Portends of Ill-Gotten Plans in Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' and 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner'

The Shipman’s Tale, one of the many tales in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, is exactly suited to the Shipman’s personality and profession as given in “The Prologue.” The shipman is described by Chaucer in the prologue as very sneaky, deceitful, and even pirate-like. The Shipman’s tale matches his personality and profession because The Shipman’s Tale is one of trickery and con. The monk in the tale tricks both the merchant and the merchant’s wife out of their money. He also uses his relationship with the merchant to his advantage, because he knows the merchant would never suspect him of having sex with his wife. The shipman is also portrayed in the prologue to have no sense of remorse or feelings of sorrow.

BibliographyAsbee, S. (2006) Approaching Poetry, Milton Keynes, The Open UniversityReid, N. (2006) Coleridge, Form and Symbol, Or the Ascertaining Vision, Aldershot, Ashgate PublishingWellek, R. (1963) The Concept of Romanticism in literary historyin Bygrave, S (2006) Romantic Writings London, The Open UniversityZuk, E. Coleridges Blank Verse [online], http://www.expansivepoetryonline.com/journal/cult072004.html (Accessed 28th April 2008)

At the end of chapter 20 in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, Coleridge describes his own experience with poetry and its effect on others’ imagination from an outsiders point of view:

In Robert Burn’s “Tam O’Shanter” and Samuel Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner” supernatural forces appear in both poems. These strange elements change the lives of the main characters that do bad things and get punished. One gets punished through his horse and the other is cursed for life.

To the Romantics, the imagination was important. It was the core and foundation of everything they thought about, believed in, and even they way they perceived God itself. The leaders of the Romantic Movement were undoubtedly Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his close friend, William Wordsworth. Both were poets, and both wrote about the imagination. Wordsworth usually wrote about those close to nature, and therefore, in the minds of the Romantics, deeper into the imagination than the ordinary man. Coleridge, however, was to write about the supernatural, how nature extended past the depth of the rational mind.

According to Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia, an allegory is described as a fictional literary narrative or artistic expression that conveys a symbolic meaning parallel to but distinct from, and more important than, the literal meaning. This is true in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is an allegory that symbolizes the inherent struggle of humans facing the ideas of sin and redemption. In writing this poem, Coleridge spent four months of sustained writing upon his purpose of supposing that supernatural situations are real. This purpose is seen clearly in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", which demonstrates

Ambivalence is the act of celebrating heroes for their bravery and dedication to their goal; however their dedication is terrifying and even inhuman to the hero than even love or happiness. According to Yeats, "Cuchulain's Fight with the Sea" is the story of a warrior that competes for his immortal legacy and ends up terminating his son, son of lover Emer, all in the name of glory. However, the myth of Cuchulain is a little off, as Yeats makes a few mistakes. Despite the errors, Yeats' story takes on a more poetic version of Cuchulain and his fictive death. By ignoring all evidence that reminds Cuchulain of his beloved Emer, it was ultimately the combination of Cuchulain's love affair with Emer and his inability to act upon such ignorance,

In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Coleridge writes of a sailor bringing a tale to life as he speaks to a wedding guest. An ancient Mariner tells of his brutal journey through the Pacific Ocean to the South Pole. Coleridge suffers from loneliness, because of his lifelong need for love and livelihood; similarly, during the Mariner’s tale, his loneliness shows when he becomes alone at sea, because of the loss of his crew. Having a disastrous dependence to opium and laudanum, Coleridge, in partnership with Wordsworth, writes this complicated, difficult to understand, yet appealing poem, which becomes the first poem in the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads. The Mariner’s frame of mind flip-flops throughout the literary ballad, a

Coleridge stated that poetry “gives us most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood”. He preferred to consider The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere a work of “pure imagination” rather than a textual construction representing a particular cultural ideology. However, his writing of the text as a Romantic poet, espousing all ideologies that the Romantic Movement represented, conditioned his work to be one of passion, mystery and imagination. Due to this, his “purely imaginative” work fosters the dominant discourse of a Romantic outlook on the universe; the protagonists of the text

In 1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge published his poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. Several editions followed this, the most notable being the 1815 version, which included a gloss. This poem has grown to become well known and debated, especially concerning the message that Coleridge was attempting to impart. The interpretation of the poem as a whole and of various characters, settings, and objects has been the subject of numerous essays, papers, books, and lectures. There are approximately four things that are major symbols in this work, along with the possibility that the structure itself is symbolic.

Throughout the beginning of the poem there are religious undertones Coleridge uses words like bended knee and reverential to highlight a religious belief and perhaps a plea to God to cure the “Pains of Sleep” this is interesting as he seems to feel “humbled” by the spirit presence. He mentions being weak but realises he is blest by this power. The religious undertone suggests to me a feeling of utter helplessness.

There are a myriad of critical theory lenses that can be applied and utilized to closely observe pieces of literature. One of these theories is John Keats’s Negative Capability theory which consists of an idea of “…when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason…” (Keats 968). Ultimately, this signifies that in poetry the emphasis be placed on the significance of inquisitiveness and the asking of questions of the life and scenery around one’s self, rather than placing emphasis on strongly searching for these answers. This theory can be applied to a multitude of works, but for these sakes and purposes what will be critiqued is Samuel Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. In a subtle

Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” is a bright example of the transforming power imagination has. The poet’s usage of diction and allegories transform this poem into a symbol for imagination. It is said that it was written after Coleridge’s encounter with the sublime while still being under the effect of opium, and when he went to record it, he was disrupted by a visitor and the remaining of the poem was lost even to him. In the poem he shows how possibilities are limitless as long as our imaginations are; Coleridge uses “caverns measureless to man” as a

Samuel Taylor Coleridge uses nature as a catalyst to search deeper into his mind and discover the surreal creativity of his own imagination. "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" depicts an out-of-body vision that encompasses a breathtaking vista of green mountains and purple flowers from the eyes of an imaginer. Gazing at it "with swimming sense," the picture becomes "less gross than bodily," causing the swirling colors to form something only found in the divine. However surreal this picture is, nothing can compare to Cloleridge's vision in "Kubla Khan." In this poem he uses nature's creations to depict unnatural scenes. In "caverns measureless to man," Kubla Khan wants to build a "sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice." Such a place is only real in the imagination and in the written word, which is why this poem seems so tangible to the eye. He comes across these imaginary visions while "meandering with a mazy motion through wood and dale," where these thoughts come alive. It explains through alliteration how walking through wooded paths, accompanied only by one's mind, one comes upon new feelings and thoughts that are only palpable in that wood. Nature inspires Samuel Coleridge to exorcise his mind's eye and create a heavenly atmosphere.

Although there is no consistent syntax, rhyme, or meter in Kubla Khan, the poem begins its journey through the mind in a conscious and calculating manner. The first four lines of the poem, in fact, appear to almost directly derive from a passage of Purchas’s Pilgrimage, as the narrative voice slowly drifts into a dreamlike state. Coleridge’s paraphrasing of a relatively accessible, published piece of literature seems to provide the narrator with a solid foundation to build his seemingly inaccessible poem upon.