Essay Kubla Khan

Kubla Khan
Kubla Khan" is considered to be one of the greatest poems by the English Romantic poet Samuel
Taylor Coleridge In the first part of the poem, the speaker envisions the landscape surrounding
the Mongol ruler and Chinese emperor Kubla Khan’s summer palace, called "Xanadu,"
describing it as a place of beauty, pleasure, violence and more. The author suggests that these
qualities are all deeply intertwined and, in the final stanza, announces a desire to build a
"pleasure palace". Overall, it's possible to think of it as speaking to the creative ambitions of
poetry itself as well as to its limitations or something like that. Kubla Khan is the finest example
of pure poetry removed from any intellectual content. Being essential to the nature of a dream, it
enchants by the loveliness of its color, artistic beauty, and sweet harmony. Its vision is wrought
out of the most various sources oriented on romance and travel books. Its remote setting and its
delicate imaginative realism render it especially romantic. The supernatural atmosphere is
evoked chiefly through suggestion and association. The musical effect of the poem is
unsurpassed. The main appeal of the poem lies in its sound effects. The rhythm and even the
length of the lines are varied to produce subtle effects of harmony. The judicious use of hard
consonants has given occasionally the effect of force and harshness.
The poem is to open with the verse “A stately pleasing-dome decree.” This “dome” I think he
can identify him with Kubla Khan, who blinded by power, of the desire to have more and more,
of the lusts of the world and its trials. Nature is the most dynamic element of the poem, like “ and
here was forests novelist as the hills/Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. Nature wanted to tell the
history that those lands have. Everything that happened on the long path that surrounds Kubla
Khan. From my point of view, nature in this poem is in better words, a labyrinth of destiny
“Then reached the caverns, measureless to man,/ And sank in tumult to a lifeline ocean” On the
other hand, nature has decisive force in the destiny of the characters, and in everything. From my
point of view, the forces of nature are the classic way to do good or to make some situations
worse.
Here is where the process of reconstruction begins and where the conscious will is used,
through the fact that the events of a past situation are being recalled, remembered. Kubla Khan
himself plays a role of a creator in this part, and as the dome has been destroyed “The shadow of
the dome of pleasure/ Floated midway on the waves “by forces of nature, it is now being
recreated through imagination, namely the secondary imagination, which attributes an
esemplastic power to the poet. Besides, the image of Kubla Khan has been reconstructed as well
“His flashing eyes, his floating hair” In “The shadow of the dome of pleasure” we find that
Kubla Khan's power is a dream, an imagination in his head. In this way, nature with its own’s
mystical power and divinity can shatter the strength of a “great game”.
I believe that Kubla Khan provides fundamental support for observation and interpretation of
the Romantic imagination, as it is not only consistent concerning Samuel T. Coleridge’s concept
of imagination and fancy, but also with the Romantic purpose of these ideas – surpassing reality,
reassembling and regenerating memory, and raising some emotional awareness in the reader.
Moreover, although the poem was published at the beginning of the 19th century, it still proves
to be a great device for interpreting not only Romantic concepts in the historical sense, but also
Arch-Romantic notions, and that matters extremely to us, because we have the honor of reading
these works even today, and to the surprise of many of us they have an extremely good impact
although sometimes some romantic traits are extremely difficult to understand.
In the conclusion of everything I tried to highlight in the lines above, In the end,
everything becomes history and the present past as the river that runs up and down, in fact, a
metaphor of life. ‘Alph’ can suggest the ‘beginning’ who cannot exist without ‘Omega’, ‘the
ending’: ‘The Alph, the sacred river, ran/ Through caverns measureless to man/ Down to a
sunless sea’. To sum up, the earthy power in Kubla Khan is illustrated by the references to the
past, to the dream, by contrast with nature, and by the idea of ephemerality and creation. Kubla
Khan’s palace appears as a refugee, a monument symbolic of his power and which may win the
test of the passing time.

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Kubla Khan

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