SOURCE: “The Faults of Vision: Identity and Poetry (A Dialogue of Voices, with an essay on Kubla Khan)” in Identity of the Literary Text, edited by Mario J. Valdes and Owen Miller, University of Toronto Press, 1985, pp. 119-45.

[In the following excerpt, Hamlin notes that “Kubla Khan” remains a challenge for critics because of its visionary and inspired text, and that while it is a poem that displays the Romantic power of imagination it is also a text that stands on its own as a poetic statement.]

‘MINGLED MEASURE’ IN KUBLA KHAN¹

Sameron adion asō: but the to-morrow is yet to come.

Kubla Khan occupies a special place among English Romantic poems. Few texts have received so much critical attention, and few of the major Romantic lyrics make so persuasive a claim for what might be called visionary or inspired discourse. Romantic poetics privileges the powers of the imagination. This holds true for Coleridge above all. Kubla Khan, however problematic its status as text, seems to demonstrate with consummate eloquence and authority that singular poetic quality. Yet precisely because of this claim as poetry and because so much is at stake for a theory of poetry to which this text bears witness, Kubla Khan remains a challenge for criticism. No more crucial instance comes to mind for the question of identity in poetry.

.....

Despite the claim of the original published text to be a fragment and despite the biographical circumstances of its composition, as described in the prose preface which accompanied that publication (discussion of which is here omitted), Kubla Khan can and does stand on its own as a poetic statement, complete and self-sufficient. Nor can the organization of its language be denied a latent sense of coherent and unified design as a potentially conscious or even self-conscious work of art, despite the author's apparent denial of such design and such consciousness to himself at the occasion of writing the poem. It may even be argued, as has been done,² that the form of statement in the poem opens up at least the possibility of a transcendental response (in Kant's sense of the term as self-reference or self-reflection), whereby the act of reading the poem engenders in the mind of the reader a conscious awareness of the language as such, both in its design and in its self-reference. The outcome of such a reading—this is my central point, which has not, so far as I am aware, hitherto been made—is a complex transformation from a literal to a figurative or symbolic function for the poem as discourse. Kubla Khan thus becomes a paradigm for poetic discourse in general. A critical reading involves an act of recognition, whereby a hermeneutical consciousness of the poem is achieved as poetic function. The identity of the text—if the term has any validity at all—must be found in the dynamic process through which this hermeneutical consciousness is achieved for the reader. It includes above all a tension between vision and reflectivity, established by discontinuities of discourse within the language of the text. These discontinuities impose a sense of transgression (in Stierle's sense) or Sprung (in Heidegger's sense), a figurative crossing-over which opens up a reflective, self-referential dimension to the poem.

1. THE POEM AS EVENT: ‘QUIETLY SHINING’

What is the principle of organization for Kubla Khan? Much attention has been devoted by critics to irregularities of form, which to some might strengthen the case for the poem as visionary reverie, a speaking which does not know what it is saying, totally lacking in formal design. The stanza divisions show no formal principle of length, thus suggesting convenient demarkations of statement, as if the stanzas were paragraphs in a narrative. Yet the final stanza does indicate a significant turn in the movement of the poem, which justifies consideration of the text as if it were a composition in two movements.

The first movement focuses almost exclusively on the pleasure-dome of Kubla Khan and the exotic setting in which it is located. Certain shifts of focus and variations of tone may nonetheless be perceived, which allow the text to be arranged on the analogy of a classical sonata-allegro form in music (which I shall not attempt to justify further here), as follows:

Exposition: lines 1 to 11
Development: lines 12 to 24
Recapitulation: lines 25 to 30
Coda: lines 31 to 36

A basic distinction is made throughout this movement between art and nature. The pleasure-dome is a man-made construct, exotic and elaborate, whereas the setting in which it is located is defined as a landscape through which the sacred river flows from its source in a fountain that bursts forth from a hidden cavern or chasm to its final destination in the ‘sunless sea’ (5) or ‘lifeless ocean’ (28). Little attention is actually paid to the pleasure-dome itself, apart from the initial assertion that it was built by the decree of the Khan. Descriptive material in the latter part of the exposition focuses entirely upon the landscape of the enclosed space within walls and towers, which consists of gardens and forests. A sense of symmetry and order is achieved here, where verbal form appears to imitate what it describes: art encloses nature. A quality of harmony and repose is attributed to the enclosure, which yet partakes of the life and power of nature: ‘fertile ground’ (6) is ‘girdled round’ (7). The pleasure-dome is mentioned again in the recapitulation, but there the focus is not the dome itself, but its shadow, reflected upon the moving surface of the river as it flows past. A curious displacement of concern thus occurs away from the palace of the Khan, first to the landscape which contains it and then to the surface of the river which reflects it.

The delineation of landscape remains curiously indeterminate. The river's course occupies the centre in highly schematic manner, as a force (‘turmoil,’ (17) and a sound (‘tumult,’ 28), projected upon both origin and destination, which constitute the limit of reference for this life. In the development an exotic and momentous significance is attributed to the act of bursting forth, through which the fountain emerges from ‘that deep romantic chasm’ (12). It is called ‘a savage place’ (14). Several figurative associations are superimposed upon the fountain, so that it assumes a complex significance as place and event. The place is given a supernatural aura: ‘as holy and enchanted / As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted / By woman wailing for her demon-lover!’ (14ff.). The force of the fountain is attributed to nature as an animate, if not a sentient being: ‘as if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing’ (18). Fragments of earth thrown up by the fountain are compared to natural and rustic activity: ‘like rebounded hail, / Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail’ (21f.). This sequence of similes opens up a pluralistic perspective, more general and fantastic than the place itself. The tone of the evocation is also made personal and emphatic by an exclamation: ‘But oh’ (12); by a demonstrative: ‘that deep romantic chasm’ (12); and by an apostrophe: ‘a savage place!’ (14). These various verbal devices evoke a sense of design and intention to the poet's statement.

The movement of syntax is convoluted and accumulative in its rhetorical affect, as indicated by the use of repeated exclamation points and colons. Within this complex sequence, however, a spatial perspective is also established upon a middle ground, as if we ourselves were located within the pleasure-dome. This occurs through terms of position: ‘amid’ (20) and ‘'mid’ (23), and interruption: ‘intermitted’ (20), enhanced by a sense of dramatic immediacy in the repeated adverb ‘momently’ (19 and 24), which offsets the sense of temporal and historical distance in the consistent use of narrative past tense. As the poem advances from development to recapitulation a marked shift of rhythmic cadence and phonetic patterning occurs, which resembles a kind of eddying (a favourite image of Coleridge) and which signals the movement within the poem from event to reflection upon the event. To offer one instance among many: an alliterative pattern of repeated consonants across two rhythmically balanced phrases within a single line evokes a sense of measured flow which is attributed to the river:

Five míles … eańdeřing with a máz … mot … on

(25)

This line introduces the recapitulation, where phrases are repeated from the opening of the poem (‘to a lifeless ocean,’ 28, is a variant of ‘to a sunless sea,’ 5). Recognition of this repeated material thus occurs within a rhythmic and phonetic cadence of resolution and ceremonial reduction to the complex dramatic movement of the poem. A heightening of focus and accent is also achieved in the recapitulation through syntactical ellipsis and delay, so that the main subject of this continuous statement (‘the sacred river,’ 26) assumes a sense of climax, semantically and rhythmically. The pattern of rhyme across these lines also achieves a kind of balance and interaction which complements the effect of reflective eddying: motion—ran—man—ocean. The movement of the language at various formal levels thus forces the mind of the reader to turn back upon itself in company with the recapitulation of statement.

The figure of the emperor is also reintroduced at the end of the recapitulation. Initially he was invoked as the originating cause for the pleasure-dome; now through a subtle shift of reference he functions as an effect of or a response to his creation. At the beginning of the poem his role seemed to echo that of God as creator in Genesis, causing the palace to come into being by mere decree. Now we are told that the Khan hears the voices of his ancestors communicating a prophecy of war. What does this shift of roles signify? Presumably these voices are conveyed by the sound of the river, both in the tumult of its bursting forth and in its final sinking into the lifeless ocean. The emperor thus hears a sound ‘from far’ (29) which is interpreted as the murmuring of spectral voices. Such a response also suggests a symbolic substitution, whereby the river is associated with the course of human life from birth to death. Recognition of this substitution further opens up a sense of analogy between the role of the emperor in his interpretive response and our own role as readers interpreting the poem. The response of the Khan thus serves as a hermeneutical signal for the task of interpretation as such. The emperor was identified initially as creator, a kind of surrogate for the author of the poem (even if that association was not explicit), and now has been transformed into a mere recipient, a kind of auditory exegete, responding to the sounds which reach him as the effect of his own creative act. By recognizing the analogy between this shift of roles and our own hermeneutical task as readers we also may identify the fundamental structural design of the poem as a communicative strategy, whereby the act of reading the text accompanies the movement of the poem through a sympathetic imitation: from descriptive inquiry towards interpretive response. This shift also suggests how we as readers may relate to the poet as author, in a relation not of identity but of reciprocity, which is appropriate to the dynamic, dialectical form of communication itself.

On the basis of this perceived relationship as communicative strategy, we may locate in the coda a further strategy of figuration and self-referential resonance. There is a twofold focus here. First, the image or ‘shadow’ (31) of the pleasure-dome is reflected upon the surface of the river as it flows past. To float midway (32) is to attain the privileged status of the symbol, where temporality is transcended or, in Hegel's sense, sublated. Second, the sounds of tumult from the river in the origin and completion of its course are transformed into a ‘mingled measure’ (33) in the manner of a musical harmony. Senses of sight and sound are thus conjoined: presumably for the emperor, as for the poet and for the reader of his poem. To perceive and enjoy this experience requires a shared dwelling within that pleasure-dome as symbolic space, which conveys both the vision of reflected resonance and the mingled measure of harmonious sound. The poem itself thus becomes identical with this space through symbolic transference and the self-reflective turn of figuration. The meaning achieved at this moment within the poem involves for the reader an act of self-recognition, since the hermeneutical response of his own mind is included within the symbolic reference of the poem's statement. The couplet which concludes the coda constitutes the climax and fulfilment of the poem as a whole, in so far as it conveys to us our own experience as readers within the hermeneutical consciousness attained by our reading of the poem:

It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

(35f.)

The poem may now by understood as event, in Heidegger's sense: Er-eignis, both as ‘en-own-ment’ and as ‘en-eye-ment.’

What can be made of the ‘caves of ice’? At one level the validity of the phrase is apparent. The indeterminate copula (‘it was’) includes both the pleasure-dome itself and its reflected image upon the surface of the river. The mingled measure from fountain and cave is superimposed upon this ambivalence of a resonating preserve. As a symbol of art it is a fixed and unchanging value within a dynamic movement and a mingling of sounds: Dauer im Wechsel. Yet equally we may refer this phrase to the poem itself as artefact or verbal construct, which like a ‘cave of ice’ is inhuman and lifeless. The image thus sustains a sense of art as pure reflectivity, an ambivalent paradigm for vision as both shine and sheen (in the dual sense of the term Schein defined by both Schiller and Hegel).³ Here also that sense of poetry as verbal event is affirmed in Heidegger's sense of a resonating preserve (‘der in sich schwingende Bereich’), where the moment is realized and known. The opposition of sunlight and ice, established by balanced phrases as a reciprocity of identity and difference, conveys the deepest paradox of what Coleridge understood to be the poetic imagination. Readers of Coleridge will recall another symbolic image, equally powerful and precisely correlative to this, where reflected light is revealed in a fixed and frozen form. This occurs at the end of Frost at Midnight in the image of the icicle, frozen water drops, dangling from the eaves of the poet's cottage, which is seen through the window in the wintry night: ‘quietly shining to the quiet moon.’

2. THE POEM AS THROUGH A GLASS: DARKLY REFLECTING

The critical moment of figurative transgression in Kubla Khan occurs at the outset of the final verse paragraph of the poem. It is a moment of categorical reversal, of disruption, disillusionment and deconstruction, of crossing-over in the most radical sense. Reference shifts, on one hand, to the ‘damsel with a dulcimer’ (37), conjured apparently out of the poet's own memory; and the poet introduces himself, on the other, as first-person pronominal subject for the first time in the poem. All apparent concern with Kubla Khan and his pleasure-dome is abruptly abandoned by arbitrary displacement. This transgression from descriptive subject matter to the subjective self was anticipated by the strategies of reflective figuration which preceded it. The movement of the poem may thus be perceived as an advance beyond its moment of visionary climax through a disruptive response, which sustains and completes the symbolic action of the poem in the manner of a dialectical negation. The full import of this movement for the hermeneutical reception of the text needs further consideration.

What is the relation of the damsel to the pleasure-dome? How does the vision here claimed by the poetic self as something once seen relate to the development of his previous description into poetic event? More specifically, within the temporal continuum of the poem as fictional historical narrative, how is the assertion of a particular moment of experience—‘once’ (38)—to be referred back to the remote setting of the opening movement? It is presumably no accident that an identical form of indeterminate generic statement with the verb to be occurs both at the end of the first movement and near the outset of the second: ‘It was …’ (35 and 39), both times at the beginning of a line. Given the remoteness of Kubla Khan and his world to the poet and the position he occupies as speaker in both time and space, the question of relationship between description and vision becomes extremely problematic. An awareness of this problem is central to the hermeneutical design of the final movement.

The subject of the damsel's song is Mount Abora, which remains unrelated, except through patterns of sound, to Xanadu and the river Alph. Yet, through a displacement of discourse into the subjunctive mood of a condition contrary to fact, a hypothetical analogy is established between the song of the Abyssinian maid and the poet's own poem. May we therefore associate the damsel's song with the simile used earlier of the ‘woman wailing for her demon-lover’ (16), whose manner was associated with the ‘savage place’ (14) of the river's birth? The common denominator is vision, and the medium of communication in each instance would be ‘symphony and song’ (43), received once by the poet ‘in a vision’ (38) and now to be revived ‘within me’ (42) through a recreative act of the poetic imagination. The automatic and inevitable consequence of such a recreative act, we are told, would be a ‘music loud and long’ (45). Even more, to achieve such music of vision would be to ‘build that dome in air, / That sunny dome! those caves of ice!’ (46f.) What does this mean?

Such allusion to the earlier focus of the poem on the pleasure-dome involves a radical opposition to the project of its own discourse. Earlier the pleasure-dome and caves of ice were evoked as image and as paradigm, recalled and reconstructed within the descriptive language of the poem as fictional event. The final couplet of that movement established a reflective, hermeneutical perspective of self-reference, as if ‘it was’ (35 and 39) had become ‘this is.’ Now all possibility of such realization is removed into a subjunctive alternative: ‘if only.’ The poem thus seems to undo everything it earlier achieved. Equally important for a hermeneutical reading of the poem is the assertion that a reconstruction of sunny dome and caves of ice, the possibility of which is implicitly denied, would not be a reflection or shadow upon the surface of the sacred river or a mingled measure of murmuring spirit voices, but rather an aerial palace suspended impossibly in the sky like some cloud, signifying the distance and insubstantiality of poetic vision or imaginative Schein. How does this second dome relate to the first?

The two constructs appear initially to oppose each other, as description opposes vision, or as reality (event) opposes idea (image). Upon reflection, however, we perceive that the two are identical, both within the fictional or poetic world of the poem and within the mind of the recreative imagination, regardless of the recipient of that recreation: Kubla Khan, the Abyssinian maid (as she sings to her dulcimer), the poet (as he speaks in and through his poem), and ourselves (as we read this text). The only difference—and it is the crucial difference for hermeneutical consciousness—resides in the affect of that figurative transgression which occurred in the movement from one section of the poem to the other. The shadow of the dome was initially affirmed as a figure of capable imagination, the product of a willing suspension of disbelief; reference to it latterly involves displacement through several levels of negation or deconstruction, so that it serves as a conscious, indeed a self-conscious, sign for the poem itself, not as it has been achieved, but as it might be in an ideal instance. The content of that sign, its transcendental referent, is thus the norm for poetic vision, performing in the manner of a transcendent signified for the discourse of the poem as a play of signifiers, against which the actual movement of that discourse may be measured as negative instance (in Hegel's sense of the negative).

How appropriate, finally, that the language of the poem shifts its focus at the end through a further ironic displacement to a hypothetical recipient for such visionary song. This recipient turns out to be, as the last playful surrogate for the identity of the text, the reader of Kubla Khan, indeed we ourselves, at least within a figure of hermeneutical response. About that poet singing of his vision in a fine frenzy, whose voice until now has been tacitly accepted as the vehicle for the entire text of this poem, we ourselves are made to utter the concluding lines (49-54) as a warning to dissociate ourselves from the madness of his vision. Everything which constituted the fiction of the pleasure-dome as event and even the damsel's song as vision has now collapsed into a hyperbole of affect. We share in it only vicariously through a distancing of perspective, a dissociation of sensibility, which we ourselves impose—or rather: the final lines of the poem do it for us. The poet's state of mind as he produces his visionary song is relegated to a kind of madness, manifested by such clichés as ‘his flashing eyes’ and ‘his floating hair’ (50). The exclamation by this hypothetical audience of ‘all who heard’ (48) even assumes the rhetorical form of a second-person address in the imperative mood. In effect, we are giving commands to each other, indeed to all readers. The effect of such a statement, as further enhancement to the thematic reflectivity of our hermeneutical consciousness, is that the poem speaks directly to us in our own voice, so that our position and attitude are categorically differentiated from those of the poet. The discourse of the lyric, through a final transgression, thus dispels all sense of presence and breaks all sense of poetic illusion. Where are we left at the end but in the real world, beyond the limits of vision, outside the magic circle which we ourselves have drawn about the poet, to separate us from all possible exchange with that lunatic mind which fed on ‘honey-dew’ (53) and drank ‘the milk of Paradise’ (54)? Our compensation must be that the language of the poem has also moved with us to the outside, thus sharing in the breakdown of its vision, indeed causing it through an imperious usurpation of our own voice. The implications of all this for the concept of identity are disturbing.

It may now be instructive by way of conclusion to this essay on the poem to consider briefly the prose preface which Coleridge included with the initial publication of the text in 1816. Whether or not this preface reports accurately the biographical circumstances in which the poem was composed may be of less interest than the ironic thematic association of the situation there described with the hypothetical status of the poet as visionary within the poem. The opium dream in which the poem is said to have been composed may thus be identified with the frenzy of vision attributed to the poet at the end of the poem. Also important is the use of water images to describe the failure of the poet's vision when he endeavoured to write down his dream after waking up. Following the interruption by his visitor, he asserts, ‘all the rest [of the vision] 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.’ He then quotes a passage from his poem The Pains of Sleep, which was included in the initial publication just after Kubla Khan, where a similar image of concentric circles upon the surface of water is used to signify the disruption of a vision, like the breaking of a spell. The hope is there expressed that the smoothness of the surface will soon return, re-establishing the lost vision as in a mirror or a glass. May we not refer this image of the reflecting surface of water to the central symbol of the poem itself: ‘The shadow of the dome of pleasure / Floated midway on the waves’ (31f.)? Such continuity must be more than accidental and suggests, further, that the apparent fragmentary status of the written text may contrast with the vision it seeks to recapture in the way that the smooth surface of the water relates to the concentric rippling which results when the surface is disturbed.

A thematic analogy may also be perceived between the dissociation of the reader from the poet at the end of the poem and the interruption of the act of writing by the arrival of the visitor from Porlock on business in the prose preface. To refer both these moments of disruption to the act of reading may go beyond any apparent intention on Coleridge's part, although within the poem it seems unavoidable as analogy for the reader. Yet such ironic transformations are precisely appropriate to the dialectical movement of thought: through moments of projected vision towards a position of reflective self-awareness by means of a cognitive response to patterns of figurative transgression and the breakdown of vision. Not unrelated to this strategy of ironic dissociation is the initial assertion in the preface that the author is only publishing his fragment ‘at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity’ (whom scholars inform us was Lord Byron), and that, as far as the author is concerned, the text serves ‘rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits.’ Do we not perceive a bit of tongue in cheek here? Yet that request by a fellow poet, perhaps in analogy to the decree of Kubla Khan for the construction of the pleasure dome, shifts the burden of authority away from the poet himself, who nonetheless remains the source of the vision represented in the fragment, and attributes the claim for publication to what must be regarded as a response to a reading of the text, including presumably a hermeneutical consciousness of what the text is capable of communicating concerning that vision which the poet claims to have been lost.

These several levels of related paradoxical distinctions between vision and reflection, both in the text of the poem and in the prose preface, serve to enhance and sustain that hermeneutical consciousness in the reader, which I take to be the ultimate communicative purpose of such texts. The meaning of poetic vision thus remains always and only accessible to our interpretive understanding, as Coleridge well knew, from the distance of a disillusionment, like the circles upon the surface of the water or the faults in a crystal, a sense of absence or distance rather than presence, indeed as an image of a paradise which has always just been lost at the moment it is glimpsed. The measure of identity for a reader of poetry, as a reflective knowledge to be achieved, is the radical breakdown and destruction of the principle of identity itself.

Notes

1. In order to reduce the length of the present essay for inclusion in the current volume on the Identity of the Literary Text, a section of about seven pages in typescript was omitted from the discussion of Kubla Khan (the lacuna is indicated by the line of dots). What I have omitted is a brief survey of the publication history of the poem and the history of its critical reception. This material, however important for a reassessment of the poem in the context of Coleridge scholarship, did not seem essential to the discussion of identity. The complete text of the essay will be published in a collection of my essays forthcoming under the title The Hermeneutics of Form. The poem and its prose preface are printed following the notes.

2. Kenneth Burke, ‘“Kubla Khan,” Proto-Surrealist Poem,’ in Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method, Berkeley 1968, pp. 201-22; esp. pp. 209f.

3. The basic ambivalence of the term Schein for aesthetic theory was first perceived by Schiller in his letters to Körner in 1793, which have come to be known as the Kallias-Briefe, since he there outlines plans for an essay on the theory of beauty to be entitled ‘Kallias.’ The letters are printed together in the volume of Theoretische Schriften, in the edition of Schiller's works, ed. Fricke and Göpfert, München 1959, v, 394-433. For Hegel on Schein, see note 9 above. I have discussed this ambivalence in an earlier essay, ‘The Temporality of Selfhood: Metaphor and Romantic Poetry,’ New Literary History, 6 (1974-5), 169-93, esp. pp. 174f.