Stylistic Analysis Kubla khan

Stylistic Analysis   SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834)   KUBLA KHAN 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.                            5                                          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,       10                   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         15                      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           20                            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         25                       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 !               30                                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,                 35                                           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,                40                                             Singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight 't would win me, That with music loud and long,                      45                                                  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!                50                                       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.   BY SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE             The poem Kubla Khan was inspired by the great Kublai Khan (this is an example of one of the author's numerous spelling errors in this poem).He was, historically, a thirteenth-century descendant of Genghis Khan who had built the palace of K'ai P'ing, which is translated to a homophone of Xanadu. This poem is divided into two parts. 1) First one, (written in third person), the author talks about the place that Kubla Khan wanted to build his palace. It is a description of a dome and large garden. This is portrayed as earthly heaven, surrounded by ancient forests, blooming and bright. It begins with the allusion to the sacred river Alph. All related to nature. So that is the explanation of the born, life and death of that river into the sea. One of the topics that we found in the poem is paganism against Christianity, related to the river Alph too. That means referring to an underground river that passed through dimensions that could not be understood by any man, and then emptying into an underground sea. Another topic that the poem introduces is biblical reference when it talks about the garden. It is referring to the Garden of Eden: 'gardens bright with sinuous rills.' (line 8) ‘Sinuous rills’ can be represented as two different metaphors: 'rills' can mean either a stream or a valley on the moon. The moon is seen as the source of all creativity in romantic idealism, and so this first metaphor is significant in the poem. On the contrary, when it speaks of 'forests ancient as the hills,/ Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.' (lines 10-11), this reference to the sun contrasts with the valleys on the moon. The second metaphor refers to that of the snake in the Garden of Eden. The word sinuous implies snakelike, and the connection of these small tributaries to the river Alph. The author is talking about a woman who is Eve, and she is 'wailing' for the source of her desires, literally her demon lover, but figuratively the apple that got her threw out of Eden.             Another symbolical characteristic that we found in the poem is the number five. It can be found twice in Kubla Khan, the first time when speaking of Khan's palace of Xanadu. Coleridge says 'twice five miles' instead of simply saying ten. The second use of the number five is after the pleasure dome has been subdued by nature's wrath. The significance of the number five is huge in paganism. The number five refers to the fifth element, spirit, which in pagan belief is the source of all magic and life on Earth. Another number that we found in the poem is number three. The three circles that they 'weave' around him are both an ancient, superstitious ritual to keep an evil spirit at bay, and a reference to the holy trinity.             In the second part of the poem, there is a change in subject, writing and tone. While in the first line of the poem begins ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan’ (line 1) referring to a male, the second part of the poem is referred to a female character ‘A damsel with a dulcimer’ (line 37), emphasizing the change in sections and the difference between paganism and Christianity, as well as continuing Coleridge's obsession with sex in nature. The poem closes talking about ‘And drunk milk of Paradise’ (line 54), here the author maybe tries to say that his life has been very luxury and he was a powerful man. But can not forget that Coleridge was an opium addict, and maybe in one of that ‘trips’ that he had, saw that land Xanadu, with its leader Kubla Khan, and later wrote that poem to have constancy of what he have lived. It seems that was his addiction what made the poem of only one topic and the lack of succession on the facts that he explains, because the poet could write what he thoughts at that moment[1]. Another point to consider is the society of Coleridge’s time. Actually he lived in a period called the Napoleonic era. At this time, the French Revolution was in its final period, and also the Industrial Revolution could influence his writings, as it took place in the late XVIII century. The Industrial Revolution brought several changes in society that affected people, for example the urbanization, changes in agriculture, introduction of railways, new machineries etc. Like Coleridge’s personality, his writings have a loose and disorganised connection. His philosophy of unity is one of the fundamental contexts of his writings. At that time, there are many political and social changes in Britain and Europe. He moves from radical to conservative, from necessitarian rationalist to philosophical idealism and Anglican Christianity. So that this representative qualities give importance to Coleridge’s successes but more to his failures. But his most considerable influence knew his closest friend, William Wordsworth. The poetry that produce in that period of intimacy with the Wordsworth family, constitutes perhaps his least claim to greatness. The ‘Conversation’ poems were mainly written at this time, as were ‘The Ancient Mariner’, conceived as Coleridge’s principal contribution to the ‘Lyrical Ballads’, and also both ‘Kubla Khan’ and the first part of ‘Christabel’. We appreciate several irregularities through the text. We have found some stylistic resources throughout the poem. First, we can see the predominance of nature over many other topics, so the semantic field of the poem is nature. Some words related to it are: “river”(l.3), “sunless sea”, “tree” (l.9), “forests” (l.10), “sunny” (l.11), “hill” (l.13), “earth” (l.18), “fountain” (l. 19), “rocks” (l.23), “ocean” (l.28), “waves” (l.32), “air” (l.46). We can found many parallelisms, same word beginning many lines, in that poem is the word “And” (l. 8, 10, 17, 23, 28, 29, 40, 48, 49, 52 and 54). Other resource found is a comparison using the link “like”: “Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail” (l. 21). On the second part of the poem we can appreciate another stylistic resource, the hyperbaton: “A damsel with a dulcimer / In a vision once I saw:”, that is not the correct form of writing, because the first line has to go besides the second one, there is a change of lines.  The text uses many exclamations to make the reader feel the musicality of the poem. Repetition of words like “sacred river” (l. 24, 26), “tumult” (l. 28, 29), and the repetition of the word ‘Beware!’(l.49), is an example of a common device in romantic writing. It is when an author wants to stress an image or a feeling that a word is using, he would repeat the word, drilling it into the reader's mind. According to the relation of this poem with the rest of the poet’s poetic production, we can explain that ‘Kubla Khan’ together with ‘Christabel’, are two of the uncompleted Coleridge’s poems.  This was because, according to Coleridge, the parts that have been not found, were lost in the transition between the dream and the awake. That poem is written like a chant and uses the Coleridge yambic tetrameter and the rhythmical alteration.             It is important to mention the situation of the author when he wrote this poem. In fact, it was in the summer of the year 1797, when the author retired himself to a lonely farm house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire, because of an illness. In consequence of a slight indisposition, and anodyne had been prescribed, from the effect of which he feel asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in ‘Purchas’s Pilgrimage:’ ‘here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be build, and a stately garden thereunto: and thus ten miles of fertile ground were enclosed with a wall.’ The author continued for about three hours to a profound sleep, at least for the eternal senses, during which time he was the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed from less than two or three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation of consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had past away[2].             Nowadays we can make a relation between the poem and people who take drugs. Actually, when you swallow some hallucinogenic substances, you get into a “world” where all seems perfect and “fantastic” for you. No worry neither nostalgia could invade your brain. In other words, you do not take control of anything. Totally the contrary, drugs take control of you.    Imagination For Coleridge the imagination is just as poignant as a religious concept as a purely literary one. The same may be said of John Keats. In a letter to Benjamin Bailey he writes of imagination; "I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination - what the imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth - whether it existed before or not...The imagination may be compared to Adam's dream - he awoke and found it truth." This being a reference to the deep sleep that comes over Adam in which he dreams about Eve and awakes to find her created. Keats too references the bible in the existence of the imagination and its role as a creative power. He continues to say, "that it [Adam's Dream] seems to be a conviction that imagination and its empyreal reflection is the same as human life and its spiritual repetition." To imagine is to create. Colderidge makes further reference to the divinity of the imagination in his poem Kubla Kahn: "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 drank the milk of Paradise." (7.50-54) Here we see Coleridge making reference to the Classical Mythology in which one who feds upon the honey dew, and drinks the milk of Paradise is essentially received into a god status. So in essence at the end of the poem Kubla Khan, whom has through his imagination created a unique pleasure dome, actually becomes a god. This embodies the concept of imagination for Colderidge, it is the power of (a) god: creation. It is interesting to note, however, that in his poem Kubla Khan Colderidge makes inferences that perhaps all is not well in Kubla Khan's pleasure dome, with phrases such as "a savage place/haunted by woman wailing for her demon-lover/turmoil seething/a sunny pleasure dome of caves of ice" (4-5.14-36). Coleridge leads us to understand that perhaps the creative power of imagination has an inherently dark side to it. This darker creative concept of the imagination is further developed by Keats. Most notably in his portraying of The Eve of St. Agnes in which he uses darker elements, such as the opening stanza with the words "bitter, chill, cold, frozen, numb," and the passage from the 14th stanza lines 1st and 2nd: "St. Agnes, Ah it is St. Agnes Eve- yet men will murder upon holy days" and many other tools such as Porphyro being in the closet, the ensuing storm outside and of course the very descriptive final stanzas in which we find that all the players in the poem are dead. This is done to give a decisively dark undertone to an otherwise almost Romeo and Juliet seeming romance. In The Eve of St. Agnes, Keats uses his idea of dreaming something only to wake and find its actual creation. Madeline awakens from a dream of Porphyro to find him there. This, mixed with the decidedly dark undertone, casts a shadow of a disturbing nature upon the poem, and leads the reader to ponder upon the darker possibilities of the creative power found in the imagination. In La Belle Dame sans Mercy Keats relates a story of a knight who encounters a lady - enticing, beautiful, and enchanting - who ultimately leads the knight away into a realm from which he cannot or will not return. Thus suggesting that perhaps imagination is the same: It is an alluring, tantalizing, subliminal thing but once we leave the real for the unreal, we may not be unable to return. We may get stuck out there. We may become lost, crippled and lose our purpose in life, becoming in a way dead. The following lines bear the mark of imagination and makes, the poem highly romantic. It was a miracle of rare device.  A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/3952687 Coleridge experienced this feeling of despair and despondency in his battle with his opium addiction, and his portrayal of it is�prevalent in his Odes. As did Keats, knowing that his life would be cut short, and perhaps he would not have time to fulfill his dreams of becoming an acclaimed poet. To these men the imagination was not some abstract frivolous ideal. It is not some subjective realm, some distant far away fantasy, but the world itself. It drove them. It defined them. It shaped them. It ultimately made them. Literally. Super naturalism in kubla khan We should also note that suggestiveness is a very important ingredient of Coleridge’s supernaturalism. We should not forget the closing lines which contain a picture of poetic frenzy. We see here a great blending of the natural and the supernatural. And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His fleshing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice And close eyes with holy dread, For him on honey- drew hath fed. And drunk the milk of Paradise.   Here we see that every line emphasizes the atmosphere of mystery and fear and this is the key note of the poem. Coleridge’s Kubla Khan is a triumph of supernaturalism. It transforms the world of everyday life in to world of enchantment. The atmosphere of strangeness and mystery has effectively and skillfully been created  Kubla Khan Symbolism, Imagery & Wordplay The River AlphThis big, dramatic river takes over most of the first half of the poem. Our speaker is a fan he seems to be constantly drawn back to the river. Descriptions of the river largely focus on ho... The OceanWhen it shows up in the poem, the ocean is a gloomy, mysterious and far-away place. Nothing in particular happens there, except that it marks the end of the river. It's a dead-end, a place where th... Xanadu - a.k.a. The Pleasure DomeThis might sound a little more exciting than it really is. As far as we can tell, it just means a big, especially nice palace, with pretty gardens all around it. The dome is a safe, sunny, happy pl... The CavernsThe caverns are huge, frightening, cold, and fascinating to our speaker. They appear in the poem for just a moment at first, as the place the river passes through. As things move along, however, we... The Woman and Her Demon LoverThis one comes and goes fast, but it's a really powerful image. The line calls up feelings of supernatural power, romance and excitement. A waning moon and the spooky chasm all help set a scene tha...                     §BIBLIOGRAPHY: -         Jackson, H. J., ed. Samuel Taylor Coleridge Selected Poetry. Great Britain: Oxford, 1997. -         Newlyn, Lucy, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge. United Kingdom: Cambridge, 2002.   §WEBGRAPHY: -         Poemas. Colección de poesías – poemas, 2007. 17 Nov. 2007 http://www.poesiaspoemas.com/samuel-taylor-coleridge/kubla-khan -         Wikipedia. The Free Encyclopedia. 18 Nov. 2007 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubla_Khan -         El Sueño de Coleridge. Jorge Luís Borges. 16 Nov. 2007 http://www.caressa.it/testi/borges01.html -         Cosa Fácil. 20 Nov. 2007 http://cosafacil.blogspot.com/2006/08/kubla-khan-el-extasis-de-lo-macabro.html -         Dictionary. From late 18th/Early 19th – Century English, Classical Greek, and Coleridge Inventions to late 20th – Century American. 16 Nov. 2007http://etext.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/resources/dictionary.html#momently [1]Ideas taken from www.4literature.com     [2] Ideas based on Selected Poetry (1997). Oxford University Press by H.J. Jackson.            To have a better understanding of the artistic styles and presentations mentioned above , two of the most widely known art pieces , which have been revised and repainted by many painters on their own version , shall be examined . For the International Gothic Style , The Coronation of The Virgin painted by Gentile de Fabriano shall be observed as to how the figures of its presentation where shown in connection with the message of the art work . For the High Renaissance Style , the version of Madonna ad Child by Lorenzo Di Credi shall be examined as well The Elements of Creative Art Both paintings created by the painters mentioned above have their own characteristics that depicts the message each painter wants to send the viewing public . The following re the elements of art and painting that contributes to the said matter of concern . Hence , both paintings shall be analyzed as to how they are able to convey their message to their audiences Space Analysis The `Coronation of the Virgin ' is more of a wide spaced painting wherein the point of attention is focused upon the arising `Mary ' towards the direction of heaven . This spacious factor in the said painting thus contributes to the sense of centralized visionary element that the painter would want to imply to the viewers.. “Kubla Khan” is not a poetic fragment resulting from a dream, but a complex and carefully organized work that illustrates Coleridge’s poetic principles. Discuss the statement! “Kubla Khan” is an excellent example. Nineteenth-century critics tended to dismiss it as a rather inconsequential or meaningless triviality. In large part, this was due to Coleridge’s own introduction to the poem. When it was first published in 1816, he subtitled it “A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment.”  Those poets and critics who admired “Kubla Khan,” such as Algernon Charles Swinburne and Leigh Hunt, did so for its marvelous melodic quality.   Arthur Symons called “Kubla Khan”: “One of the finest examples of lyric poetry. It has just enough meaning to give it bodily existence; otherwise it would be disembodied music.” We can see the music of the poem in the following lines: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea’ The opening lines of “Kubla Khan” immediately thrust us into a strange world where the remarkable is commonplace. Kubla Khan orders a “pleasure-dome” to be built next to a sacred river that erupts from a chasm, flows in “sinuous rills” through gardens, then descends “in tumult” into “caverns measureless to man.” Encircling the centrally placed dome, walls and towers inscribe a defining limit around “forests ancient as the hills.” These elegant and civilized structures actually enclose a “deep romantic chasm … A savage place” that spurts life-giving waters to the gardens like a spouting heart or a birthing mother. In other words, despite human artifice, nature vivifies the whole and gives it meaning. So Kubla Khan, the prototypical Romantic artist, in order to create his masterpiece, merely defines a limit with his art around the uncontrollable magic of untrammeled nature and allows it to feed and inform his art work. And this, in fact, was the aesthetic Coleridge and other Romantic poets practiced. For them, poetry, as an “imitation of nature,” merely delimits in image and form the divine beauty of raw nature. But in “Kubla Khan,” as Coleridge informs us in the preface to the 1816 edition of the poem, the wild nature of the gardens, the fountain “with ceaseless turmoil seething,” and “Alph, the sacred river,” actually emerge from the poet’s dream consciousness. The Romantics believed that, at its core, the self is one with nature. Childhood and dreams fascinated them thematically in their poetry because both, like nature, were simple, raw, and unrestrainable. They recognized that in all of its forms, nature yearns with omnidirected desire. Just like a “woman wailing for her demon-lover,” nature is, in William Blake’s words, “Energy.” And what Blake says in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell of this “Energy” also applies here in “Kubla Khan”: “Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy…. Energy is Eternal Delight.” The “outward circumference” of the Khan’s towers and walls circumscribes the “Eternal Delight” of untamed nature, which is both “holy and enchanted” and certainly beyond human control. ‘In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid’ Read as the beginning of a longer poem, Coleridge’s poetic “fragment” sets forth a fantastic world, set both in the “mysterious” Orient and in the “magical” Middle Ages. But read as a whole complete unto itself, “Kubla Khan” evokes the fleeting images of a waking dream that speak not in words but in symbols. And although many critics point to the Crewe manuscript version of “Kubla Khan” found in 1934 as proof that Coleridge “consciously” revised the text, the poem as it stands successfully replicates the dream state and unveils a genuine glimpse into an archetypal world, a world Carl Jung, a Swiss psychoanalyst, called the “collective unconscious.” The first thirty-six lines of the poem imagistically present a symbolic diagram of the “self,” in which consciousness strives to find integration with the incalculably greater depth of the unconscious mind, while the last eighteen lines reflect upon the power of the unconscious mind when Coleridge finally realized that the full recollection of his dream work was impossible. By demarcating a circular space from the “forests ancient as the hills” with protective walls and towers, Kubla Khan creates a kind of “mandala” whose circumference is described by the “stately pleasure-dome” at its center. A Sanskrit technical term from Tantric Buddhism for a circular “cosmogram” used for “centering” and meditation, the mandala is a map of the inner world (the microcosm) that mirrors the outer world (the macrocosm). According to Jung, the mandala serves to define and protect the self as it seeks to integrate with the unruly forces of the unconscious mind. But in “Kubla Khan,” the “sunny spots of greenery” and the bright “sinuous rills” within the conscious world of the self appear tenuous, fragile, and minuscule in comparison to the cavernous deeps of the “sunless sea.” In fact, all of the paired opposites that appear within the poem (sun and moon, light and dark, male and female, movement and rest, and good and evil) struggle without success to find balance within this delicate world fed by the waters of the collective unconscious. I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! those caves of ice!   As mentioned previously, “Alph, the sacred river,” suffuses consciousness with creative “Energy.” This overwhelming creativity fecundates the conscious mind (“twice five miles of fertile ground”) via the spouting chasm that flings up water and “dancing rocks” from the underworld. This birth-giving chasm, clearly associated with the “woman wailing for her demon-lover,” charges the visionary with almost frenzied inspiration. In the last eighteen lines, the speaker recalls yet another female figure he had once seen in vision, the “damsel with a dulcimer.” Her strange song, if he could but “revive [it] within” himself, would so permeate him with numinous powers that he would be able to recreate the Khan’s dome and the “caves of ice” in the air itself. Such magical powers, the fruit of a kind of possession, would then make the speaker into an object of taboo, both holy and dangerous to the common sort of humanity. Like the chasm, both “holy and enchanted,” the inspired poet becomes an ambivalent figure “beyond good and evil,” for “he on honey-dew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise.” Not surprisingly, many critics have commented that this “milk of Paradise” might be nothing more than laudanum, a solution of opium in alcohol, to which Coleridge was addicted most of his life. Unfortunately, Coleridge’s dependence on drugs cut short his poetically most productive period. This complexity makes it difficult to fully believe that “Kubla Khan” is nothing more than the remnant of a half-remembered dream. The thematic repetition, intricacy of rhyme and metrical schemes, as well as the carefully juxtaposed images beautifully “harmonize and support” the poem’s purpose and theme. In “Kubla Khan,” Coleridge has created more than simple lyric poetry. He has fulfilled his poetic ideal of a harmonious blend of meaning and form, which results in a “graceful and intelligent whole.” 'Kubla Khan,' by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is one of the most enigmatic and ambiguous pieces of literature ever written. Allegedly written after a laudanum (an opiate) induced dream, the author claims to have been planning a two hundred to three hundred line poem before he got interrupted by a 'man from Porlock,' after which he had forgotten nearly all of his dream. This may have been merely an excuse, and the poem was scorned at the time for having no poetic value, one critic even going so far as to call it 'more a musical composition than a poem.' This is partly true, as the language seems to strive for an aural beauty more than a literary beauty, although it accomplishes both. Like many great artists, Coleridge has been most appreciated after his death, when his radically different works could be justified, as the ideas presented in his works hadn't been popular during his life. Coleridge's philosophy in life was very romantic, and so nearly all of his poems exemplify the romantic ideal, especially Kubla Khan. This romantic poem uses brilliant imagery and metaphors to contrast the ideals of romantic paganism with often ingratious Christianity. The vision of paganism is the first idea introduced in the poem. The super-natural reference to 'Alph,' or Alpheus as it is historically known, 'the sacred river, [which] ran/ Through caverns measureless to man/ Down to a sunless sea,' begins this pagan theme by referring to an underground river that passed through dimensions that could not be understood by any man, and then emptying into an underground sea. This also introduces an idea of the lack of human understanding that recurs at the end of the poem, one of the common elements that tie the poem's seemingly two-part separate structure together. Xanadu's walls enclosed 'gardens bright with sinuous rills.' These gardens represent the Garden of Eden, or a natural paradise on Earth. The degree of nature in this paradise is such that, although it is a biblical reference,..