Images of Creativity in "Kubla Khan" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
Patrick Mooney
English 121
February 28, 2000
An examination of the characters that Coleridge presents in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan" and the situations in which they find themselves reveals interesting aspects of Coleridge’s own character that are both similar to and different from the characters named in the titles of these poems. In particular, an examination of these characters with an eye toward Coleridge’s conception of poetic inspiration and success can be fruitful.
In "Kubla Khan," Coleridge depicts a powerful character who "did ... a stately pleasure dome decree" ("Kubla Khan" lines 1-2). The fact that Kubla Khan is able merely to decree a pleasure-dome and know that his orders will be executed implies that he is a character of both strong will and great creative power. This faith in himself is not misplaced. The Khan decrees that a pleasure-dome be built and his order is immediately executed: "So twice five miles of fertile ground/ With walls and towers were girdled round" (6-7). Some aspects of the landscape and the dome echo the hardness implied by the chieftain’s single-minded determination: the fountain "with ceaseless turmoil seething," the "dancing rocks" that are tossed into the air by the fountain, the "ancestral voices prophesying war," and the fact that the sacred river itself is "flung up momently" by the fountain (18, 23, 30, 24). As the Khan’s creation, the dome can reasonably be expected to contain clues to his character, and the characterization of the Khan harmonizes well with these clues about his character given by the pleasure dome: the image of a Mongol chief is one associated with danger, war, and a large amount of strength.
All of the aspects of the dome’s landscape so far mentioned are located beneath the ground in the geography that the poem sets up. Above the ground, the Khan’s pleasure-dome is situated in a landscape which also includes "gardens bright with sinuous rills" and "many an incense-bearing tree" — both images which, along with the pleasure-dome, call to mind sensuality and languor (8, 9). That is, the lower landscape of primal force and dynamic action is covered and concealed by a surface landscape of beauty and permanence. This dichotomy suggests a psychological interpretation of the landscape as a whole: the sensual surface-covering may represent the conscious and rational mind, while the subterranean landscape may represent the unconscious, irrational mind of drives and instincts. The powerful Khan, then, can be seen as a figure who has a connection with both landscapes, and his creation, the dome, "floats midway on the waves" between the two worlds: it protrudes into the surface world of the conscious mind, but its roots extend deep beneath the surface; it is a "sunny pleasure-dome" that has caverns below it that extend so far underground that they becomes "caves of ice" (32, 36).
The other object that exists in both poetic landscapes is the fountain that "flung up momently the sacred river" (24). The fountain is located in the chasm that represents the subconscious, but it tosses the sacred river, Alph, up into the sunny landscape symbolic of the conscious and rational world. The fountain is of particular interest because of the two classes of things that it tosses into the air. The first set of objects that the fountain forces up consists of "fragments" (21). Although these fragments are later described as "dancing rocks," the word "fragment" here calls to mind the fact that the subtitle of "Kubla Khan" describes it as a "fragment." The second thing tossed into the air by the fountain is the water of the sacred river Alph. The name "Alph" suggests the Greek alpha, the first letter of the Greek alphabet that is frequently associated with beginnings and origins. (For instance, God identifies Himself as "the alpha and the omega" — the beginning and the end — in Revelation 1:8.) Together, the objects flung into the air by the fountain suggest poetic inspiration — and in the context of the symbolic landscape described above, the images seem to describe primally generated fragments of poetry thrown from the unconscious mind into the sunny landscape of rationality. The fountain, that is, is a channel of poetic inspiration, and Kubla Khan is a figure whose strength and focused desire allow him to harness this vehicle of inspiration and make it part of his own creation, the dome.
Like the Khan’s dome, Coleridge’s "Kubla Khan" is a creative work. Like the dome, it exists two levels: a surface, rational level of the literal meanings of the words and the story that they convey and a lower level of symbolism and irrational feelings associated with the texture and sound of the words used. (The patterns of sound quality and texture quality in this poem are complex. The first stanza, for instance, rhymes in the pattern abaab ccdede, and Coleridge frequently alliterates both vowels and consonants to interlock the sounds of various words. The patterns of consonant-alliteration are particularly involved: Coleridge sometimes uses the same sound at the beginnings of two consecutive syllables, even when words are multisyllabic — as in the "miles meandering" of line 25, the "deep delight" of line 43, and the "Xanadu did" of line one.)
Unlike the Khan’s dome, however, Coleridge’s poem is not a complete and structured creative work; it is a "fragment." The Khan, for this reason, presents the dreaming poet with an ideal image of a creative figure that, as Coleridge explains in the final stanza, he attempts to emulate. He identifies the creation of poetry with "That sunny dome, those caves of ice!" (46). The "Abyssinian maid," not previously mentioned in the vision, awakens within the poet a desire to "build that dome in air" with "music loud and long" (45, 44). She seems to be a sort of muse for Coleridge, a figure who provides creative inspiration with music. This equation of music with the pleasure-dome ties the dome to the poem more strongly than any other symbolic link in "Kubla Khan."
The entire fantasy, however, is nothing but that — a fantasy. Coleridge qualifies his ability to "build that dome in air" throughout the last stanza: his ability to do so is dependent on being able to awaken a "deep delight," which in turn depends on his opportunity to "revive within me/ Her symphony and song" (43, 41-42). If that is possible, then he would like to build his own pleasure-dome, the poem, with "music loud and long" (44). All of these requirements, however, are expressed as conditionals — "’twould," "could," and "would," respectively. This seems to constitute a tacit admission on Coleridge’s part that these conditions are unlikely ever to happen. It seems that the poem, then, is expressive of a feeling that Coleridge has that his poetic gift is, in some fundamental way, flawed and incomplete. This is true whether the poem truly is a "fragment" or (as the well-constructed symbolism seems to suggest) it is actually a complete poetic work: the underlying feeling of despair and yearning remains, and the text points to an interpretation of this as despair over the lack of strong creative ability at the level of Kubla Khan.
The figure of the ancient mariner presents an image similar in some ways to Kubla Khan, but the identification of the mariner as a creative figure — in this case, as a storyteller — is simpler and the anxieties about the nature of the creative process are different in nature.
The mariner, as a storyteller, is easily comparable with Coleridge. The similarity between the two figures runs deeper than a mere affinity of creative processes, however. The mariner experiences a force that constrains him to tell his story from time to time: he says that since his experience where he first told his tale to the "hermit good,"
at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns,
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns. ("Ancient Mariner" 514, 583-5).
This force is similar to the bursts of inspiration that occur "momently," already identified with Coleridge, that are found in "Kubla Khan" ("Kubla Khan" 19).
Coleridge also seems to identify with the mariner in terms of the anxiety that both experience about the nature of their stories. The mariner is clearly anxious in both of the levels of the story in which he is placed. He is (of course) anxious as a character within the framed narrative in the "Rime," as he has no idea what his eventual fate will be or if he will ever escape alive from the ship, which is a prison from which he is not allowed even the release of death — although it is clear that he desires this escape: he describes the horror of living for a week in the presence of the curse of two hundred dead men’s eyes, saying: "Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse, / And yet I could not die" ("Ancient Mariner" 261-2).
More importantly, however, the mariner’s anxiety about the story translates to the level of the framing narrative, although for different reasons. In the level of the framing narrative, the mariner experiences anxiety because of the compulsion to tell his tale that he experiences, not because he is unsure of the ending (583-5). The mariner is also anxious that his tale will be heard — he insists that the wedding-guest listen, despite the fact that the guest has a prior commitment to attend his kinsman’s wedding — and that the wedding-guest should learn its moral, which he repeats twice to lend it emphasis (5-6, 13-14, 612-5).
This anxiety about the compulsion to tell the tale and way in which it is to be received are similar to the anxiety that Coleridge seems to have about the Rime’s reception. Coleridge changed the text of "Ancient Mariner" significantly between the first (1798) edition, published in Lyrical Ballads, and the fifth (1817) edition, published in Sibylline Leaves. It is not the alterations in the text itself that change the details of the story that are relevant here, however. Rather, it is the changes in the way that Coleridge contextualizes the poem that are of concern. These changes include a modernization in spelling for words that had previously been spelled in an archaic manner and the addition of a marginal gloss and an epigram. All of these changes seem to attempt to make the poem easier to understand. The modernization of spelling makes the poem more immediately accessible to the reader; the epigram places the mariner’s story in a cosmological context and starts the reader’s thoughts in a certain direction, which helps Coleridge to control the reader’s interpretation of the poem.
The marginal gloss is perhaps the most interesting of the changes between the first and fifth texts of the poem. The set of notes that Coleridge provides cannot be simply explained as a convenience for the reader, although some of them may serve that purpose. Many of these notes, such as the gloss to line 119 ("the albatross begins to be avenged"), the gloss to lines 139-42 (which explains the significance of the albatross-necklace given to the mariner by the other sailors), and the gloss to lines 345-50 (which explains that the spirits animating the dead sailors were "angelic" and not demonic in nature) add additional material not present in the text of the poem itself. The interpretation of Coleridge’s motive most licensed by the text seems to be his desire to control the reader’s understanding of the poem.
In the end, the mariner is an idealized portrait of Coleridge as a poet, just as Kubla Khan is. As a storyteller, the mariner furnishes an example of the compelling nature of the perfect story. Although the wedding-guest wants to leave, and is so torn between hearing the story and attending his kinsman’s wedding that he beats his breast in anguish several times, he is unable to tear himself away from the mariner: "the mariner hath his will" of the guest (16).
Just as the mariner experienced a series of terrible events on his voyage, Coleridge’s life was difficult. He struggled with addiction to opium, his marriage was sometimes difficult, and he certainly seems to have questioned the strength of his poetic gift. It is possible that, like the mariner, Coleridge experienced storytelling and creative urges in connection with feelings of guilt and failure and saw the creation of a poem as an act that is fundamentally cathartic and which expurgates guilt. In that case, the mariner and Kubla Khan do not present fundamentally different images of Coleridge’s ideal of poetic inspiration, but different aspects of the same image: Kubla Khan is an image of an essentially creative aspect of Coleridge’s poetic function, while the mariner is an image of a broken and essentially conciliatory force. When seen in these terms, it seems that the mariner may be the image with which Coleridge most closely identified himself, but both are symbols of his creative process.
References
The Bible. Authorized (King James) Translation.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. "Kubla Khan" in Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Edition of the Major Works. Ed. H. J. Jackson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. "The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, in Seven Parts" (1798 text) in Romanticism: An Anthology, Second Edition. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1998.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In Seven Parts" (1817 text) in Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Edition of the Major Works. Ed. H. J. Jackson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
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