice o'er the restless sea
Of aye-surging infinity!
Grief shall ope the founts of truth,
And heaven sing the truth to thee.
We knew this at our earliest birth
And will again when we quit this earth
And if, between, our memory
Cannot quite grasp such mystery
We need but patience, patience now
Await aye still th' immortan How.
Patience child of grief
The weary unrelief
Patience who is strong
From grief that is lifelong.
Grief in darkling manner freeing.
Wouldst thou yet unriddle of Being
Further than others can?
Sorrow shall give thine eyes new lustre
Sorrow's trumpet is thy muster
That Providence and Mars thus toy with man
To end what it began.
To Love and Sorrow all Nature draws;
If the riddle be read,
The code behind eternal laws
And each divergent thread
Of its mazy texture, and discover:
Whence the ravel spread.
Beside the summer sea I stand,
Where slow billows swelling shine.
How beautiful this pearly sand!
That waves, and winds, and years refine!
Be this delicious quiet mine—
The joy of youth, so sweet before,
When I could thus my frame recline,
And watch th’ entangled weeds ashore!
[Part 2 of this continuation is here.]
Ah, what a great way to begin September. You've entered the fray!
ReplyDeleteDo you think of this as an attempt to recover the fragments of STC's vision that just disappeared on him? Or do you regard this as your own original embroidery on a tapestry Coleridge left for us (as well as himself) to puzzle over?
Thanks Bill! It's a bit of both, I think (though that's a fence-sitty answer, I know). So this is all me, obviously; but I have some sense, I think, of how Coleridge was going to complete his poem, and if I persevere that's where I'll take it: I talk about it in this old blogpost.
DeleteInteresting, Adam. I'm of the belief that, whatever there was to the vision, the poem we've got is all there ever was. So, I'm with Bloom on the "degree of formal finish and harmony." And, I'm with a remark by Humphrey House that, if it weren't for the preface, we'd never suspect there was any more. Moreover, I sometimes think that, if we only had the first 36 lines we'd have no reason to suspect the existence of "damsel with a dulcimer" etc.
DeleteBut if that last is the case, it leaves open the possibility that we can grant Humphrey House his point, and yet there is still the opportunity of more to come, but just not in the ordinary narrative way. I mean, here we have Walter Shandy coming down the stairs when, amid step, woosh! he's whisked off to Titan. How strange, we think. Would it be any stranger, though, if, even before he's been able to sink a line into the water beneath the ice, zoom! he's off again, this time to a forgotten ficcione by Borges? From there it's but a hop skip and a jump to the halls of Montezuma, and then we're off to see the Wizard. Can the Tardis be far behind?
I agree with you (and Bloom, and House) that the poem, qua poem, exhibits really remarkable poise and finish (such that there is real hubris as well as ludicrousness in attempting to "complete" it). But I also think that the preface is part of the poem, in the way Eliot's notes to The Waste Land are part of The Waste Land; and that considering the whole text involves us in Romantic Irony, in its Schlegelian and later metatextual and pomo forms.
Delete(... which is, I know, just to restate your Shandeian point ...)
DeleteWhen I was an undergraduate I wrote a paper arguing that, by asserting its own incompleteness in the second part, the poem thereby completes itself. And that was before deconstruction had become a thing, though three years after Derrida had delivered his Lévi-Strauss paper at the structuralism conference. In retrospect, that seems a reasonable thing for an undergraduate to do. As a critical method though, it can get rather thin.
DeleteNot to dwell on minutiae at a moment of your exceedingly fine poem's debut, but "And thrill my mind's true ear" is far more elegant than Cottle's "mental ear"
ReplyDeleteThank you, "Unknown".
Delete"throne of jet" reminds me of something like "BONE of jet ... all bare and black I ween" I cant recall precisely. Very Coleridgean. So many branches of imagination here unfold true to the upshooting course of the original. And like Jove fed with wild milk and honey at his birth - the bees recognize his authority. But to openly invoke Mars ? Not sure Coleridge would directly reference one of the seven in a Mystery poem.
ReplyDeleteAnd, to your lines on riddles, code, and unriddling, we might have the following reference to Brown's Pseudodoxia Epigraphia:
ReplyDeleteWeave a circle 'round him, eldest,
Thrice Great Hermes Trismegistus
I cant remember the wording precisely, but it's something like "if we be measured by the zone of time ... do we weave at last a line or circle about the eldest ...and commensurate the sphere of Thrice Great Hermes". The point at the center of a thousand circlets, collapses and once again becomes a mirror. Mars and Venus in a love/war embrace. Jove and the great encircling river Okeanos. These are physiosophemes (philosophemes, but Coleridge refers to them as "physiosophemes").
Pseudodoxia EpiDEMICA - by Sir Thomas Browne. Page 294:
Delete"And therefore, although we be measured by the Zone of time, and the flowing and continued instants thereof, do weave at last a line and circle about the eldest; yet can we not thus commensurate the sphere of Trismegistus"
This book was "Presented by Charles Lamb to STC 10 March 1804 who presented it to Sara Hutchinson that day". There may have been earlier copies referenced by Coleridge.