An Analysis of Coleridges Kubla Kahn Essay -- Coleridge Kubla Khan Es

An Analysis of Coleridges Kubla Kahn Although the form of Kubla Kahn is beautiful, it is complex. The rhyming patterns are quite complicated the first stanza, for instance, rhymes in the pattern abaab ccdede. Coleridges patterns of alliteration are also intricate He will sometimes use the sound at the beginning of one syllable as the sound at the beginning of the next syllable, as in Xanadu did in line one, miles meandering in line 25, and deep delight in line 44. He also alliterates vowels, not only consonants, to produce a rhythmic singsong effect. Although the form and the beautiful language in Kubla Kahn were all that I could appreciate when I first read the song, I have since stick to to realize that the poem has a complex symbolic pattern, as well. My own analysis may seem to be paltry when faced with the fact that at that place have been thousands of criticisms of this poem published, some comprising entire volumes. But the very quantity of criticism may serve as an ar gument that any interpretation of the poem is really an investigation of the writer of the criticism. That is to say, the poem has no outward meaning, or at least that the meaning put in by the author is of lower-ranking importance. The subtitle of Kubla Kahn reads Or a Vision in a Dream. Dreams may or may not have symbolic meaning, but it is doubtful that anyone by choice designed symbolic meaning specifically for an individual dream. My reading of Kubla Kahn depends on a biographical detail from Coleridges life. Coleridge was an opium addict for years, and Appelbaum, an editor of a collection of quixotic poetry, claims that some of his Coleridges poems reflect the anguish this caused. (Appelbaum viii) Coleridge... ...s a change in the authors attitude. Whereas he may have previously been supposed to be merely an opium visionary -- a weak person who lives outside the everyday reality that the rest of us inhabit -- he is revealed here to be a creator, a strong individual, as w ell. Coleridge is here identifying himself with Kubla Kahn. The Kahn decreed a stately pleasure dome, while Coleridge created a poem that is equated with the dome. Kubla Kahn is Coleridges attempt to rise above what many people assume dose addicts to be and to show himself to be a strong creator, on a level with an emperor who founded of a great dynasty. Works Cited Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Kubla Kahn in The McGraw-Hill Book of Poetry. Ed. kraft paper Rompf and Robert DiYanni. New York McGraw-Hill, 1993. Appelbaum, Stanley, Ed. English Romantic Poetry An Anthology. Mineola Dover, 1996.