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.
I hope it’s clear I’m not talking about that silly movie with Olivia Newton-John, Michael Beck (whoever he is), and Gene Kelly in his embarrassingly awful final film role. (IIRC, this was the movie that launched the Razzies, the annual award for the worst [fill in the blank, movie-related category] of the year.
I’m talking about Kubla Khan, one of my favorite pieces of Romantic poetry, whose author, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, died 189 years ago today on July 25, 1834. He had achieved the great age–for an English Romantic poet–of sixty-one years, during which he’d written some beautiful stuff. Kubla Khan is, I think, my favorite. (OK, maybe because it’s the piece of his that–stylistically and linguistically–reminds me most of my all-time favorite English poet, John Keats. I’ll cop to that.) I only wish that we had more than a “fragment” to luxuriate in.
I’ve always loved Coleridge’s explanation of why he never finished the poem (which was written in 1797 and which he says came to him in a dream). He does a “Bob Dole” when he tells the story, writing about himself in the third person:
On awakening 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 here 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 passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!
Who among us has not, at one point or another in his or her life, been interrupted in the production of a simply magnificent magnum opus by the annoying “Person from Porlock”** who shows up uninvited, and perhaps even unwelcome, to wreak havoc in our lives by taking over the conversation and talking only about himself?
What great work would you have completed, and how much better off would the world be, had you never been similarly interrupted in your own life, by an interfering or narcissistic buffoon?
**Porlock is a small village in Somerset, England with an interesting history of its own, although the anonymous, interruptive bore who lives only as a result of Coleridge’s story may be its most prominent–real or imaginary–citizen.
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.
And there you have it. Some of the loveliest lines in English poetry.
Shangdu (Xanadu), legendary site of Kublai Khan’s summer palace, first mentioned in 1275 by Marco Polo in his Travels.
How lucky we are.
A damsel with a dulcimer:
