#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?

[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

[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

[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

[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.

[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.

[androgynousprincessgiver]

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In my mind, it is complete, and is one of the Official 39 84 Donald Trump Tee Shirt YOU MISSED FIGHT! MAGA shirt poems. Every reviewer, save one, thinks it has no meaning whatsoever. Quoting from the best analysis of this poem from the late John Spencer Hill, “The first and, for over a hundred years, almost the only reader to insist on the intelligibility and coherence of Kubla Khan was Shelley’s novel-writing friend, Thomas Love Peacock: “there are”, he declared in 1818, “very few specimens of lyrical poetry so plain, so consistent, so completely simplex et unum from first to last”. Perhaps wisely, Peacock concluded his fragmentary essay with these words, thereby sparing himself the onerous task of explaining the consistency and meaning of so plain a poem as Kubla Khan.” (John Spencer Hill, A Coleridge Companion).

[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

[cordeliaflyte]

top 5 poems !!

the shield of achilles by w. h. auden

niebo złote ci otworzę by krzysztof kamil baczyński

first duino elegy by rainer maria rilke

orpheus and eurydice by czesław miłosz

kubla khan by s. t. coleridge

[saviourkingslut]

trying to find this fucking. poem. we had to read for english in high school. it was crammed in a reader between like, wordsworth's daffodils and spenser's i wrote her name upon the strand and coleridge's rime of the ancient mariner and some shakespeare. it was somewhat like coleridge's kubla khan (but it wasn't that poem) and a LOT like "the stream with languid murmur creeps, ⁠In Lumin's flowery vale: Beneath the dew the Lily weeps ⁠Slow-waving to the gale" but it can't have been that bc it's too obscure in comparison to everything else in that reader. i feel like it was very mystical and fantastical and relatively long and i used to know a part of it by heart but by god i dont remember a single word of it. im going insane

[thecutestmancardoorhookhand]

New AU just dropped: Regency dreamling but it's less Jane Austen inspired aristocracy drama and more laughing gas fueled Romanticism at the Pneumatic Institution shenanigans

It started out as "I think Hob would have a flair for the theatrical and be a fun teacher" and "At some point Hob must have dabbled in science", which added up to "Hob would have loved hanging out with Davy, guy was famously Theatrical and very for spreading science knowledge" to "didn't he repeatedly refuse to die at the pneumatic institution even?" to "never forgetti this was the romantic chemist who was chums pals buddies bros with the romantic poets" to "Wait! kubla khan was written in a dream" (and admittedly, here a break was taken to look at the camera like i was in the office at the line "beware! beware! his flashing eyes, his floating hair!" near the end of the poem before Coleridge got interrupted by some mystery dude in the waking) to "Coleridge was one of the people who frequented the institution to get high on nitrous" to "Well what if they meet out of schedule completely on accident then"

And now we're 100+ pages deep in research over the brief but extremely passionate love affair that Chemistry and Literature had before tragically parting ways. Because sure, I do not need to be 100% historically accurate and pinpoint the exact date at which Hob freshly out of the slave trade and now active in the abolitionist movement might have met a Thomas Beddoes who was campaigning to stop the anti-freedom of speech "gagging bills", but every time a thought like "Nitrous oxide seems right up Delirium's alley, maybe she should be involved in this fic" i end up finding out that Davy hallucinated a young girl every 10 years since discovering the gas and I am compelled to pull even more from reality. Like finding out that Davy used to do dramatic storytelling at the White Hart Inn of his town when he was a teen (and in case you're curious from what we know of his lectures and letters it would not be unreasonable to picture him jumping off a chair to amuse his audience, or selling his soul for the boon of storytelling either.)

Expect me to never actually finish this, partly because all this pneumatic institution lore comes with the territory of being a chemistry clown that has to try and concentrate on non-creative work, and partly because now we're outlining "okay but what if lake district house. What's the 1810s equivalent of 'bruh.' for when the Corinthian finds Dream being moved by Frankenstein" instead of actually writing the original plan of "Hob does a science!" or the version it evolved into of "you know what's better than whatever the everloving fuck was going on in the pneumatic institution of bristol in late october 1799? Well that same mess, with all the nitrous inhaling and all the unconfirmed love affairs But add a particularly melancholy Dream of the Endless (recently reminded of his status as a father and as an entity who should not fall seriously in love with mortals) meddling and possibly casually sleeping his way into inspiring the first wave of absolute messy bitches we call romantic movement, a Dream of the Endless who immediately picks up his meeting with now-no-longer-a-slave-trader-but-a-prototype-NHS-research-assistant Hob Gadling from where they left off (that is to say: with intense eyefucking)"

[zerogate]

This certainty is characteristic of true intuition. The answers come with what psychologist Jerome Bruner calls “the shock of recognition”. They come suddenly and surprisingly, but fit so well that when the surprise wears off, we are left thinking, “Of course. It is obvious. How could I not have seen it all along?” And from that point on, the missing piece slots neatly into place, the picture is complete, the puzzle is solved and it is hard to remember what it felt like not to know the answer.

And this process of discovery is by no means unique to science. Mozart, in a letter to a friend, described his creative gift as one coming from outside himself.

When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer – say, travelling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not; nor can I force them … Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively but I hear them, as it were, all at once … The committing to paper is done quickly enough, for everything is already finished; and it rarely differs on paper from what it was in my imagination.

This enviable flow of inspiration, fully formed, was Mozart’s great glory – the result, it seems, of an unusual ability to sustain the intuitive moment beyond the brief flash that leaves most of us blinking and fumbling for answers that were clear in the moment of illumination, but seldom last long enough for us to put them into words or get them down on paper.

Bach had some of Mozart’s flair. “I play,” he said, “the notes in order, as they are written. It is God who makes the music.” Milton wrote that the Muse “dictated” to him the whole “unpremeditated song” that we now know as Paradise Lost. Robert Louis Stevenson dreamed the plot of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde. Samuel Taylor Coleridge awoke with what he called “a distinct recollection” of the whole of “Kubla Khan”, which he wrote down without conscious effort, pausing only when interrupted by the infamous Visitor from Porlock. By the time that Coleridge returned to his room, the end of the poem was lost for ever. It had “passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast.” The flow was broken and the work remains tantalisingly incomplete.

The onset of such illumination has characteristic symptoms. We become subject to “cold chills”, “tingles”, “burning sensations” and “electric glows”. We get “gut reactions” and “feel things in our bones”. The reactions are visceral, but often have superficial symptoms. The poet A. E. Housman remained resolutely clean-shaven. “Experience has taught me,” he said, “when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.” Creative ideas are often preceded by intimations, by fuzzy feelings that something is about to happen.

These are well described by philosopher Graham Wallas as “a vague, almost physical, recurrent feeling as if my clothes did not quite fit me”.

-- Lyall Watson, Beyond Supernature

[werewolfetone]

I wish to be the recipient of an info dump. Tell me about something you know too much about

Alright!!! The first thing that comes to mind to infodump about is the Romantics, so I am going to tell you about. hm. the story about the writing of Kubla Khan.

Kubla Khan is a poem by Coleridge named after the real life 13th century Mongolian emperor. This, along with the text of the poem, is... basically all that's concrete about it. It's generally accepted that it was probably written in October 1797, but given that Coleridge didn't really date his poems after he wrote them and also really really loved lying and all forms of embellishment, that's mostly just the best educated guess there is, not a hard and fast fact. I've heard summer 1797, winter 1797, even spring 1798, but in general October 1797 is the most likely and accepted date of composition.

And now for how it was written. oh boy.

Let's go over Coleridge's story first. According to him, the night that it was written he was staying in a farmhouse in the southwest of England, due to an illness he needed to recover from before he could travel back to his house. He was reading the book Purchas his Pilgrimes by Samuel Purchas, which is. uh. I think it's about Chinese history? idk I've never read it. Anyway, Coleridge had also taken an amount of opium to help him sleep, and fell asleep reading about Kublai Khan. He then had a wonderful dream in which he composed 200-300 lines of poetry about Kublai Khan, and when he woke he hurried to write them down--but was interrupted! by someone who is only credited as a "person from Porlock." And therefore what we have of Kubla Khan is unfinished, because he forgot what he needed to write as he was trying to get the visitor to leave.

So that's Coleridge's side of things, and the story has become quite well known, enough that it's almost part of the poem. However, there are several gaping holes in this story:

The biggest one is probably the book he claimed to have been reading. It was a very rare book even back then, which made it unlikely that he would have found a copy at some random farmhouse, and it was almost 1000 pages long, meaning that you probably wouldn't carry it around while hiking across England. It's been suggested that maybe he was just thinking about the book and claimed to have been reading it for a better story (this absolutely sounds like something he would have done tbh) but idk.

Coleridge later changed multiple details about the writing of it, especially the details of the drug he had been taking when he wrote it. This could just come down to the fact that he didn't want to have to deal with 18thc ableism against drug users, but I guess what I'm saying is that if he was willing to change one detail for publication there's a good chance he was willing to change others.

Speaking of drugs, given some later events (particularly the time that he thought he saw Wordsworth and Sara Hutchison ah. up to something. but that's it's own post) Coleridge definitely wasn't at his most reliable when sleep deprived and on opium. Which, I mean, no one is, but with Coleridge in particular there's other documented instances of events happening to him after he had taken a bunch of opium and him not being quite sure if what was happening was really real.

It's a very ah. convenient story. Coleridge couldn't finish this poem but oh it wasn't his fault! it was the fellow on business from Porlock! It's also very similar to other stories he would tell about other poems he couldn't finish (usually for mental illness reasons), which were more blatantly made up, which makes me doubt a little bit that it's real. With Coleridge, it's frankly much more likely that he just couldn't figure out how to finish it or couldn't force himself to finish it, leading to him going "oh making up an outlandish story about why it's unfinished would be more fun than actually finishing this." To be fair though "the vibes are off" isn't a very good reason to doubt it but also. the vibes are definitely off.

To be honest we'll probably never know if Coleridge was telling the truth about the whole story or if he just made it up but y'know. it's fun to think about. Also the poem we got out of it is pretty good, you should go and read it.