Saturday 24 October 2020

Kubla Khan Continued 2


Kubla Khan Continued 1 is here.

[This is part 2 of an occasional, and I'm perfectly aware pointless, series, in which I body-forth a possible completion of Coleridge's famous ‘Kubla Khan’. You know the story: out walking in the Somerset countryside, STC stopped off at a local farm (Adam Nicolson thinks it was Withycombe Farm in the village of Culbone, near Porlock) troubled with an attack of ‘dysentery’. He took a slug of opium to deal with his diarrhoea, blissed out for a while, and returned to consciousness with, so he claimed, ‘Kubla Khan’ fully formed in his head. Straightaway he began writing the poem out, only to be interrupted ‘by a person on business from Porlock’ who ‘detained by him above an hour’, such that ‘on his return to his room [he] found to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purpose of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast’. There is some reason to doubt the absolute verisimilitude of this account. And indeed, if we're honest, there are two ways, and not a third, of apprehending ‘Kubla Khan’ as a poem. One is to say, with Harold Bloom, that it's not only not a fragment, it's actually one of the most perfectly finished and perfect poems in English. The other is to take a more, let's say, Thomas McFarland approach and say: yes, it is a fragment, but its fragmentariness is integral to its effectiveness, and the urge to ‘complete’ it does a kind of violence to the text's evocative distinctiveness. Both possibilities exclude the notional third, that it's a fragment worth continuing. Still, here we are. Unable to offer any kind of defence of my actions at this point, in this place (although I do have a nascent Notes Towards a Theory of Aesthetic Defragmentation brewing) I shall step discretely back into the shadows, pausing only to note that I take my cue as to the possible direction Coleridge would have taken this poem, had he completed it, from this old post.]

PART II

The Khan’s Armada jostled in the bay
Barge, Warship, Doww,
Each keel, each prow
And chiming hollow hull
Clanging flank to flank
Innumerable in rank:
Whilst the tide strains full
Red marks the grisly sky at break of day
And gongs make signal to speed the boats away
Cutting sea as earth is cut by plough.

Depart! Depart!
For the far Nipponian shore
            And war!
Anchors upstart!
In long procession, more and more.
The last boat lingers on the breaking tide.
Three soul-expanding shouts the skies divide;
Three wild, responsive cheers re-echo wide.
All sweet vibration 
Tremble in the ear
As if in holy fear
Approaching the human mind
In humblest prostration.
The last delightful sounds they'll ever hear!

Still the white signal, fading, strains the eyes,
Still the lorn lover with his hand replies:
Till melting into air—the object lost
And duty sternly calling to his post,
Twixt him and joy th'eternal curtain's drawn,
No more of bliss to know returning dawn. 
Sailing a stilly sea, the fleet as one
Turns backward stern upon the setting sun.

How beautiful this ocean night!
Dewy stars supply the light,
No mist obscures, no little cloud
Breaks the whole serene of sky.
In full-swarmed glory starlights now
Flit firefly-like about the prow
As Kubla’s fleet skim silvery by:
Close hugging every warlike ark
The ocean’s bosom girdled with the dark.
How beautiful is night!

But, eye, descend, O descend!
To where the depths of water end
Bitumen-black bed of ocean's ground
Unlit, unseen, opaque to sound:
                         Descend!
Leave far above the never ceasing roar
Of titan-waves whose grip will break the shore
From rock to boulder and so to sand.
Descend to where air, sky and land
And merely phantasmic dreams:
To where all drowning bodies tend
To where hot seabed chasms rend
In utter silence and dark
                          Descend!
Blackening in ultimate deep
To where a timeless oozeing swells
To where ebon Atar, spirit, dwells
Compressed of ancient malice, half-asleep
Half-dreaming of all ruin’s creep
That spreads a boneless tentic arm
And wills man’s harm.

Ancestral spirits, they that drave
And urged proud Kublai on to war
Appearing flitting-wise in dreams
That sank, as all sinks, through ocean’s streams
Down to the monster in its cave
Within his dreaming dire and huge
With magick power of subterfuge
And mingling with the roar
Of the portentous tides
That under upper waters pour
Water slides and aye backslides.
Atar half-woke to half-declaim
In abysmal growl a spell infame:
He pronounced the deep unholy name.
Pronounced it thrice, pronounced it dire
To stir a whirlpool in that mire
That rose to where the waves aspire.

Whence enmity arose between
Th’ancestral powers of Xanadu
And this far-sunken power marine
None can tell the story true.
We only know Atar stands gainst
The Chinee empire pressing east:
And makes their coast impermious fence
Barring imperial ambition hence
Vowing they never be released.

Summoned by deep art, storms appear
Swift from the breezy north's assertive gales:
A raging hurl of tidal atmosphere
T’impel the course and swell the yielding sails
A rush the trembling craft past power to steer.

Before the sightless breeze the vessels fly
Clambers the mountain sea, t’approach the sky
And plunge again into the wave-trough nigh.
That now the refluent fleet evades the sight,
High-briny peaks and plunging water vales

Or thund'ring down the depths that foam below,
Ploughs up the surging brine with dashing prow.
The rattling cordage whirls, the sail-yards strain,
The winding pipe re-echoes o'er the main:

Firm in their stations ply the obedient crew,
To trim the lines, and strain the rudder
Haul on the beating sheets with sinew'd force,
Wrestling the vast machine’s unsteady course
Whist wind and magic make the beams shudder
               And darkness palls
               As wind heaps walls
Of water side on side to block all view.

A mast is rent
A keel is cracked
And down is sent
Ruined and racked
Warship and barge, small and large.
As gales crash in and fierce rebound
Ship after ship staggers and is drowned


*******

Far round the globe
Th’Abyssin mantissa rolls to white her eyes
And moans a magnifying chant.
She seats herself upon the earth,
Bows her head, tucks tight her robe
While hairgirt dwarfs their queen attend
Keeping holy distance til the trance doth end.* 

Phantoms of sublimity flit
Death and rebirth
A vision of a mighty fo'csle split
And crashed into the ocean
Reverberating through the depths
She sees how the winds bursting through
From ev'ry point are whirl'd, and still renew
Their circuit: rapid torrents gushing spray
In rivers that their tribute to the Ocean pay,
Whose vast will never overswell its shores.
For strait, in vapours, by the Sun exhaled
Or through Earth's secret caverns, it restores
All back again in misty cloudhead veiled.
So does the maiden’s hymn
Encircle back into its source
Web'd mystic beauties brim
Paths intricately retrouse.
The circled dome, the whirlpool’s grip!
Lamenting each engulféd ship.

He who crossed the waters
For rich Nippon’s land
With his many Sons and Daughters
And Armies to command.
Found them all the Children
Of one great Lord of Love
Whose Mercy from a thunderhead
Strikes scorpion-lightning in a spread
White antlers from above.
What the meed of her Song?
That the ceaseless on-flow
And myriad Echo
Which from the welcoming Hearts of the Pure
Repeats and works ever to prolong
Each difference Tone all meanings Just
Until in still-harmonious notes all crumbles into dust.

----------
‘In the middle of Abyssinia there are men called Pyganmies, who speak the same language as the other inhabitants of the country. They are very short, the tallest being only two cubits in height, most of them only one and a half. Their hair is very long, going down to the knees and even lower, and their beards are larger than those of any other men. When their beards are full grown they leave off wearing clothes and let the hair of their head fall down behind far below the knees, while their beard trails down to the feet in front. When their body is thus entirely covered with hair they fasten it round them with a girdle, so that it serves them for clothes. Their sheep are no bigger than lambs, their oxen, asses, horses, mules, and other beasts of burden about the size of rams. 3000 of them attend on the monarch of Abyssinia.’ Ctesius INDIKA