“Poetry: the best words in the best order.”~Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Last year I did a poem survey and began posting the top 100 poems from the survey in chronological order. Then life and laziness and Cybils and Christmas intervened, and I only posted the oldest 34 of the 100 projected poems. But I am determined to use Poetry Friday as an excuse to write about the other 66 poems on list. So, today I’m back with Coleridge.

photo © 2010 Derek Gavey | more info (via: Wylio)
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.

Coleridge was addicted to opium, and he said that this poem came to him in a an opium-induced dream. It’s essentially meaningless, as far as I can tell, even though I’ve read all sorts of interpretations that try to impose meaning on the words. Brown Bear Daughter likes to listen to lots of contemporary songs that remind me of this poem. When I ask her what they mean, she is silent and confounded, but she says the song in question is “catchy.” Kubla Khan is “catchy,” both in imagery and in words. I have pictures in my mind of Kubla Khan’s stately pleasure dome and and of the caves of ice and of the damsel with the dulcimer and of Coleridge the mad Poet. And I have memorized portions of this poem without trying, just because the sound is so memorable.