Kubla Khan was “Composed one night after [Coleridge] experienced an opium influenced dream after reading a work describing the Tartar king Kublai Khan”(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubla_Khan). By getting high and attempting to connect ancient Asian history with a sort of imaginative Eastern mysticism, Coleridge brings his wildest drug induced fantasies to paper. What Kubla Khan immediately reminded me of was The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere. In Khan, when the author speaks of winding rivers, incense bearing trees, and enchanted chasms, it reminded me of the sailor in The Rime who looks over the side of the boat. When out at sea, the sailor “watch’d the water snakes…their rich attire: Blue, glossy green, and velvet black…and every track was a flash of golden fire”(Lyrical Ballads pg 31, ll. 265-274).
It was difficult to understand the purpose of Coleridge’s fantastic descriptions the first time I read The Rime, but I came to appreciate the author’s ideas concerning the power of imagination. Coleridge utilizes this grand imagery to demonstrate that the purpose of his poetry is to, “follow the fluxes and refluxes of the mind when agitated by the great and simple affections of our nature”(Lyrical Ballads pg 394). Affection is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “The action or result of affecting the mind in some way; a mental state brought about by any influence; an emotion, feeling”(OED online). The sailor in The Rime had to be distraught, and isolated far out at sea in order to access the part of his mind that could see the slimy things of the ocean. I believe that the author wanted to induce a similar psychological state in himself, and turned to drugs as a means of this endeavor. Kubla Khan is not just a work of fantasy for pleasure’s sake, but it is a dive into the deep end of human psychological analysis. Coleridge allows the reader a glimpse of what happens when one gains access to the unbarred imagination of the human psyche.
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