Pantisocracy

 

It's a word that is, as you can see from this screenshot (click to embiggen), in the OED now: ‘a form of social organization in which all members are equal in social position and responsibility, usually also having property in common; a political doctrine advocating this. Chiefly with reference to the political ideas of a group of writers and intellectuals of the 1790s, including Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.’ 

So, yes: Coleridge and Southey planned for a time to establish a Pantisocratic, utopian community in Kentucky: twelve married couples, clearing an area of land and living thereupon with all labour and possessions in common. Later they pinned their hopes upon the Susquehanna River in Maryland/ Pennsylvania. Coleridge wrote to Southey [6th September 1794] with the calculation that ‘£2000 will do’, that ‘we shall buy the land a great deal cheaper when we arrive in America than we could do in England.’ He added, rather over-optimistically, ‘that twelve men may easily clear 300 acres in four or five months’, adding that he had been speaking to an agent who ‘recommends the Susquehannah for its excessive beauty and its security from hostile Indians.’ Finally, as the project recoiled from its encounter with the Reality Principle, not least in financial terms, Southey proposed moving themselves and their wives instead to Wales, a downgrading of ambition that disappointed Coleridge muchly. In the end it all came to nothing.

The OED entry at the head of this post cites Southey as the first to use the word in print, but it was Coleridge's coinage: the root of the word being the Greek ἰσοκρατία. So: as democracy is rule by the demos, or people; as oligarchy is rule by the oligos or few, and as aristocracy is rule by the aristos or best (supposedly), so isocracy is rule by equals (as an isoscles triangle is one whose two longest sides are of equal length). Coleridge adds in the παντ-, or παν-, pan-, meaning all, to show not only that all will rule but that all will rule as equals. As Michael Murphy notes:

Ian Wylie argues that Pantisocracy was modelled on ‘the early Christian communities of the first centuries’; Kelvin Everest views the scheme as ‘a means of escape from the hostility of anti-jacobin England’ (influenced by Hartley’s Unitarianism); J. A. Appleyard reads Pantisocracy in terms of the philosophical systems of Hartley, Priestley, and Godwin; Peter Kitson examines the influence of Harrington and Puritan utopias; Leonard Deen focuses on the influence of Godwin, the Bible, and Hartley; Robert Sayre notes the coexisting traditions of the French Revolution and Romantic Utopianism; Stuart Andrews identifies a utopianism that has its roots in the American Revolution; and E. Logan explores Coleridge’s use of American travel accounts.

Godwin and Priestly were certainly the most immediate inspirations, at least so far as Coleridge was concerned. Writing to Southey [21st October 1794] he announced that ‘in the book of Pantisocracy I hope to have comprised all that is good in Godwin’ [Collected Letters 1:115] ... ‘all that was good’ being Coleridge's way of announcing that he was jettisoning the humanist and atheistical ‘bad’. In other letters he added to Godwinian thought Hartley’s system of association, from The Observations on Man (1749), extrapolating from principles of mental and perceptual connection of ideas, feelings and sensations to social connections of fellowship, ethics and benevolence: ‘the ardour of private Attachments makes Philanthropy a necessary habit of the Soul. I love my Friend—such as he is, all mankind are or might be! The deduction is evident. Philanthropy (and indeed every other Virtue) is a thing of Concretion—Some home-born Feeling is the centre of the Ball, that, rolling on thro’ Life collects and assimilates every congenial Affection. [Collected Letters 1:86].

There's been a lot written on Coleridge's concept of Pantisocracy, but less on its origins as a piece of terminology. What was in Coleridge's mind as he coined the word? There are two possible answers I think. One is that he was reading-up ancient history. The crucial thing here is that various Greek city-states had various ideas of governance, democracy (as at Athens) being only one among many. There were other (as we might say) ‘democratic’ social models in the larger environment. And, to be specific, the word ἰσοκρατία, meaning a social system of ‘equal power’, is a word only used, in this political sense, by Herodotus. He uses it to describe not a Greek polis but a people in Asia Minor: the Issedones. Interestingly, their radical equality of social distribution was a specifically gendered matter: δὲ δίκαιοι καὶ οὗτοι λέγονται εἶναι, ἰσοκρατέες δὲ ὁμοίως αἱ γυναῖκες τοῖσι ἀνδράσι ‘these are said to be a law-abiding people, too, and the women to have equal power [ἰσοκρατέες] with the men’ [Herodotus 2:26.2]. In other words, if democracy is the rule by the demos excluding women, foreigners and slaves, isocracy is the rule by men and women. Is that what Coleridge had in mind?

There's another possibility, which is that Coleridge came upon the word not in Herodotus but Galen. This second-century Greek physician used the word in a physiological rather than a political sense: a well-balanced individual enjoyed health, he argued, on account of his or her inner ἰσο-κράτεια [‘equilibrium, equivalence’; Galen Historia Philogia, 126]. This makes more sense to me, as a source for Coleridge's neologism: that all (pan) should be in equilibrium for a perfect society. And if it's where Coleridge found the word it's interesting because it suggests he was reading Galen quite early in the 1790s Searching his corpus I can only find much later, occasional Galenic references, usually where Galen is (for instance) quoted in ‘Sennertus’, the 17th-century German physician Daniel Sennert. So that would be interesting.

Which is more likely, do you think? That Coleridge was extrapolating Heorodotian ideas of social democracy into the modern 1790s? Or that he was thinking of social equality in physiological terms? 

Coca-Coleridge

 

"The Safety of the Country" (1807): A New Coleridge Poem?

 

New in the sense of hitherto unnoticed. This is only speculative, but on balance I'd say these verses are by Coleridge. See what you think.

So, my starting point was this eight-line political squib, which certainly is by Coleridge: ‘The Taste of the Times’:

Some whim or fancy pleases every age;
For talents premature ’tis now the rage.
In Music how great Handel would have smil'd
T' have seen whole crowds enraptur'd with a child!
A Garrick we have had in little Betty,
And now, we're told, we have a Pitt in Petty.
All must allow, since thus it is decreed.
He is a very Petty Pitt indeed.

J. C. C. Mays in his edition of the Poetical Works has this as #384, and records in the headnote that ‘the only known text of the poem is a transcript by John Taylor Coleridge in his Commonplace book, subscribed “S.T.C.”’ 

The joke here concerns the extreme youth of Lord Henry Petty, who, though only 25, was Chancellor of the Exchequer in Greville's ‘Ministry of All the Talents’, the government which succeeded the death of Pitt in January 1806. Coleridge returned to England from Malta on the 17th August that year and presumably wrote the poem thereafter. Mays adds, shrewdly, ‘it is likely that the poem was copied from a contemporary newspaper which has not been traced.’

Being curious I checked, and Mays is right: this poem appeared in the Morning Post 25th February 1807. I wasn’t able to find an actual copy of the paper, short of paying a hefty subscription for full access to the British Newspaper Archives database, but I did find a copy of the anthology The Spirit of the Public Journals 1807: Being an Impartial Selection of the Most Ingenious Essays and Jeux D'Espirit That Appear in the Newspapers and Other Publications, Volume 11 (1808), a publication which selected and reprinted choice verse and prose from a range of British papers. And there is Coleridge’s poem, subscripted ‘From the Morning Post’, and with a few variants from the version Mays, following JTC, prints:

Some whim or fancy pleases every age;
And talents premature are now the rage.
In music how great Handel would have smil'd
T' have seen whole crowds in raptures with a child!
A Garrick we have had in little Betty,
And now, we're told, we have a Pitt in Petty.
All must allow, since thus it is decreed.
He is a very Petty Pitt indeed.

The child singer famous for performing Handel was Maria Poole, later Mrs Dickons, who was only six years old when she started performing, and who, engaged by Covent Garden in the 1790s, drew large crowds. The reference to ‘Betty’ is to a famous child actor who first trod the boards in December 1804 at the age of 13: William Henry West Betty (1791 -1874), known as ‘the Young Roscius’. Betty's father auditioned the boy before Michael Atkins, manager of the Belfast Theatre, who said ‘I never dared to indulge in the hope of seeing another Garrick, but I have seen an infant Garrick in Betty.’   

So far so trivial: nice to trace the poem (though it is a very minor piece of Coleridge), and to have a text closer, even if only in small ways, to what STC actually wrote. 

But here's the kicker: because, as you can see from the screenshot at the head of this post, The Spirit of the Public Journals prints ‘The Taste of the Times’ as a twofer, together with a similarly light-hearted political squib, ‘The Safety of the Country’:

                    — — Non deficit alter Aureus;
                 et simili frondescit virga metallo.

When Richmond's great Duke long ago sallied forth,
He entrench’d the whole country—south, east, west, and north;
For he held that this mis’rable nation of ours
Must be sav'd by mud walls, palisadoes, and towers.
Next Windham, with projects and crotchets quite new,
Comes forward (for he will be Quixotting too)
And with Crawfurd, as Sancho and Dapple to back him,
He defies all the windmills on earth to attack him;
Our army, which cost us such trouble to train,
He begs to set free, to enlist them again;
Our militia, he thinks, to our strength may conduce,
If, to make them more strong, you their numbers reduce;
While the poor volunteers, those unfortunate elves!
He dresses in green—to be kill'd by themselves:
And their leaders—whom fortune and rank may make prouder,
He mentions as proper provision for powder.
Jack Tar, who has heard them these projects discuss,
Exclaims— “Let them leave but the ocean to us;
We care not a jot what these lubbers are a’ter—
They shall find that the land shall be sav’d by the water.”
             MILITARIS

Is this Coleridge too? JTC didn't think it worth copying-out into his memorandum book (perhaps it was too long; or perhaps he just didn't like it. It's not as witty as ‘The Taste of the Times’, I think). The target of this satire is William Windham, a member, like Petty, of the the Ministry of All the Talents in 1806–7. As Secretary for War and the Colonies, Windham undertook various reforms of the army (specifically, he abolished the ballot for the militia to ensure that it was staffed with volunteers rather than impressed men, and he limited service in the Army to seven years, hoping thereby to attract more recruits. This poem, clearly, thinks both measures bad ones.) The Latin epigraph is from Vergil, Aeneid 6:144-45 ‘[when the first bough is torn off], a second also of gold soon follows, and a new twig shoots forth leaves of the same metal.’ Though, as you can see, the poet has added a non to the start of this quotation, negating it: so once the first twig is torn off, no golden bough succeeds.

The pseudonym ‘Militaris’ is not one that Coleridge uses elsewhere, but so far as I can see neither did anyone else. I've searched for other poems by ‘Militaris’ and can't find any, either in the Morning Post (which can be searched at the British Newspaper Archives, although if you actually want to access the results of your search you need to pay them a subscription fee), or in any other publication of the period. And STC did use a variety of pseudonyms. It doesn't seem impossible to me that he might pick this name for a squib directed at the Secretary of State for War.

My main point is that the approach of both poems is the same: pick a member of the Ministry of All the Talents, then make fun of them by riffing on their name. In the first poem, it's ‘Petty’, as ‘petty’, ‘Pitt-y’ and ‘Betty’; in the second one ‘Windham’, as ‘Windmill’ and so to ‘Tilting at Windmills’, Don Quixote and all the rest (‘Dapple’, mentioned, is Sancho Panza's mule; Colonel Crawfurd was an MP and soldier who backed Windham's reforms in the House). What's funny about Petty is that he is so young. What's funny about Windham is that he's so Quixotic.

It really does seem that these two poems go together. So if the first is by Coleridge, then isn't it possible the second is too?

Astounding Novel by John Coleridge!

 John Coleridge? Any relation, I wonder? Alas, no.

‘John Coleridge’ was one of the pseudonyms used by the US author brothers Earl Andrew Binder (1904-1966), who was born in Austria-Hungary and came to the US in 1910, and Otto Oscar Binder (1911-1975), who was the more active (and ultimately better known) of the two; after approximately 1934, when Earl became inactive as a writer, Otto continued to sign himself Eando Binder, so that some Eando Binder books – they were all published after 1940; several contain pre-1935 material – are collaborative and some by Otto alone. Together the brothers wrote eleven stories as John Coleridge and one as Dean D O'Brien, while Otto alone also wrote as Gordon A Giles and, later, as Ione Frances (or Ian Francis) Turek (forms of his wife's maiden name), did some work under the name Will Garth, and finally published a couple of novels under his own name. A third brother, Jack Binder was an illustrator who did much of the early drawing for Captain Marvel, which was regularly scripted by Otto. The brothers all retained the German pronunciation of their surname, with a short i.

Still: STC was certainly interested in ‘the life beyond ...’  

Water, Water Everywhere ...

 

Could these be Coleridge's most famous lines?

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink. [Ancient Mariner (1834 version), lines 119-122]

Where did they come from? Out of Coleridge's pure imagination, perhaps. Still: ‘it is scarcely practicable for a man,’ as he once noted, ‘to write in the ornamented style on any subject without finding his poem, against his will and without his previous consciousness, a cento of lines that had pre-existed in other works’ [Griggs (ed), Coleridge: Collected Letters (1956-71), 3:469-70].

We know that Coleridge read Angelo Poliziano, or Politian (1454-94). He talks about him in Church and State [CC 10:64] and variously in the Marginalia and Notebooks [374, 1673, 2670]. And in the Biographia he mocks George Canning for plagiarising some Poliziano in his university prize-winning poem Iter ad Meccam, ‘The Pilgrimage to Mecca’:

‘In the Nutricia of Politian, there occurs this line:

“Pura coloratos interstrepit unda lapillos.”

Casting my eye on a University prize poem, I met this line:

“Lactea purpureos interstrepit unda lapillos.”

Now look out in the Gradus for purus, and you find, as the first synonyme, lacteus; for coloratus, and the first synonyme is purpureas. I mention this by way of elucidating one of the most ordinary processes in the ferrumination of these centos.’ [Biographia, ch 1]

Centos again. Coleridge's mind was running on questions of plagiary, advertent or inadvertent. The first line of Latin quoted there (it's from Poliziano’s Rustica rather than his Nutricia, but who's counting) means: ‘the pure stream goes murmuring over little coloured pebbles’. The plagiarised line means: ‘the milk-white stream goes murmuring over the little purple pebbles.’ Canning capped his time as a student at Oxford by winning the poetry prize in 1789. He went on, of course, to become Prime Minister. Here Coleridge pays back the ridicule Canning had subjected him to in his reactionary newspaper The Anti-Jacobin, by accusing the eminent statement of plagiary (‘ferrumination’ seals the joke: the Latin ferrumino means ‘to cement, solder, join’, and ‘soldering’ is, of course, the principle strategy involved in canning, a process patented in 1810). 

What does all this have to do with the Ancient Mariner? Well, here's one of Poliziano's more famous short poems, ‘In Amicam’ [Epigrammata, 64]:

Allicis, expellis, sequeris, fugis, es pia, et es trux;
   me vis, me non vis, me crucias, et amas.
promittis, promissa negas, spem mi eripis, et das.
   iam iam ego vel sortem Tantale malo tuam.
durum ferre sitim circum salientibus undis,
   durius in medio nectare ferre sitim.

P.'s ‘amica’ is the woman he loves, and her treatment of him is not consistent. Tricky to capture the compression of the Latin in English, mind. Here's a fairly slack version:

You lure me, you banish me; you follow, you flee; you're kind and are cruel;
   you want me, you don't want me; you torment me, you're in love.
You promise then deny your promise, you snatch away my hope and offer it.
   Right now I feel like Tantalus in wanting you:
how hard my thirst, surrounded by salty waves,
   how hard my thirst in the midst of such nectar!

Here's another version:

You tease, reject; follow, flee; are kind, cruel;
   want me, don't want; torment me, are loving.
You vow, break your vow, crush hope and give it.
   Right now I'm Tantalus in wanting you:
hard thirst surrounded by salty waves,
   hard in the midst of such nectar to thirst

That's probably a bit elliptical. At any rate, it strikes me that Coleridge's potent image of desperate thirst in the midst of salt water has an antecedent in Poliziano's little love poem. Then again, I'm not accusing him of Canning-like plagiary. These things register, sinking into the mulch of the creative imagination, and are reworked. By excerpting the image from Poliziano's mannered itinerary of erotic contrasts Coleridge frees it from its rather starchy wit and re-somatizes it as something universal, something indeed existential. Immature poets, as Eliot said, imitate, mature poets steal and good poets make what they take into something better.

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

Kubla Khan Continued 1

: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 pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,
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.]