#Kubla Khan (poem)

[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?

[loveindeeair]

All these in me no means can move

To come to thee and be thy love.

Love,

DeeSignia 🐾

[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

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.

[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.

[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.

[inspofromancientworld]

Kubla Khan and its Ancient Origins

By Araniko - This file has been extracted from another file, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4126240

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan: or A Vision in a Dream in 1797 after an opium induced dream of Shangdu (called Xanadu in the poem) inspired by by reading Purchas his Pilgrimes by Samuel Purchas in 1614 where he wrote 'In Xandu did Cublai Can build a stately Pallace, encompassing sixteen miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleasant Springs, delightfull streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumpuous house of pleasure, which may be moved from place to place.' He planned it to be between 200-300 lines, but because of an interruption by a 'person on business from Porlock', the poem only ended up being 54 lines long. Because of this, references to 'on business from Porlock' have come to mean a wholly unwelcome visitor, especially if they intrude on creative acts. The poem wasn't published until 1816 after Coleridge read the poem to Lord Byron, who encouraged him to publish it.

By Nicolas Sanson - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20676494

Shangdu (ᠱᠠᠩᠳᠤ) was the summer palace of Kublia Khan, founder of the Yuan dynasty, known by his temple name as Emperor Shizu of Yuan and his regnal name as Setsen Khan. He was the grandson of Genghis Khan and followed his brother Möngke as Khagan after defeating his brother Ariq Böke in the Toluid Civil War, which caused the Great Khan's empire to splinter. Shangdu was named as the summer capital in 1271 and it was home to Muslim physicians, where medicine and surgery were taught. It also happened to be his residence, where he was named Khagan.

By Flaumfeder - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=90069769

The poem focuses on the 'pleasure dome', a place that was an 'attempt to hide from the ideal [nature and the divine] and escape into a private creation' in the poem, which was inspired by Purchas' Purchas his Pilgrimes idea of a 'house of pleasure'. Coleridge, and many Romantic poets, saw the dome as the 'most artificial of constructs' and use it to highlight the disconnect from the truth of the world. He thought the dome could be redeemed if it was connected to religion, but Khan's dome in the poem was 'a purposeless life dominated by sensuality and pleasure', leaving it 'unable to recreate Eden'.

In contrast, 'Alph, the sacred river' is nature and the divine made manifest, even to becoming darker, an angry god, though it contributes its holiness to the land of Xanadu to allow it to flourish, though that flourishing is paired with death. The build up of divine and profane reach Kublai, who is trying to work through his inner turmoil, especially the Abyssinian's song, which enthralls him, but leaves him imprisoned, unable to act on the inspiration unless he hears her sing again.

You can read the whole poem here.

[feijoacrumble]

it must be so nice to have a normal song stuck in your head. for the past six months or more i have had samuel taylor coleridge's kubla khan poem stuck in my head. did you know that in xanadu did kubla khan/ a stately pleasure dome decree? well I do and I'm fed up with it