Images
In The Road to Xanadu, Lowes argues that Coleridge had an unusual sensitivity to visual imagery, and often saw what he imagined or envisioned very clearly, as if he were actually in the scene. Trailing behind the visions came the words.
The words, Lowes argues, arose unbidden out of memory, perhaps recalling one or more passages in authors that Coleridge had studied carefully, when he was preparing to write hymns to the sun and moon (poems he never actually got around to writing).
Most of these images contain several components, often contrasting.
- The dome is full of sun, but has caves of ice.
- The water rises and falls.
- The poet's delight would help create the pleasure dome, but visitors would pull back in dread.
- The chasm is holy--and enchanted.
- The man with the flashing eyes and floating hair is frightening because he has been to Paradise.
The scenes change rapidly, too, as we move from one to the next.
And within some of these
scenes, we glide forward over
the landscape, as if we were floating through the air, or following the
water down into the earth and back up in the river. These are moving
pictures.
Lowes suggests that whole scenes rise from Coleridge's memory, not just
particular images. Ignoring the possibility that any of these scenes are
ones that Coleridge himself had seen, Lowes argues that the imagery comes
back to Coleridge's inner eye, from his reading. Of course, some of the
images have no particular source, as far as Lowes can tell.
But the most
vivid images often have multiple sources, leading Lowes to argue that
Coleridge's synthetic imagination has combined all those scenes he read
about, concatenating them because of their similarity.
When you read through the flat descriptions of these images, from the beginning to
the end, you can see that there is not a very coherent progression.
You cannot call this a closely plotted poem. For instance:
Visually, we are yanked from one scene to another.
And the point of view shifts midstream. At line 37, the poet himself
enters the poem, recalling that he once had a vision of a girl playing and
singing, and he wishes he could reconstruct her music. Somehow, recovering
that would let him build his own pleasure dome in air.
I suspect that the
gentleman from Porlock interrupted Coleridge's writing after line 36,
and when the poet returned to his manuscript, he found he could not really
lose himself in the dream again.
The second half of the poem seems to argue that if he could just recover
the music, he could write a poem like Kubla Khan.
And, then, at the end, he seems to regain the magical world, as he
describes this mysterious person with the floating hair, a man who has
come back from Paradise.
But through all these scenes, and changes of viewpoint, Coleridge's verbal music ties these moments
together in an onrushing rhythm that recalls Milton touring Paradise, or
following Lucifer in his fall.
The sound, not the vision, keeps us moving forward as if under a spell.
And Coleridge inserts internal, end-line, and half rhymes, in an irregular
pattern, surging forward, pausing, and echoing what went before, all in a
breathless tone of awe. The music of the language is magical and
fluid--deliberately so.
The verbal symphony--the mingled measure--stitches together the descriptions
of these scenes in a way that induces us to ignore the logistical
confusion.
Generally, as we read Kubla Khan, we do not ask reportorial questions
about who, what, why, when, and where. We are content to give in to the
charm.
Like the spell woven at the end of the poem, the text keeps circling
around and around and around, recreating a vision that mingles together
the verbal, the visual, and the musical.
Here, though, we isolate the individual scenes, showing the lines
in which they occur, highlighting the words that Lowes suggests Coleridge
may have borrowed, along with the visions.
Analysis definitely removes some of the magic from these scenes. But by
putting our attention on the visual, we get beyond the merely verbal
echoes, to "see" something closer to the twilight consciousness that
Coleridge experienced, akin to a dream, where we never ask rational
questions about what is happening, or why one event follows another.
In this sense, Lowes endeavors to go beyond mere verbal trifling, to
imagine what Coleridge was seeing, hearing, and recording.
Other Perspectives
Sources
William Bartram
William
Beckford
F. Bernier
James Bruce
Thomas
Burnet
William
Collins
Herodotus
Athanasius
Kircher
Jerome Lobo
Thomas
Maurice
John Milton
Pausanias
Samuel
Purchas
Major
James Rennell
Seneca
Strabo
Virgil
Mary
Wollstonecraft
Note: I have
separated out the images here, for analysis, but in doing so I am not
closely
following Lowes. You will see that some lines have no hot text,
because none of the words in those lines have been linked to a source, in
Lowes. Perhaps Coleridge had a moment where he actually thought of an
image himself, at those times--or perhaps Lowes just did not do enough
detective work, to spot a possible source.