"Christabel" and "Kubla Khan"
"Christabel" and "Kubla Khan" were first printed in 1816, in a pamphlet
along with "The Pains of Sleep," a sort of contrast to "Kubla Khan"
composed in 1803. In the Preface to this pamphlet Coleridge informs us
that the first part of "Christabel" was written at Stowey in 1797 and
the second part at Keswick, Cumberland, in 1800. The poem was intended
originally for the "Lyrical Ballads," and it was with the hope of
finishing it for the second edition that Coleridge took it up again in
the fall of 1800. There is a good deal of uncertainty as to just how
much of the work was done at that time. In two letters of that period he
speaks of it as "running up to 1300 lines," and "swelled into a poem of
1400 lines," so that it is no longer suitable for the "Lyrical Ballads";
but hardly half of this amount was printed in the 1816 pamphlet or has
ever been found since. One suspects that already in 1800 dreams and
projects had begun to be confounded with performance. In the latter of
the two letters mentioned above he relates how his "verse-making
faculties returned" to him, after long and unsuccessful struggles with
"barrenness" and deep "dejection," as the result of drinking, "at the
house of a neighbouring clergyman, ... so much wine, that I found some
effort and dexterity requisite to balance myself on the hither edge of
sobriety." On the whole, it seems probable that "Christabel" owes little
to the forced efforts of his first year in the Lake country. Like most
of the other poems in this volume, it is a product of the great year at
Stowey. He himself told a friend in later years: "I had the whole of the
two cantos in my mind before I began it," adding very truly, "certainly
the first canto is more perfect, has more of the true wild weird spirit
than the last."
Down to the close of his life he dreamed of finishing this work. He
amused his listeners at Highgate with a continuation of the plot; and
in 1833 he declared that if he "were perfectly free from vexation and
were in the ad libitum hearing of fine music" he could yet finish
"Christabel," "for I have, as I always had, the whole plan entire from
beginning to end in my mind; but I fear I could not carry on with equal
success the execution of the idea." Wordsworth had a different
recollection. He told Coleridge's nephew in 1836 that he did not think
Coleridge "had ever conceived, in his own mind, any definite plan for
it; that the poem had been composed while they were in habits of daily
intercourse, and almost in his presence, and when there was the most
unreserved intercourse between them as to all their literary projects
and productions, and he had never heard from him any plan for finishing
it"; and added, what is fully borne out by a study of Coleridge's life:
"schemes of this sort passed rapidly and vividly through his mind, and
so impressed him, that he often fancied he had arranged things, which
really, and upon trial, proved to be mere embryos."
"The unfinished window in Aladdin's tower
Unfinished must remain,"
wrote Longfellow, alluding to "The Dolliver Romance" that Hawthorne left
incomplete at his death. There is strong kinship, moral and artistic,
between Coleridge and Hawthorne; both believed that the heart is more
than the head, and neither could force his imagination to work under
unfavorable conditions. But Hawthorne's failure of imagination came at
the end of a fruitful and consistent career, and his life failed with
it; in Coleridge the poet died half a lifetime before the man, and left
the man—the preacher and philosopher—to lament his loss.
Whether or not Coleridge had the story complete in his mind, what we
have is a fragment, and does not enable us to divine, as some broken
statues do, the plan of the whole. What it gives us is the romantic
mood, the sense of "witchery by daylight," and this it does more
hauntingly than anything else in the English language. It is a series
of magical and unforgetable pictures. It owes a good deal to the old
verse romances and ballads that so impressed the imagination in those
days of the mediaeval revival, but it was itself a far stronger
influence. It operated as an original force, both by its form and by its
spirit, upon the poetic imagination of the first half of the nineteenth
century more widely and deeply than the work of any other man, Burns and
Keats not excepted. Scott heard it read from manuscript, and the "Lay of
the Last Minstrel," with the series of verse romances that followed, may
almost be called a result of that reading; the verse form of Scott's
romances certainly is. Poe's poetry is as far as the poles removed from
Scott's; yet a close study of Poe's work shows the influence of
"Christabel" to be even deeper here than in the "Lay of the Last
Minstrel."
Coleridge was fully aware of a special power, both of imagination and of
verse-music, in the poem. His attempts to complete it in 1800 brought
persistently to his mind the project of a philosophy of poetry, and
especially of this poem, as we may infer from a letter to Poole in
March, 1801: "I shall ... immediately publish my 'Christabel,' with two
essays annexed to it, on the 'Preternatural' and on 'Metre.'" When the
two cantos were at last printed in 1816, Coleridge wrote in the Preface:
"The metre of the 'Christabel' is not, properly speaking, irregular,
though it may seem so from its being founded on a new principle: namely,
that of counting in each line the accents, not the syllables. Though the
latter may vary from seven to twelve, yet in each line the accents will
be found to be only four. Nevertheless this occasional variation in
number of syllables is not introduced wantonly, or for the mere ends of
convenience, but in correspondence with some transition, in the nature
of the imagery or passion." This is not to be taken quite literally. The
accentual principle was assuredly nothing new in English verse, and
syllable-counting, though introduced by Chaucer, had to be reintroduced
by the Renaissance poets and did not become an unquestioned convention
till the latter part of the seventeenth century. But the return to free
accentual verse in the "Christabel" was an innovation at the beginning
of the nineteenth century. It is to be noted, too, that there are lines
of three and even of two accents in Part I.
In chap. XV. of the Biographia Literaria, in a list of the "specific
symptoms of poetic power" in Shakespeare's early work, Coleridge places
first "the perfect sweetness of the versification; its adaptation to the
subject; and the power displayed in varying the march of the words....
The sense of musical delight, with the power of producing it, is a gift
of imagination; and this, together with the power of reducing multitude
into unity of effect, and modifying a series of thoughts by some one
predominant thought or feeling, may be cultivated and improved, but can
never be learnt. It is in these that Poeta nascitur non fit."
"Kubla Khan" is the remembered fragment of a dream. All that we know
about it is contained in the note Coleridge prefixed to it in the
pamphlet of 1816. In the summer of 1798 (Coleridge says 1797, but this
seems to have been a slip of his memory[1]) "the author, then in ill
health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton,
on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a
slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects
of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading
the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in 'Purchas's
Pilgrimage': 'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a
stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were
inclosed with a wall.' The author continued for about three hours in a
profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he
has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than
from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called
composition in which all the images rose up before him as things,
with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any
sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself
to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink,
and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here
preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on
business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his
return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification,
that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the
general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or
ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the
images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but,
alas! without the after restoration of the latter!"
Opinion will ever vary as to its poetic worth. Coleridge himself
professed to consider it "rather as a psychological curiosity" than as a
thing "of any supposed poetic merits"; to Lamb he repeated it "so
enchantingly that it irradiates and brings heaven and elysian bowers
into any parlour when he sings or says it," and it has been a sort of
touchstone of romantic taste ever since. It supremely illustrates that
"sense of musical delight, with the power of producing it," which the
poet declared to be a gift of the imagination that can never be learnt.
