SOURCE: “‘Kubla Khan’ in the Context of Coleridge's Writings Around 1802,” English Studies, Vol. 68, No. 3, June, 1987, pp. 228-35.

[In the following essay, Rookmaaker proposes that the key to understanding “Kubla Khan” may lie as much in Coleridge's other writing at the time he composed the poem as it does in its sources.]

Although most critics regard ‘Kubla Khan’ as one of the seminal poems of romanticism, there is sharp critical disagreement about its significance and meaning. While the general outlines of the landscape described in the poem are relatively clear, it offers only little indication concerning the significance of its imagery. The pleasure-dome, for instance, can be interpreted as a symbol of ‘the heaven of art’ (J. V. Baker), or as embodying finite man's ‘desire for pleasure and safety’ (R. H. Fogle); again, it could signify ‘the pleasure of a sexual union’ (G. Wilson Knight), or the individual's ‘limited field of consciousness’ (P. Magnuson). ¹ Though exaggerated, there is some truth in N. Fruman's remark that ‘Every interpretation is in an important sense a catalog of the reader's interests’.²

In their attempts to solve the riddle of ‘Kubla Khan’, critics have sought elucidation in its sources, ranging presumably from Ridley's ‘Tale of the Genii’ to Pausanias's Description of Greece, from Southey's ‘Thalaba’ to Eichhorn's commentary on Revelations.³ All these sources are conjectural, however, and often yield conflicting evidence. Even sources that are generally accepted have appeared little helpful: Purchas's Pilgrimage, for instance, describes a false paradise, Milton's Paradise Lost obviously a true one.

An alternative to source criticism would be to approach the poem in the light of Coleridge's contemporaneous poetical and non-poetical writings. But again one is confronted with a difficulty; its date of composition is unknown. The date Coleridge himself supplies in the Preface, summer 1797, is now largely discredited, partly because the Preface has turned out to be misleading also in other respects, partly because Coleridge was never very accurate where autobiographical details are concerned.⁴ On the basis of internal evidence, I would suggest that a first draft of the poem was conceived during, or shortly after his trip to Germany in 1799, but that its definitive version was not completed until 1803 or 1804. The internal evidence on which this conjecture is based will be presented in detail in the course of this article; at this point it should suffice to note the general resemblance between the ideas encountered in ‘Kubla Khan’ and those expressed in ‘Dejection: an Ode’ (1802) and ‘The Picture’ (1802). The poet lamenting his inability to recapture the lost vision, the role attributed to joy in this process, and the somewhat deceptive appearance of an optimistic ending are among the features shared by all three poems. Besides, in his Preface Coleridge expressly associates ‘Kubla Khan’ with ‘The Picture’. This hypothetical dating offers the possibility of a new approach to ‘Kubla Khan’, reading it in the context of Coleridge's position between 1799 and 1804.

‘KUBLA KHAN’ AND THE ROMANTIC FALL MYTH

After his journey to Germany in 1799, Coleridge appears to be strongly influenced by continental thought, especially German idealism. In connection with ‘Kubla Khan’, one aspect of this tradition, which for brevity's sake I will call the romantic fall myth, is highly relevant. Its general outlines are as follows. It was believed that originally man and nature were one, man being wholly and truly a child of nature. Man's fall was due to his becoming conscious of his individuality which entailed his separation from the unity of all being and thus his alienation from nature which henceforward appeared to him as an outer world of unrelated things. It was the conviction of many German thinkers that the ultimate aim of all human endeavour is to restore this lost unity with nature, to regain this original paradise. Underlying this fall myth is the belief that the same ‘divine’ life-force is the source of both man's and nature's life. Although after the fall human consciousness is temporarily alienated from the universal life-force, this force nevertheless remains as the sustaining cause of man's life as well as nature's. This implies that if man is capable of re-establishing unity with the life-force within himself, of which he has become ‘unconscious’ after his fall, he likewise restores his unity with the life-force operative in nature, and thus regains his original, paradisal state.⁵ This romantic fall myth, which has antecedents in the Neoplatonic and gnostic traditions, was very popular in Germany around 1800; in one version or another it can be found in the works of Kant, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling and Friedrich Schlegel, to name only a few thinkers in whom Coleridge was interested during various stages of his career.⁶

Coleridge's substantial acceptance of this myth may be deduced from various passages in his letters and notebooks. In a letter of January 1803 he describes his experiences as he climbs a mountain,⁷

The farther I ascend from animated Nature, from men, and cattle, & the common birds of the woods, & fields, the greater becomes in me the Intensity of the feeling of Life; Life seems to me then a universal spirit, that neither has, nor can have an opposite. God is every where, I have exclaimed, & works every where; & where is there room for Death?

The farther Coleridge is removed from the world of separate phenomena, the more he is aware of the all-pervading, universal spirit, or feeling, of life, the ground of all being. He is afforded, as it were, a momentary experience of paradise in which death has ceased to exist, since death implies merely a return to the unconscious life of nature.

In ‘Hymn before Sunrise’ Coleridge associates these moments of heightened vision with a state of semi-consciousness,

O dread and silent Mount! I gazed upon thee,
Till thou, still present to my bodily eye,
Didst vanish from my thought: entranced in prayer
I worshipped the invisible alone.
Yet thou meantime wast working on my soul,
E'en like some deep enchanting melody.
But I awake, and with a busier mind,
And active will self-conscious, offer now
Not as before, involuntary pray'r
And passive adoration!

(lines 13-22; 1802 version)

After consciousness has returned, nature regains its ‘outness’, and the recollection of the vision of unity can only elicit ‘passive adoration’. It is noteworthy that in his Preface to ‘Kubla Khan’ Coleridge similarly relates his vision of Kubla's paradise to a state of semi-consciousness; he informs the reader that the poem was written ‘in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses’ during which ‘all the images rose up before him … without any sensation or consciousness of effort’. Thus it is likely that ‘Kubla Khan’ describes a similar vision of unity with the underlying life-force.

‘Alph, the sacred river’ seems an appropriate image of the divine life-force operative in man: it emerges out of the earth, out of the unconscious regions of the human mind, and after running five miles above ground, signifying the visionary moment of human contact with the life-force, disappears ‘Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea’, back to the area beyond human consciousness. If read in this way, ‘Kubla Khan’ offers a symbolic representation of the brief moment of vision when with ‘the deep power of Joy, / We see into the life of Things’.⁸ The disappearance of the river indicates the end of the vision, when man is again confronted with the ‘inanimate cold world’ of external phenomena, with the world as a ‘lifeless ocean’.

In ‘Dejection: an Ode’ Coleridge describes Joy as being intimately connected with the paradisal experience of the life-force; it is no less than

Life, and Life's effluence, cloud at once and shower,
Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power,
Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower
                    A new Earth and new Heaven

(lines 66-69).

In short, Joy could be regarded as the concrete, psychological manifestation of the felt unity of all life.⁹ Similarly, in the centre of Kubla's vision is the pleasure-dome. No matter how intense this joy, however, man is afforded only a momentary, finite vision of the infinite: the paradise is enclosed and its walls are, appropriately, exactly as long as the distance which the river runs above ground (‘twice five miles’ probably means five square miles). In this brief moment of Joy, then, man is given a foretaste of his ultimate return to paradise.

While the first part of ‘Kubla Khan’ (lines 1-11) is pervaded by an air of order and tranquillity, the following part (lines 12-30) is wild and tumultuous, suggesting a world in the throes of creation. Some elements in this section are extremely puzzling. In general terms, it describes the deep recesses, the ‘deep romantic chasm’, of the human mind from which the unconscious life-force wells up. The tempestuous, almost destructive violence of the fountain, the source of the river, could partly be explained by the fact that here man comes into contact with a superhuman power far greater than he, partly as a symbolic description of the overpowering Joy, ‘the gladness of Joy’, man feels in moments of supreme vision, as is suggested by a Notebook entry of November 1804,¹⁰

I am never happy, never deeply gladdened—I know not, I have forgotten what the Joy is of which the Heart is full as of a deep & quiet fountain overflowing insensibly, or the gladness of Joy, when the fountain overflows ebullient.

Again, the wailing woman could, in Neoplatonic terms, be accounted for as the human soul longing to return to the One, or at least to reach the stage of demons, creatures living in closer proximity to the One. Finally, the ‘ancestral voices prophesying war’ articulate man's awareness, based on age-old experience, of the precarious and temporary character of the vision. Yet, while probably valid in general terms, such a gloss skims over the surface of the poem rather too smoothly.

At the risk of appearing sententious, I wish to recall an earlier version of the romantic fall myth, prevalent in Neoplatonic and gnostic circles, in an attempt to do fuller justice to the poem. This anterior version of the myth must have been known to Coleridge: it is found in the works of Jacob Boehme (Behmen) as well as in John Scotus Erigena's De Divisione Naturae; to both of these there are references in Notebook entries around 1802.¹¹ Also in the works of the Cambridge Platonists allusions to this very old tradition are encountered.¹²

According to this Neoplatonic version of the myth man was originally created as a self-regenerating, undivided, androgynous being comprising both male and female parts. As C. Manusov describes it, ‘At the moment that Adam longed for an earthly wife, this unity was lost and the so-called “matrix” was separated from him. Also he lost his fire of love. The new and changed man has succeeded in regaining this lost unity by allying himself with the heavenly Sophia’, thus becoming an androgyne again.¹³ In his commentary on Aristophanes' myth of the original androgyne as presented in Plato's Symposium Ficino further identifies this lost aspect of man as the supernatural light; men, he notes, strive to win back ‘that divine supernatural light, that former half of themselves which they lost in the fall. When this has been won back, they will then be whole and blessed with the vision of God’.¹⁴ In terms of this version of the myth, an experience of the divine life-force would be accompanied with the emergence of the lost female part of man, while a vision of the paradisal unity of all being would imply a temporary reunion of man with the lost female.

Two puzzling elements in ‘Kubla Khan’ could be explained on the basis of this myth. Firstly, the woman appearing at the source of the river, ‘wailing’ to be reunited with her ‘demon lover’, could be regarded as the heavenly Sophia, ever present in the unconscious regions of the human mind, longing for a reunion with her lost male part. If such a reunion of male and female could be permanently established, it would mean that man becomes a paradisal being again, no longer caught in the prison of his fallen earthly state, and that man could start journeying back to his Maker through the different worlds intermediate between earth and the One, the first of these being the world of demons. Secondly, it could explain Coleridge's use of explicit, sexual imagery in his description of the fountain. Since a return to paradise, however visionary and temporary, implies a reunion of male and female, the imagery suggesting coition and ejaculation would not be inappropriate, also because this coition leads up to the ‘birth’ of the ‘new Earth and new Heaven’ temporarily beheld in the vision of the dome. One could recognize a pun on ‘momently’ (line 24) in this connection; besides meaning ‘recurring at short intervals’ (cf. ‘in fast thick pants’, ‘half-intermitted’),¹⁵ it could also be read as ‘momentarily’, that is as long as ejaculation and coition, hence sexual union of male and female, last. Some confirmation of this rather fanciful interpretation of the ‘wailing woman’ might be that her appearance is associated with the moon which in Behmean lore is the sign of both supernatural love and the heavenly Sophia.¹⁶ If one wanted to, one could even press further and surmise an autobiographical dimension: in the verse-letter version of the Dejection Ode Coleridge regards his forced separation from Sara Hutchinson as a major cause of the suspension of his imagination, so that perhaps she had come to represent to him a physical embodiment of the heavenly Sophia.

It is not impossible that the lost female returns in the last section of the poem in the guise of the ‘Abyssinian maid’, Abyssinia being traditionally associated with paradise. If the poet were able to re-establish contact with the paradisal maiden, he would be whole again and recover the paradisal vision and the ‘deep delight’ attendant on this, which he could subsequently express in poetry.

COLERIDGE'S VIEW OF POETIC CREATION AND THE PREFACE OF ‘KUBLA KHAN’

It is usually assumed that the Preface of ‘Kubla Khan’ was written around 1815, shortly before the publication of the poem. Since the Preface is thematically closely related to ‘Dejection: an Ode’ and ‘The Picture’, however, it is likely that the ‘story’ presented in it was conceived more or less contemporaneously with the poem, somewhere between 1802 and 1804. In order to show this, a brief discussion of the Dejection Ode and ‘The Picture’ is inevitable.

The view of poetic creation implicit in ‘Kubla Khan’ is treated in detail in the Dejection Ode. In the latter poem Coleridge draws a distinction between the ‘inanimate cold world allowed / To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd’ (lines 51-52) and the world of poetic vision, the ‘new Earth and new Heaven’ (line 69), seen by ‘the pure, and in their purest hour’ (line 65) when instigated by Joy they imbue nature with life. One of the consequences of this view of poetic creation is that the relation between poetry and reality becomes problematic: poetry is concerned with a heightened vision of ‘reality’ different from the everyday world of most people. Since the average person experiences the visionary world of poetry as alien and strange, his reaction would be one of distrust, unbelief and dread, as is also suggested in the last lines of ‘Kubla Khan’.

Also the poet, however, is only afforded momentary glimpses of this higher world: only when he is filled with Joy, ‘that beautiful and beauty-making power’ (line 63), is he capable of apprehending the life of nature. This implies that the poetic vision is based on a subjective feeling, as is candidly recognized in the ode,

Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud—
                    We in ourselves rejoice!

(lines 71-72)

Whether the cloud appears luminous or not, whether nature is beautiful or not, depends wholly on the poet's state of feeling. Thus a wedge is driven between nature as represented in poetry and external reality: it is not at all certain if the poetic vision, a reflection of the poet's state of feeling, corresponds in any way to the ‘reality of nature’. Poetry, then, is removed out of the area of truth and reality, and must be seen as an expression of the subjective (dream) world of the poet.

In ‘The Picture’ Coleridge carries this theme even further. Here the protagonist's view of reality is determined by his ‘master-passion’, his strong feelings of love. Although he tries to resist his inner projective urge in a desperate attempt to cling to reality as he knows it to be, the ‘master-passion’ time and again interferes and he sees in nature nothing but the phantom world created by his passion. Thus he fancies he ‘sees’ a poor youth, clearly a projection of himself, who torn by his feelings of love thinks he sees the reflection of his beloved in the pool (lines 68-111). Neither the girl, nor the lover are actually there, they only exist in the dream world of the protagonist. Thus the girl, the ultimate centre of the vision, is three stages removed from reality: in the dream world of the protagonist (stage 1), a lover sees a phantom girl (stage 2) indirectly, as a reflection in the pool (stage 3). From the ironic playfulness of this passage it appears that Coleridge was fully aware of the solipsistic implications of his subjective view of poetic creation.¹⁷

It is certainly no coincidence that in the Preface of ‘Kubla Khan’ Coleridge refers specifically to this ‘dream’ quoting the ten lines which describe the imaginary lover's loss of vision. In fact, the situation built up in ‘Kubla Khan’ and its Preface curiously resembles the one in ‘The Picture’. Just as the fictional ‘I’ of the latter poem wanders through the woods dreaming his visions, so the (fictional?) ‘Author’ sleeps at a lonely farmhouse on Exmoor after reading Purchas's Pilgrimage (clearly a fictional detail: for the sheer size and rarity of the volume this would be virtually impossible in ‘reality’) where he similarly dreams his vision. Again, in this dream the poet sees a protagonist (Kubla, corresponding to the lover in ‘The Picture’, both probably dream projections of their respective ‘authors’) who creates his own vision: the pleasure-dome corresponding to the beloved in ‘The Picture’. The subtitle of the poem, ‘A Vision in a Dream’, clearly emphasizes the significance of the correspondence between the two situations. On the basis of this evidence, it is likely that the Preface should not be regarded as a factual statement but as an integral part of the fictional world of the poem.¹⁸

In the poem itself the precariousness of the poetic vision is already hinted at. Contact with the river is restricted to a distance of five miles, after which the ‘sunless sea’ of everyday existence reasserts itself and only recollection remains. Similarly, the fact that Kubla's paradise is enclosed within walls indicates its partial and temporary character. Then there are the ‘ancestral voices prophesying war’, or the destruction of paradise. Again, describing the vision as ‘a miracle of rare device’ does not only betoken its unique beauty, but also its rare occurrence. Moreover, the relation between the dome as the centre of the vision and the river, its sustaining cause, remains strangely elusive, one of substance and shadow,

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves

(lines 31-32).

Finally, the description of the vision seems to end on a dissonant in the line ‘A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice’. In Coleridge's work ‘ice’ usually suggests lifelessness¹⁹ and thus the ‘caves of ice’ may very well indicate that already during the brief moment of vision, its beauty and Joy are challenged and to some extent diminished by an awareness of its inevitable disappearance. This poem, which already seems to lament the passing away of the vision in its description of the visionary experience itself, is preceded by a Preface which sheds doubt on the validity of the experience. It is denounced as a ‘psychological curiosity’ and the reference to ‘The Picture’ implies that possibly the whole vision is merely a pretty delusion, a dream of a better world devoid of any truth or ‘reality’.

‘Kubla Khan’, then, celebrates the beauty and joy of the poetic vision of the all-embracing, paradisal unity of man and nature, while at the same time it voices doubts concerning its viability and ultimate validity. This ambiguous attitude to poetic insight is characteristic of Coleridge's position during the period under consideration, and probably a major cause of his subsequent turn to metaphysics.

All interpretations of ‘Kubla Khan’ are to some extent conjectural and there always remains ample room for doubt and disagreement. The reading proposed here is no exception. Nevertheless, this consideration of the poem in the light of Coleridge's position around 1802 has shown, I hope, that his beliefs and interests of this period are reflected in the poem and that the fundamental problems he was struggling with in those years are thematically closely related to ‘Kubla Khan’. As such, it could be regarded as the epitome of Coleridge's position of this period, expressing in enigmatic language his most basic convictions and doubts.

Notes

1. See J. V. Baker, The Sacred River (Louisiana, 1957), p. 18; R. H. Fogle, The Permanent Pleasure (Athens, 1974), p. 46; G. Wilson Knight, The Starlit Dome (London, 1941), p. 95; P. Magnuson, Coleridge's Nightmare Poetry (Charlottesville, 1974), p. 42.

2. N. Fruman, Coleridge, The Damaged Archangel (London, 1972), p. 395; Fruman related the poem to an incestuous dream.

3. These sources are suggested in J. Beer, ‘Coleridge and Poetry’ in R. L. Brett, ed., S. T. Coleridge (London, 1971), pp. 64-6; P. M. Adair, The Waking Dream (London, 1967), p. 113; E. Schneider, Coleridge, Opium, and Kubla Khan (New York, 1970; first publ. 1953), pp. 136ff.; E. S. Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’ and The Fall of Jerusalem (London, 1975), passim.

4. The date of ‘Kubla Khan’ is discussed in detail by E. Schneider, op. cit.; N. Fruman, op. cit., discusses at length Coleridge's autobiographical inaccuracies; I have briefly discussed the date of ‘Kubla Khan’ in H. R. Rookmaaker Jr., Towards a Romantic Conception of Nature (Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1984), pp. 147-8.

5. A good account of this romantic myth is found in A. Béguin, L'Âme Romantique et le Rêve (Paris, 1939), ch. V, centering on the period around 1820; cf. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York, 1971), passim.

6. See, e.g., J. Engell, The Creative Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), esp. ch. 20 and H. R. Rookmaaker, op. cit., pp. 106-115.

7. E. L. Griggs, ed., Collected Letters of S. T. Coleridge (London, 1956 etc.) (CL), II, p. 916; cf. K. Coburn, ed., The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London, 1957 etc.) (CN), I, 921, 1561.

8. In CN, I, 921 Coleridge relates these lines from ‘Tintern Abbey’ to an experience of the unity of man and nature.

9. See H. R. Rookmaaker, op. cit., pp. 136-140.

10. CN, II, 2279.

11. CN, I, 1000, 1369, 1382.

12. Coleridge borrowed R. Cudworth's True Intellectual System from Bristol Library before his journey to Germany, see G. Whalley, ‘The Bristol Library Borrowings of Southey and Coleridge, 1793-8’, Library, 4 (Sept. 1949), pp. 114-131; H. More is mentioned in CN, I, 938.

13. C. Manusov, Pelgrims en Profeten (Utrecht, 1985), pp. 61-2. (my translation); ch. III of her study deals with the androgyne myth; cf. M. H. Abrams, op. cit., pp. 154ff.

14. Quoted in C. Manusov, op. cit., pp. 72-3.

15. E. Schneider, op. cit., p. 207.

16. C. Manusov, op. cit., p. 77.

17. I have discussed these aspects of ‘Dejection: an Ode’ and ‘The Picture’ at greater length in H. R. Rookmaaker, op. cit., ch. IX and XI.

18. The suggestion that the Preface presents a fictional account is found (though not extensively argued) in L. Brisman, Romantic Origins (Ithaca/London, 1978), p. 30 and A. K. Mellor, English Romantic Irony (Cambridge, Mass./London, 1980), pp. 157-8.

19. See, e.g., L. Patton and P. Mann, eds., Lectures 1795 On Politics and Religion (London, 1971), p. 92n.