Throughout Kubla Khan,
I thought that it was interesting that there is no indication that Khan even
knows of the chasm or of the fountain. In lines 17-24 we read a very vivid and
violent description of a fountain bursting from the caverns vaulting huge
fragments and ‘dancing rocks’ into the air—volcanic-like. However, among this
tumult, in lines 29-30 Khan only hears from afar, “Ancestral voices prophesying
war!”
I think that it is important to consider the fact that Khan
decreed the dome to be built; in other words, he exercised his stately powers
to build a pleasure dome to embody the grandeur of his state and absolute rule.
Also, that this is complicated by the fact that the very foundation of this
dome is situated upon a cavern where a sacred river, Alph—an allusion to Greek
mythology—runs through.
I read the dome as being an embodiment of man’s creation,
specifically of the state and other political institutions, with its very
creation representing the praxis of man’s attempt to control, or domesticate,
nature. The fountain bursting violently from afar represents nature’s response
and rebellion as it echoes of impending doom—perhaps reminding Khan that his
empiric footprint is as ephemeral and forgettable as Ozymandias.
I have never understood Kubla Khan, but I do love Ozymandias, so I found your analysis in the last paragraph to be quite interesting. There is that similarity between Kubla Khan and Ozymandias of trying to create something lasting, but anything they create is fleeting because nature seems to always reclaim its territory. The sacred river pops up and time and decay destroy the statue of Ozymandias. It's almost as if Kubla Khan shows the moment when man tries to control nature and Ozymandias shows what will ultimately happen. Man will pass on, and nature will reclaim what is hers.
ReplyDeleteSeveral critics have pointed out that Coleridge's image for the fountain was borrowed from William Bartram's Travels. Bartram writes of a "Great Sink" into which all the waters of the savannah empty, and where the waters "descend by slow degrees, through rocky caverns, into the bowels of the earth, whence they are carried by secret subterraneous channels into other receptacles and basons." Along with the sink, "just under my feet was the inchanting and amazing chrystal fountain, which incessantly threw up, from dark, rocky caverns below, tons of water every minute, forming a bason...directly opposite to the mouth or outlet to the creek, is a continual and amazing ebullition, where the waters are thrown up in such abundance and amazing force, as to jet and swell up two or three feet above the common surface" (165-6). Bartram goes on to describe how the fish appear in the fountain: "behold yet something far more admirable, see whole armies descending into an abyss, into the mouth of the bubbling fountain, they disappear! are they gone forever? is it real? I raise my eyes with terror and astonishment,--I look down again to the fountain with anxiety, when behold them as it were emerging from the blue ether of another world, apparently at a vast distance, at their first appearance, no bigger than flies or minnows, now gradually enlarging, their brilliant colours begin to paint the fluid.
ReplyDeleteNow they come forward rapidly, and instantly emerge, with the elastic expanding column of chrystaline waters, into the circular bason or funnel, see now how gently they rise, some upright, others obliquely, or seem to lay as it were on their sides, suffering themselves to be gently lifted or born up, by the expanding fluid towards the surface, sailing or floating like butterflies in the cerulean ether: then again they as gently descend, diverge and move off; when they rally, form again and rejoin their kindred tribes.
THIS amazing and delightful scene, though real, appears at first but as a piece of excellent painting; there seems no medium, you imagine the picture to be within a few inches of your eyes, and that you may without the least difficulty touch any one of the fish, or put your singer upon the crocodile's eye, when it really is twenty or thirty feet under water."