From the fountain and the caves
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure- dome with caves of ice!
Reference:– These imaginary, erotic lines have been taken from a dream vision poem `Kubla Khan` composed by one of the fragment and unsystematic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He is one of the most important poets of Romantic Era, England. S.T Coleridge was the poet of imagination who explored not only varieties but the relationship between the nature and mind. Kubla Khan is one of Coleridge`s most famous and enduring poem.
Context:– S.T Coleridge composed the Kubla Khan in a state of anodyne (Opium dose), he fell asleep while reading a bool called Purchase His, Pilgrims. Hence, Kubla Khan is a dream vision of S.T Coleridge. This poem is about a pleasure dome of a historian emperor of Mongolian Dynasty, who commands to built a pleasure- dome in Xanadu (a capital city) where Alph river (a sacred river) ran through caverns (गुफ़ा), filled with beautiful garden and forest.
Expalnation:- In the given line, the poet describes that a deep romantic chasm (खाई) slanted down a green hill, occasionally forth a violent and powerful burst of water. Also, Kubla hears ancestral voices bringing prophesies of war. The pleasure- dome shadow floated on the waves where the mingled sounds of the fountain and the caves could be heard. The Poet also describes a damsel (a woman) playing Dulcimer (kind of music instrument) singing melancholy (उदासी भरा), so he suggests that stay away from her flashing eyes and floating hair.
The poem Kubla Khan explores the theme of man along with nature. It’s a highly romantic poem focusing on human and natural forces beautifully.
<p value="<strong>Critical Comment:- </strong> Coleridge has used variety of forms of beautiful scenery (nature) in Kubla Khan, which explores the theme of vivid description of nature along with man. The poem Kubla Khan progress with the unorthodox rhyme scheme which starts off in tight fashion but gradually loosens and weakens, only punctuated here and there with <strong>binding couplets</strong> and one text within the formal syntax. There is a use of <strong>hexameter</strong> in the stanza, the inconsistent rhyme of meter of the poem together with the complex narrative has to deeper study of the poem`s structure, because the Kubla Khan is composed in irregular meter as <strong>ABAB.Also, there is a use of rhyming words like the waves, and caves, ice, and device, and the fountain and the dome, everything is involved with sound of the river that forms a “mingled measure”. Hence all this mingling show up within the rhymes and meter too. The story and composition is also very famous in the history of English poetry. The poem Kubla Khan was written around 1797 and published on 25 May, 1816 with “Christabel” and “The Pains of Sleep”.
Coleridge was the philosopher, a critic of the romantic movement. Hence the poem Kubla Khan is about the act of poetic creation and a fantasy contrasted with the beautiful portray of nature and human.
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