#Kubla Khan (poem)

[loveindeeair]

All these in me no means can move

To come to thee and be thy love.

Love,

DeeSignia 🐾

[soulmaking]

from "Kubla Khan" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

[comparativelysuperlative]

Every so often I get randomly sad that Kubla Khan was never finished. I would absolutely accept Two Cakes, but AO3 apparently doesn't cover poetry fix-it fics. Or at least not the insanely hubristic ones.

How long do we have to wait before GPT can write the full 300 lines at Coleridge quality? Is that particular symphony and song before or after the tumult sinking to a lifeless ocean?

[haveyoureadthispoem-poll]

"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."

Read it here | Reblog for a larger sample size

[p-isforpoetry]

"Kubla Khan" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (read by Sir Ian McKellen)

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.

Source: The Poetry of Coleridge, 2006

[haywardfreud]

The pride of feeling you yourself would make the greatest reader of Kubla khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

[kpgresham]

Dream of Mystery, Mnemosyne, and Miserable Truth

by M.K. Waller You had a dream Well, I had one too . . . You tell me your dreamAnd I’ll tell you mine.—Albert H. Brown, Charles N. Daniels, Seymour Rice, “You Tell Me Your Dream” Remorse–is Memory–Awake—Emily Dickinson British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge had a dream. In October of 1797, after reading about the summer capital of the Yuan dynasty of China founded by Kubla Khan, he had an…

[hellsitegenetics]

Hi, can I request you do my favorite poem, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"? (Can be found here, skipping the intro, beginning with "In Xanadu"). I confess I'm quite hoping it will be a moth. Thank you!!

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Closest match: Cicer arietinum chromosome Ca7 Common name: Chickpea

[thesiltverses]

Are there any poems that inspired TSV? I know I asked a similar question about plays, and I really loved the ones listen!

Well, there's a huge amount of Seamus Heaney in the landscape and vibes of TSV (particularly the bog-sacrifice poems for obvious reasons, the early Death of a Naturalist work trying to make sense of his childhood and parents, and his Buile Suibhne translations), and generally speaking we're sort of riffing off symbolist knight-errant narratives which includes poems like Faerie Queene.

They're almost too obvious and famous to be called influences, but I don't think you can write anything about religious and apocalyptic dread without feeling the looming shadow of The Waste Land, The Hollow Men and The Second Coming, and I think there's a lot of buried Rime of the Ancient Mariner homages in Carpenter's story (like one who on a lonesome road, etc) and Kubla Khan in Faulkner's.

[thebeautifulbook]

POEMS BY COLERIDGE by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (Eragny Press, 1904) Art binding by Samuel Feinstein. Wood engravings by Lucien Pissarro.

“Christabel”, “Kubla Khan”, “Fancy in Nubibus”, and “Song from Zapolya”.

source

[galleryofart]

A Sea Spell

Artist: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (British, 1828-1882)

Date: 1877

Medium: Oil Paint on canvas

Collection: Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States

Description

A Sea-Spell was painted for Rossetti’s patron Frederick Leyland, a ship magnate who owned a large number of paintings by the artist. Rossetti first planned to illustrate lines from Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan - “A damsel with a dulcimer / In a vision once I saw” - but the subject was ultimately derived from his own poem, inscribed on the frame that he designed. The musician’s “lashing fingers weave the sweet-strung spell” of the siren, a mythological figure whose voice lures sailors to their deaths. Although sirens were traditionally described as women with the bodies or heads of birds, Rossetti’s enchantress retains her human form. The artist evokes all of the senses in his lushly claustrophobic canvas; the siren’s dreamy mien suggests that she, too, has been bewitched by the music and by the fragrance of the surrounding flowers. The subject of the dangerous woman, or “femme fatale,” flourished in the nineteenth century.

[etymology-of-the-emblem]

Zanado / ザナド, Shambhala / シャンバラ, and Agartha / アガルタ

Zanado (JP: ザナド; rōmaji: zanado), also known as the Red Canyon, is the site of ruins that the Nabateans once called home in Fire Emblem: Three Houses. This name comes from ザナドゥ (rōmaji: zanadu) Xanadu, more traditionally known as 上都, Shàngdū. Literally meaning "Upper Capital," Shàngdū was the summer capital of China's Yuan dynasty. When it was first constructed, the city was called 開平, Kāipíng; less than a decade later, it would be Kublai Khan who gave it the name we use today. In a century's time, Shàngdū would be abandoned, the people driven off or killed when the Ming dynasty wrested power from Toghon Temür, the last ruler of the Yuan.

Before its collapse, Shàngdū was a great city that even the Western world had heard of. Infamous Venetian explorer Marco Polo had visited during the reign of Kublai Khan. He referred to the city by the name Chandu or Ciandu, and thoroughly recounted the intricate, artistic structure of the city, remarking of rooms gilded and rich with paintings. The city held two palaces—one of marble, one of wicker—as well as a great park containing vast meadows, lovely fountains and brooks, and a plethora of flora and fauna. Three centuries later, the English cleric Samuel Purchas published a work that, for brevity's sake, we'll simply call Purchas his Pilgrimes, which collected descriptions of various locations and religions. Amongst this was a rewording of Marco Polo's account of Shàngdū, which Purchas instead called Xandu.

It was Purchas' documentation that reached English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1797. He was struck by an intensely vivid dream after reading of Xandu, and from this begot his famed Kubla Khan. He exaggerated the beautiful land that Marco Polo wrote of, and gave the world the Xanadu. He also conjured up a canyon that ruptured, the burst releasing a great river through the land. In that moment, Kubla Khan received a prophecy of war. The poem is most commonly thought to portray Xanadu as an idyllic paradise, and that interpretation persists to this day, with the name being synonymous with paradise and being conflated with similar concepts like Shangri-La. Curiously, the concept of Shangri-La is a paradise hidden away in a Tibetan valley.

The Red Canyon leans into the idea of Shàngdū being this long lost paradise. Even the fact that is a canyon of all things is likely derived from the Coleridge's poem. It could be interpreted that both the destruction of Shàngdū by the Mings and the explosion of the canyon relate to the atrocity that befell the Nabateans. Similarly, the fact that Shàngdū was utterly abandoned and forgotten, and is now largely remembered for this idealized image made by someone who only read someone else's account could tie into how the actual significance of Zanado is lost throughout Fódlan.

Shambhala (JP: シャンバラ; rōmaji: shanbara) is the underground city that the Agarthans use as their stronghold. The name Shambhala originates from Hinduism: according to the Vishnu Purana, it is in this city that Kalki, the final incarnation of the god Vishnu, is supposed to be born. It is said that he will end a dark era of unrighteousness and bring about the most virtuous age before Mahapralaya, the end of the universe.

The concept of Shambhala would later be adopted into Tibetan Buddhism, first mentioned in the Kalachakra tantra. In the story, King Manjuśrīkīrti banished thousands of people of his unnamed kingdom for practicing Surya Samadhi, the worship of the sun. As it turned out, these sun-praisers, were the wisest people of the land, and Manjuśrīkīrti was soon begging them to return. The majority of the exiles would found a city called Shambhala, which is prophesized as the origin of a savior similar to the Hindu city. It is said that when the world is overrun with violence and avarice, the Kalki king Maitreya would come from Shambhala and bring about defeat to evil and peace to the world.

Western esotericism would twist Shambhala into another form. Rather than an actual city, it was common for individuals like Alice Bailey to interpret Shambhala as a realm on another spiritual plane where the deity presiding over Earth resides. Further building off the ideas presented in Buddhism, others will interpret Shambhala as a land of a mysterious faction that do good throughout the world.

The Shambhala seen in Three Houses is very much a twisting of the classic prophecies. The Agarthans, while exiled by the Goddess to their subterranean lands like in the Buddhist text, instead use their great capabilities as a way to bring war, chaos, and darkness to the world. They also corrupt the "mysterious faction" found in esoteric works, but that more has to do with the last name to talk about today.

Agartha (JP: アガルタ; rōmaji: agaruta)was a highly-advanced civilization whose people were driven underground into Shambhala. Agartha is a mystical land found at the earth's core appearing in various occult and esoteric beliefs. Despite this, the name is very transparently derived from modern literature: Louis Jacolliot's Les Fils du Dieu told of the rise and fall of a lost Indian capital of Asgartha. The story followed no Indian traditions, instead styling for a historic account of Norse mythology based on various preexisting theories. In fact, Asgartha is derived from the Norse Ásgarðr, the land of the gods.

However, the book (and its two sequels) were incredibly popular in Jacolliot's homeland of France, and the way he framed to books as being derived from ancient manuscripts led to the idea of Agartha evolving into its own entity. Just over a decade later, occultist Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre would popularize the modern ideas of Agartha in his Mission de l'Inde en Europe. He claimed to have astral projected to an underground city with a population in the millions, all ruled by a powerful master of magic and advanced technology. From there, many occultists and esoterics would interpret Agartha as housing a Grand Lodge made up of the secret rulers of our world. It's easy to see how the concepts of Agartha and Shambhala are now commonly conflated with one another.

The Agarthans of Fire Emblem wear their inspirations on their dubstep-playing sleeves. They are a highly advanced people living under the earth's surface. They infiltrate the political scene of the overworld, manipulating the world to bring about a scenario that will let them claim revenge and utter domination of the world. Not to mention that their leader is a powerful spellcaster with actual missiles at his disposal. And in a sense of irony, all three of the locations we've looked at today are named after lands that have been viewed as paradise. Likely both the Nabateans and Agarthans thought what they once had was that perfect, idyllic life.

[gwenllian-in-the-abbey]

Is there anything good (positive achievement) about the Valyrian/ghiscarian empires? I feel GRRM didn't bother giving them nuanced and interesting history beside mass slavery, rape and genocide, esp the ghiscarians they are mash up of the all the racist oriental tropes you can think of

Hi anon, this is a really good question. I think you can look at it two ways.

On the one hand, if we're analyzing the books from a literary perspective, GRRM's portrayal of the entire continent of Essos is pretty Orientalist and doesn't hold up that well. And we can blame this to some extent on GRRM being a white boomer who clearly did not think all that deeply about the stereotypes he was playing into when he created his "exotic" eastern continent. 90s fantasy was rife with this stuff (even my beloved Robin Hobb is not completely immune-- I'm looking at you, Chalcedeans), and at the time Orientalism was, much like critical race theory or decolonization, a grad school level concept, unless you ran in activist circles. You didn't have Tumblr and Twitter and TikTok and Youtube generating Discourse, you had to actively seek out different perspectives. And ex-hippie liberal white boomers often assumed that they already had the right perspectives, that they knew what traps to avoid, and so you'd get 90s SFF authors thinking they were very cleverly subverting these tropes by going, "I know, I'll have an intensely misogynistic culture of desert dwelling nomads who have harems and slaves but I'll make them white." It was pretty bleak. Luckily for all of us, fantasy has come a long way since then.

And yeah, once you see the Orientalism in ASOIAF, you can't unsee it. Lys is basically the fantasy version of the "pleasure planet" trope, the Dothraki are a stereotype of the Mongol armies without any of the many positive contributions the Molgols made, Qarth is like the Coleridge poem come to life with people riding camels with jeweled saddles and wearing tiger skins, with its women baring one breast and it's sophisticated assassin's guild, and Mereen has its pyramids. The entire continent is brimming with spices and jewels and pleasure houses and people saying "Your Magnificence." It is also a place of blood magic and dragons and Red Gods and shadowlands. It is everything exciting and "exotic," juxtaposed against what appears to most readers to be very mundane--septas and pseudocatholicism and maesters in the citadel. So yeah, it's an Orientalist's fantasy world, and the point of all this is not necessarily to cast it as evil per se, but to cast it as "Other" (and to be clear, Orientalism is harmful and GRRM deserves the criticism he gets for leaning into stereotypes). Valyria and the Valyrians are certainly included in that-- they are explicitly Other as foreign born ruling family in Westeros, and they are treated that way both in-world and by the narrative.

The question then becomes, although GRRM's depictions of Essos lean heavily and inelegantly into Orientalist tropes, why did he create these worlds the way he did? Why is Valyria an "Other" and what significance does it have to the story? And I think that some of this is GRRM's shorthand for something magical that is lost and forgotten and fading away, just like Valyria itself is in the memories of the Targaryen family. It is the Xanadu of Coleridge's Kubla Khan, not just the East viewed from the West, but the past viewed from the present, a nostalgic yearning for a place that only ever existed in the imagination. When the narrative does visit these places in person, rather than telling us about them secondhand, they become ugly and brutal, the jeweled facade hiding a rot underneath. In ASOIAF we have Dany ripping that facade off of Meereen and Yunkai, but she idealizes her own Targaryen heritage, and that is not insignificant, and as readers, we are invited to idealize it right along with her, in spite of plenty of hints that perhaps we should not (like the aforementioned slavery). We even hear Astapori and Yunkish slavers speaking to Dany echo sentiments about the even older Ghiscari empire, also lost, "Ours is the blood of ancient Ghis, whose empire was old when Valyria was yet a squalling child." Old Ghis and the Valyrians who conquered them are both long gone at this point, and yet their descendants are clinging to the legacies of cultures that would be wholly foreign to both of them. Because if Valyria is Xanadu, the Old Valyrians and Old Ghiscari are also Ozymandias, the mighty who have fallen, their once grand civilizations nothing but forgotten ruins. The Targaryens don't yet realize that they are that "half-sunk shattered visage," that they are yearning for something that is gone and never returning, something they never really knew in the first place.

Westeros is not immune to this either. I think it's a consistent theme that GRRM plays with is the ways which the past is glorified and distorted and romanticized. Even in a meta-sense, his entire medieval world is, in many ways, a half-remembered medieval fantasy, the medieval world as imagined by people who read Ivanhoe, rather than a medieval world as actually was. And GRRM simultaneously presents this romanticized world alongside the brutality of the past (and to drive that point home, George's medieval world is much more brutal than the real medieval world was), and so he asks us, just like Dany must ask herself at some point, is the past really all that romantic? Or are we simply yearning for something unnamable and Other? And if we yearn for that, why?

On the other hand, from an in-world perspective, if you are Westerosi, are there any redeeming qualities to Valyrian culture? And I think we can answer that question by asking ourselves, is there anything salvageable from the past, even if the past was terrible? Even if what we perceive of Old Valyria wavers between a horrific empire based on conquest and slavery, and an idealized homeland full of magical dragonriders, depending on who is doing the telling, if we accept it as a fully fleshed out world, then I think we can remember no cultures are monoliths. Old Valyria had art, architecture, fashion, music, literature, and I like to imagine that there were good freeholders, perhaps even Valyrian versions of the Roman Stoics and the Cynics, who raised moral objections to slavery. Certainly the Valyrian "freeholder" government itself, a kind of proto-democracy, similar to that of Athens, was innovative for its particular time and place, even if it was not as democratic as our modern democracies are, and that model of government is replicated throughout Essos, where strict hereditary monarchy seems to be relatively uncommon. Valyria also had a great deal of religious freedom, which persists throughout Essos as well. And as with any empire, it's important to keep in mind that the ruling class made up only a small percentage of actual Valyria, and we know there were Valyrians who were not dragonlords but just normal people, going about their lives who had nothing to do with the atrocities committed, and those people were telling stories, creating art, writing songs, and producing culture too. So I think, tying back into how GRRM uses Valyria and Essos in his narrative, we do not have to discard the past entirely, nor do in-world Targaryens, but it's the romanticization that's the problem, and I think that's something that both in-world characters and readers are cautioned against.

[dont-forget-to-drink-water]

This is quite random, but if anyone is looking for a poem that fits surprisingly well with old Heterodynes, may I suggest Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge?

It includes: a sacred river, a woman wailing for her demon-lover (which just sounds like a thing that would happen in Mechanicsburg, exchange demon for monstrous, or jäger), a place both holy, enchanted, and haunted with walls and towers, a mighty fountain, ancestral voices prophesying war!, and this:

"Could I revive within me / her symphony and song / to such a deep delight 'would win me / That with music loud and long / I would build that dome in air / ... / 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."

Remind you of anything? Lmao.

[amourduloup]

After she published Frankenstein, Mary went on to write five more novels, as well as many short stories and works of nonfiction. In 1831, she returned to her first novel, revising and extending the text, making the story darker and even more dystopian.

In the introduction, she declared that she had struggled to come up with the idea for the novel. It was not until she had a dream of a “pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together” that she could begin writing.30 However, there is no evidence to suggest that this was true. At no point had she or any of her friends or family mentioned any difficulties in the composition of the novel. Indeed, from the records of those who were there, and from reviewing the notebooks in which Mary wrote the novel, all the evidence suggests that she composed the novel with uncommon fluency and speed. Why, then, would she say that she had difficulty coming up with an idea?

The most likely answer is that Mary wanted to distance herself from the inception of a work that critics had called perverse and immoral. Indeed, her story about the composition of Frankenstein is probably just that: another layer of fiction in a many-layered book. More than fifteen years had passed since she had written the first edition of Frankenstein, both Byron and Shelley were dead, and she faced enormous financial and social pressures as a single mother. She was well aware that women artists were considered monstrous, as women were supposed to create babies, not art. If she could improve her sales and her reputation by saying that she had not consciously created the story, she would do so, inventing a tale that would deflect the criticism she faced when people learned that she was the author of Frankenstein. Gifted storyteller that she was, she described her “dream” with the kind of telling details that make it seem real:

When I placed my head on my pillow I did not sleep nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie

But buried within Mary’s apparent self-deprecation is another, prouder claim. Like the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had given a vivid account of the hallucination that led to “Kubla Khan,” his famous fragment of a poem published in the fall of 1816, Mary was asserting her qualifications as a true poet. A dream vision was the marker of a true Romantic artist. Extraordinary dreams were not democratic; only great artists received visions. Thus, at the same time that she downplayed her own initiative, she also asserted her credentials as an artist.

Charlotte Gordon, introduction to Frankenstein: The 1818 Text by Mary Shelley

[thehoneybeet]

Desiderium (E, 6.1k): draco/harry

Tags: POV Draco, clubbing, minor drug use, fuckbuddies, Draco is a writer, EWE, canon divergence, thunderstorms, body shots, kissing, edging, oral sex, legilimency, wandless magic, pining, staying up all night, this fic is almost entirely one sex scene, except they talk through most of it Summary: Their club, their loo, their writing on the wall—it has to be enough. Until it isn’t.

Draco kept his arm glued to Potter’s waist, clinging to the pretence of keeping him upright as they navigated the maze of sweltering, moving bodies out into the night. It was humid, threatening rain, and Draco faltered at the sidewalk, sucking deep breaths into his lungs, with no idea where to apparate. He’d never been to Potter’s house. Evening flowers poured out over boxes along the street, spilling over the eaves, the scent cloying, and on the horizon was the last indication it had ever been day—a greenish line, like the flash of a curse.

Potter breathed hot into his neck. “Do you trust me?”

“No.”

“Ah, well,” said Potter, as he sucked them out of sight.

For @hp-poetry-fest, inspired by Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Much love and thanks to @mono-chromia, @the-fools-errand, @nv-md, and @epitomereally for your eyes on this🌹

Read on Ao3

(some spoilery thoughts/author notes under the cut!)

I loved the concept of poetry fest and have been wanting to push myself to write longer scenes, and this was the result. Something I love about Kubla Khan as a poem is how sexy it is, especially upon a second read, and how beautifully it represents paradise not only as a state of artistic creation, but also a feeling that we constantly strive towards but can never quite reach. I was captivated by a Harry who goes through life still halfway in Xanadu, the liminal place between life and death he visited when he died. But of course, 'his flashing eyes, his floating hair'... Harry needed a witness, someone who was both drawn to him and terrified of getting too close. Draco, who initially believes Harry doesn't care for him, still can't help himself, and offers Harry both a reminder that he's alive and a witness to Harry's worst and most wonderful memory. And ultimately, while Draco is Harry's path to Xanadu, Xanadu becomes Draco's path to Harry.

I also wanted to explore this theme through the sex by writing a story where neither of them come. There is no moment of release in that way, which to me was important to convey the feeling that what you most desire is close, but just out of reach. I loved playing with the tension, edging both them and the reader, and in the end leaving them still searching. Anyway, just some thoughts I had while writing, and know that I love you if you read this far.