Kubla Khan

My first thought after I finished “Kubla Khan” was, “What?” Something about the structure of the poem and the shift that it has part way through and the incredibly large amount of imagery in the middle left me completely and totally unable to understand the poem at first go. So I read it a second time, with little luck. Then, I started to think, ‘This is ridiculous. I am good at English. I should be able to understand this. I must be tired’ So, put the poem away for the night and decided to try again in the morning. Of course, in the morning, I was only marginally more successful. That was when I decided to look it up and see if I could figure out, after having done a very thorough job of trying to understand it, what this poem was talking about. I found out, not exactly what the poem was about, but rather the fact that Coleridge, the poet, was on opium at the time of the authoring of this poem. That was when I decided to wait until class to figure out what it was about.

After the class discussion, I am still not clear on what the poem is really about, but no longer fuzzy on what it is saying. I like the theory that we talked about in class, where the poem is saying that dreaming is dangerous and to beware of it, but I don’t know that it’s the only meaning, or even the best one. The very nature of this poem seems to be that no one really knows what it’s about, and critics and scholars have come up with a wide range of possibilities.

Of course, all of this analysis is done ignoring the fact that Coleridge was on opium when he wrote it and while that’s the obvious and only strategy that we have to look at this poem literarily, I was still left wondering how the opium effected the writing. Was it as descriptive as it was because of Coleridge? Or because opium makes you more detail-oriented? I’ve never tried opium and I simply didn’t know. So, resorted back to my trusty internet and looked it up. My research pretty much corroborated what I had already suspected. Opium increases the senses, making everything seem more so. Thus, the high level of imagery in Coleridge’s writing.

I can’t say that I hated “Kubla Khan”. I think that it is an interesting poem and its vague, sort of indistinct meaning is rather fascinating. The circumstances under which it was written provide another level of interesting discussion. However, despite all of this, I can’t really say that I liked it either.