i need help to anayze the sonnet kubla khan ( Vision in a Dream) by smauel cloeridge?

Question

please i need help with finding the meaning for this sonnet the kula khan for my essay ? if anybody knows any site or idea might help please share with me

Answer 1

Lots of people think that "Kubla Khan" is fragmentary and impossible to understand because it came to Coleridge in a dream while he was on drugs, and he was interrupted and never could recapture the dream. I used to think the same thing.

But that's dead wrong! It's just a part of Coleridge's fiction. Actually it's a complete poem, carefully worked out, drawing allusions from many of the works Coleridge was reading at the time or was familiar with from his background.

(And by the way, it is NOT a sonnet!)

In his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge talks about two kinds of genius: what the calls the "command genius" and the creative or poetic genius, or "absolute genius." Each attempts to recapture Paradise, or an ideal world. The "commanding genius" does so by commanding people to remake the world according to his dictate. Napoleon was his primary example. The problem is their their "remade" worlds are never actually ideal. They have flaws. And they don't last.

In the first part of this poem, the ancient Kubla Khan represents the "commanding genius."

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.

The "paradise-on-earth" was constructed according to his command. But it has flaws ("hugh fragments vaulted like rebound hail"), and it won't last forever ("Ancestral voices prophesying war"). Read the first section carefully, and you will find details about this ideal "paradise." You can even draw a map of it. But you can also see the hints of imperfection ("woman wailing for her demon lover," "A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!")

The last section of the poem (about the "damsel with a dulcimer") refers to the creative genius. The creative genius reconstructs Paradise in a work of art (poetry, music, painting, etc.). It can be perfect, and it can last forever. But it requires an act of the imaginative. Unimaginative people, those who do not appreciate or respond to fine art, will dismiss it as a work of a madman or of witchcraft -- and even attempt to censor it.

And all who heard should see them there,
[that is, in his poem or symphony or painting]
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.

The imaginative genius is seen by the rest of the world as bewitched or demonized, and his works dismissed or set apart--just as "Kubla Khan" has been called the fragmentary raving of a drug addict.

Two books, listed below, have made a thorough study of the sources Coleridge picked up from his reading and either consciously or unconsciously incorporated into the poem. [1, 2] There's also a hypertext that pulls all these sources together. [3]

But the main source for the idea about the "commanding genius" and "creative genius" is Coleridge's own Biographia Literaria. [4] For a more datailed interpretation of the poem, developing this contrast, see [5] below.

Answer 2

I did a paper over this last year!!!

I used this site to help me out.

www.sparknotes.com


Basically all that I did was break down the stanzas and analyzed it. I can't remember what exactly I wrote, but I think I told how Kubla Khan had built a beautiful pleasure dome with a small stream and trees. The only problem is that he built it over a river, and when the river flooded, it carried away the dome and destroyed the garden. He then remembers a song he heard a slave play on a dulcimer once, and when the song plays in his mind he decides to rebuild the dome, but make it more grand and up in the air. At the end, he begins to go mad and his people sense doom for the ruler.

Answer 3

Kubla Kahn is not a sonnet. Sonnets, by definition, have 14 lines. Some things you should know:

Coleridge had LOTS of medical problems and took morphine and other drugs frequently.

Coleridge wrote in his letter to William Wordsworth that he was sleeping and this vision of Kubla Kahn and his "pleasure dome" appeared to him.

Coleridge awoke and began writing as fast as he could, but company arrived and he had to stop. When he resumed writing, he could think of nothing else to say - he had lost the inspiration.

It was only by the insistance of Wordsworth that Coleridge published it at all; he didn't like it, particularly that it was unfinished.

The poem itself uses quite a bit of imagery, vividly describing the setting of the pleasure dome and the women "wailing for their demon lover"

Kubla Kahn was the leader of the Mongol empire/culture for a period in history. I'm afraid I can't be more specific as to when....

In my unprofessional-sounding professional opinion, he was a drug addict on a morphine trip.

Answer 4

I don't care WHAT your teacher says, you CAN'T. He was high as a kite on laudanum and opium. That poem was the product of a dream - unfinished because his sleep was interrupted. Many of the poems of that era are perfect examples of "selective criticism" - if the critics liked it, they read whatever they wanted into it. Yup, yup, yup - Samuel was a darn gifted writer, but that particular peice could have been written by Roger Waters (Pink Floyd?).

Answer 5

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubla_Khan