Final Project

Tracing Poetry

            Often times, we forget the limitations of text—not of a text so much as text itself especially when it comes to poetry.  Writing is, on the very face of it, something which attempts to contain and portray language which, itself, is attempting to contain and represent thought.  Poetry, in a sense, is trying to cut out the middleman by blurring the line between text and language in an attempt to bring the reader closer to the world of thought.  The two poems that we have looked at most in depth this semester are T.S. Eliot’s “The Four Quartets” and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”  While both of these poems deserve consideration, I will spend this time focusing on “Kubla Khan.”  Coleridge takes us a step closer to the world of thought when, in “Kubla Khan,” he attempts to draw us into his dream.  This is a text which, since it was assigned to be memorized, we have all seen (and hopefully read) more times than we have heard it performed. However, we must move beyond the text itself.  We must present the text in such a way as to display the language that has been reduced to text and we must enact the dream that has been reduced to language.  This is something that is lost when poetry is read only as text.  Therefore, I have, after countless repetitions, devised my own version of “Kubla Khan” which I hope moves beyond the realm of text into the realm of dreams and thought.

            This idea is something that came to me last spring during a poetry reading by Frederick Turner, who I have already been mentioned this semester.  I do not remember the poem that he read where it clicked and, come to think of it, I still have not seen any of these poems in text form from his collection The Undiscovered Country, but there was something about the way he read them: the timing, the verve, the highs and the lows.  At this moment, I realized that anyone who does not hear this poem read, or performed, rather, by its author, will never understand what I am seeing.  The poem was well written; but admittedly, were I to stumble across the text version somewhere on the internet, I likely would not have looked twice, but in this auditorium, I was stopped in my tracks by the performance in front of me.  I pushed the thought to the back of my mind for some time but, slowly, it began to creep up on me and I began to realize that every poem I have ever read has only been some ghost of the original.    Emotion cannot be placed upon the page in the way that the author of poetry needs it to be; there is no punctuation that tells the reader to slow down and enunciate every syllable; there are no stage directions; there is no symbol to tell the speaker to lower his voice to a barely audible piano or to rattle the window-panes with a booming fortissimo.  The poet is like a craftsman working with tools that just do not fit into his hands: he does his best, but in the end, there is not a language for the thoughts of a poet.  In “Kubla Khan,” we see Coleridge struggle with these same problems.  That is why, whenever Dr. Sexson recites any portion of the poem, we are all left thinking, “what the fuck?”  Some thoughts lie to deep, are too thought-like to find a place in our system of language.  Keeping these insufficiencies in mind, I have taken “Kubla Khan” and attempted to move beyond the text and to do some things to the words on the page that cannot be written.

 

            In my reading of “Kubla Khan,” there are several of things that I employ that are not written on the page.  The first of these is the speed with which the first stanza is read.  I think the first stanza should be read slowly: the speaker (presumably Coleridge, since the historical context for this poem is so rich) is still trying to comprehend the dream that he has just had.  The words, “Xanado,” “Kubla Khan,” and “Alph,” are finding their way into language for the first time.  The strangeness of this must be just as striking to the poet as to the readers.  Along these same lines, there also needs to be some subtle question marks written in as Coleridge finds the correct word to fit what he is trying to describe.  This could hint at the fact that perhaps these words do not describe what he saw at all, but are as close as he can get using the English language.  The line break is the deep breath before the plunge: a ‘Eureka’ moment for the poet that demonstrates that he has realized, perhaps in that instant, where is going, and now he is going be drag the reader along.

            In the second stanza, Coleridge really picks up the pace.  We start to see exclamation points—four in the first five lines—as he becomes excited and really starts to let the description go.  The speed and volume of this stanza increase, perhaps so much so that the listeners are left a little bit behind because he knows that if he does not get this description out now, he never will.  And as the river falls for the second time, we slow down again.  The speaker, like the listeners is listening, listening for the “Ancestral voices” that “Kubla heard from far.”  We continue the slow speed throughout the end of the stanza.  Are these the words of the ancestors?  Probably not.  There are not words for their language, so we continue with our description, slowly now, since we are nearing the end and we read the final exclamation point of the stanza not so much as one of the excitement that carried us through the bulk of the stanza, but a note of triumphant resolution that we have made it thus far and are ready for the next step.

            The line-break between the ultimate and penultimate stanzas give, both the reader and the listeners a chance to catch up and be sure that they are on the same page.  The first five lines of this final stanza start slow and matter-of-factly, much as we ended the preceding stanza.  By now, the listener begins to think that the speaker has calmed down from the frenzy of the second stanza.  But, as the speaker paints the picture of the maid and her song, and begins to think about recreating them so that others could hear her “symphony,” we begin to increase the volume, and the tone is almost one of anger and frustration.  The speaker knows that he could never accurately recreate his vision and the maid’s song (which are one in the same), and he hates it.  What’s more, even if he could recreate it those who heard him and heard her song and saw the “sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice” would think him a madman.  This frustration is what leads us back into the exclamation marks and a second frenzy which brings us near the end.  As the fury breaks over the speaker and he realizes that everyone would think him mad, he realizes that it is he who has “drunk the milk of paradise.”  This creates the fall that seems to end the poem on a sad note, but there is something joyous in the broken voice, but it is an inner joy, a self satisfaction that, with these divine visions, he knows no one will understand, but that does not make them any less real.

 

            Keeping some of these things in mind, I would like to take some time to talk about how this poem relates to some of the other works we have looked at this semester.   Since I would like to allow for some time for discussion about any of these ideas, I am going to keep this discussion relatively short and focus on discussion points more than on a discussion itself.

            For Annie Dillard’s book, For the Time Being, we get the feeling that the “forests ancient as the hills enfolding sunny spots of greenery” are some of the places that she brings her reader.  From China to a hospital’s delivery room, Dillard helps how similar some of the most seemingly different situations, places, and people really are.  Is “Xanado” really any different from the archeological sights or the hospital or Israel or Rome?

            In The Secular Scriptures, Northrop Frye says,

On the lower reaches of descent we find the night world, often a dark and labyrinthine world of caves and shadows where the forest has turned subterranean, and where we are surrounded by the shapes of animals.  If the meander-and-descent patterns of Paleolithic caves, along with the paintings on their walls, have anything like the same kind of significance, we are here retracing what are, so far as we know, the oldest imaginative steps of humanity. (111-2)

Does the river in the poem do anything besides meander and descend?  In fact, Frye’s whole chapter titled “Themes of Descent” feels as if he could have been writing about “Kubla Khan” the entire time.  From the strange nature of the landscape, to the seemingly unintelligible language, to the fact that Coleridge experienced this all in a dream only helps to make this fact more apparent.  Is this the creative process? a series of rabbit-holes we all must fall down? And is it possible to descend too far?  Is this what Coleridge did?

            And finally, is Mircea Eliade’s Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries doing anything more than telling us to embrace those “Ancestral voices” that Kubla hears and we all listen for?  If Coleridge has descended into an unknown land, perhaps his drug induced stupor has made him privy to something we can only guess at: something primal and grotesque.  These are our primitive desires, thoughts, and creations, and we should surrender ourselves to them in order to get back in illo tempore.  Then, that before-time place, in the world of the descent, did Coleridge, somehow, tap into the collective imagination?

            How do all of these points relate to the other works of fiction that we have read and discussed?  To the poetry of “The Four Quartets” and the prose of The Magus?  Can Nicholas Urfe relate to the speaker’s frustration at the end of “Kubla Khan?”  What do we learn about time and descent when we pair “The Four Quartets,” Frye, and “Kubla Khan?”  Is Alison the demon lover? Or is Nick? Perhaps both?

 

            While many of these questions may not have definite answers, I am interested in knowing your thoughts when viewing these works from a ‘Kubla-centeric’ perspective instead of using The Magus as our starting point as we have done for the second half of this semester.