When
Mary, the alien stepped into the Hub with Toshiko towards the end of the
episode ‘Greeks Bearing Gifts’ she began to recite a poem.
‘...in
Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A
stately pleasure-dome decree
Where
Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through
caverns measureless to man
Down
to a sunless sea.’
Samuel
Taylor Coleridge was an English poet born 21st October 1772 and died
25th July 1834.
Kubla
Khan’ is a poem that was written by Coleridge in 1797 and wasn’t published
until 1816 on the prompting of his great friend George Gordon Byron.
Coleridge
wrote the poem while under the influence of laudanum, a prescribed medicine for
his ill health. He was said to have been reading a book by Samuel Purchas - Purchas, his Pilgrimage or Relations of the
World and Religions Observed in All Ages and Places Discovered, from the
Creation to the Present.
The
portion of the book told of the Mongol ruler and his summer Palace in Xanadu,
which Marco Polo had visited on his explorations of the world. It was while reading the book that the vision
of the poem came to him. But a man who
naturally wrote poems with over 200 lines, only managed 54 lines before he was
said to have been interrupted by a ‘Man from Porlock’.
There
are many who have speculated over this phrase, ‘A Man from Porlock’, as to
whether it were a man at all, and that perhaps as with most great writers, of
poetry or prose, that perhaps it was merely writer’s block that prevented the
poem from exceeding 54 lines.
But
here it is the poem in its entirety.
Kubla Khan, or A Vision in a Dream. A
Fragment
In
Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A
stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where
Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through
caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So
twice five miles of fertile ground
With
walls and towers were girdled round;
And
there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where
blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And
here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding
sunny spots of greenery.
But oh!
that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down
the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A
savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er
beneath a waning moon was haunted
By
woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And
from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this
earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A
mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid
whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge
fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or
chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And mid
these dancing rocks at once and ever
It
flung up momently the sacred river.
Five
miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through
wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then
reached the caverns measureless to man,
And
sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
And
’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral
voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was
a miracle of rare device,
A sunny
pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A
damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That
with music loud and long,
I would
build that dome in air,
That
sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all
who heard should see them there,
And all
should cry, Beware! Beware!
His
flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a
circle round him thrice,
And
close your eyes with holy dread
For he
on honey-dew hath fed,
And
drunk the milk of Paradise.
To find
out more about the poem and its history, visit:
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