Themes In Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan'

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Meant to be Heard In the poem “Kubla Khan,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in a drug-induced state, writes of a mysterious garden that had been commanded to be built by the Khan. The work was written during the Romantic Era of British literature and is tied nicely to romantic themes of nature and the supernatural. Lines sixteen through twenty-four progress from a natural description of the garden, to a supernatural garden. The literary devices used allow Coleridge to maintain the fantasy throughout. The images presented do not exist; however, they leave the reader longing to see them. These lines are written in such a way that when read aloud they captivate the audience with rhythmic sounds that resonate with the visions described. When translating …show more content…

He paints pictures using words. During the Romantic Era, extensive travel was not undertaken by many people; therefore, most people would not know how a river that ran beneath the earth and then reemerged sounded. Coleridge uses sounds that might be familiar to everyone to represent the sound of the river. When he writes in stanza two that “from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, / as if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing” (17-18), he is not claiming that the earth is breathing, but that the sound coming from the chasm was “as if …breathing.” If instead, like the prose, he had written “…as if this earth were breathing in fast thick pants,” the reader may have understood what sound was made, but the poem would have given up some of its eerie attributes. The removal of this device would have created a more concrete world; however, it would have also removed the fairy-tale like quality of the piece. The imagery is important because it allows the reader to see both the haunting “woman wailing for her demon-lover” and hear the “mighty fountain” (16.19). The metaphors that Coleridge uses to describe the sounds in this dreamlike garden add to the imagery that pulls the poem from natural to supernatural. Simile is not the only device that Coleridge uses that makes these words more fit for poetry than

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