Critical appreciation of Kubla khan
Ans. Critical appreciation of Kubla khan, Kubla khan is supposed to be the recreation of a dream that Coleridge saw when he had fallen asleep. The poem is often described as the most perfect of all records of dream experiences with the coherent incoherence of a dream.
In the poem, Coleridge conjured up a vision of two kinds of paradise, one of the stately done and pleasure garden of Kubla khan. and the other the Paradise of Mount Abora a reference to a passage from Milton’s Paradise Lost book IV.
The complete title of the poem is Kubla Khan or a vision in a dream; A fragment It is often described as a fragmentary poem. The poem creates a wonderful picture of a dream-like vision that the poet had As a psychological curiosity it tries to penetrate the process of creation.
Kubla khan by Coleridge
It considers the role of the conscious, the subconscious, and the unconscious in the process, of creation. It also speaks of the role of inspired imagination in the process of poetic creation. In the poem, there are echoes of a number of books that Coleridge had read.
The immediate source of inspiration, however, were books like his pilgrimage and travels to discover the source of the Nile.
This poem of Coleridge gives us a description of the glory associated with Kubla Khan, supposed to be the most famous Asiatic sovereign the founder of the Mongol dynasty in China.
The poem begins with a stanza telling us that Kubla Khan ordered to build a palace for himself in Xanadu, just where the river Alph went underground. For this palace, ten miles of fertile territory, was surrounded by walls and towers and in this palace, trees started flowering, and there was vegetation all around.
After describing the background in which Kubla Khan ordered his palace to be built in Xanadu, Coleridge in the second stanza presents a metaphysical picture in which the protagonist hears ancestral voices prophesying that war will break out soon.
The whole palace is described as savage, and the entire atmosphere becomes full of dread and/confusion. This picture is full of extraordinary realizations, and the overall confusion is effectively recreated by the poet with his romantic phrases of a “raining moon” and a “woman waiting for her demon. lover “.
In the third stanza, the poet describes how the shadow of this proposed place of pleasure starts floating on the waves of the atmosphere.
The poet seems to listen to a lady in a vision, Singing of Mount Abora in, Abyssinia (now known as Ethiopia) This lady is Abyssinian, and her song is again something metaphysical, a spiritual realization.
The last stanza of the poem takes us to the beauty of this song of the Abyssinian main reminding us of Wordsworth’s reaction to the song of the solitary reaper.
Coleridge here says that if he could bring back within him the symphony and the song of that maid, he would get indeed such a deep pleasure that he would build the pleasure that Kubla Khan wanted to construct.
Kubla Khan Short Summary
He could become a person who was fed on the dew of honey and has drunk the milk of paradise. In short, the song of the Abyssinian maid is so powerful that it can give eternal happiness to people and make them do great things.
It will perhaps be relevant to note here that Kubla Khan is supposed to be the recreation of a dream that Coleridge saw when he had fallen asleep reading purchase his pilgrims.
That is why it retains all the qualities of such a visionary dream. The poem starts with the proposed palace of Kubla Khan is Xanadu, and it ends with a personal reaction of the poet to such a palace.
The poem is a unique example of Romantic Imagination, and the poet’s subjective reaction to the whole scene is of primary importance here. The irregular meter of the poem further contributes to the dream-like quality of the poem’, for in a dream Things move quite irregularly.
Read more from Mystic Drum (click)
