Samuel Coleridge's Kubla Khan and Materialism
Samuel T. Coleridge’s Kubla Khan is a poem of two opposing ideas: materialism and imagination. In the poem, Coleridge presents imagination and emotion as the means to achieving pure pleasure and creating paradise. He does this by depicting two separate creations of a pleasure dome. One, made by Kubla Khan (a Chinese emperor in the 13th century), was founded on materialistic greed and was created in physical reality, infecting an already present paradise in nature. This now contaminated paradise is doomed to be destroyed. A first-person narrator in the rest of the poem discusses being able to create this pleasure dome in his mind, thus achieving the experience of pure pleasure. In addition to the basic portrayals of materialism and imagination, Coleridge associates religious views, specifically those of paganism and Christianity, with each one. The pagan emphasis on nature and the abstract ties in with the ideals and, in the words of John McKay, “emotional exuberance [and] unretrsained imagination” (766) of the romantic period. Christianity’s great desire to continuously spread, as well as its comparatively ungrateful attitude toward nature and its superstitious rejection of most forms of pleasure as negative and evil, fits in with Kubla Khan’s materialistic pleasure dome as well as the presumed attitude toward the narrator’s creation. Coleridge communicates all of this in Kubla Khan with allusions, imagery, recurring ideas (both in repetition and of actual ideas), and excellent and elaborate diction throughout. All of these (particularly the imagery and the repetition) are characteristic of romantic poetry, so not only do Coleridge’s beliefs fall in line with the many of the ideals of romanticism, his techniques reflect those used by other romantic poets.
Kubla Khan, the source of the title of the poem as well as the creator of the first pleasure dome, is representative of all those who desire control over territory and land. The real Khan was an emperor focused on territorial gain. He conquered several other dynasties in China and made attempts to conquer Japan, Myanmar, Vietnam, and Indonesia. It is of note that when Kubla Khan was written, Napoleon had recently come into power in France. His land-hungry crusades throughout Europe could have inspired Coleridge to use a historical leader (specifically Khan) as his figure of materialistic greed. Kubla Khan’s pleasure dome is a futile attempt by mankind to capture and physically create the epitome of pleasure in the form of a paradise. By making this attempt, Kubla Khan is contaminating an already existing paradise. Coleridge shows a sensitive appreciation of the nature on which the pleasure dome in built throughout the first stanza in which he describes it. Coleridge notes “Alph, the sacred river,” “caverns measureless to man,” a “sunless sea,” “twice five miles of fertile ground,” “gardens bright with sinuous rills,” “an incense-bearing tree,” “forests as ancient as the hills,” and “sunny spots of greenery.” Most of these images, in addition to portraying a setting with almost every imaginable natural formation, have a deeper significance. The allusion to five in “twice five miles of fertile ground” is making this setting closely tied in with the spirit and paganism, as the number five is extremely meaningful in pagan beliefs as the fifth element, or the spirit. This connection intensifies Coleridge’s approval of the natural setting of the pleasure dome as he and other romantics fall in line with the many beliefs of pagans as well as the belief in abstract qualities such as the spirit. The image of the “caverns measureless to man” is an image that rebels against science, as they are incapable of being defined (measured) by man. This rebellion is very typical of romantic poets as they reject the scientific rationality of the preceding time period, the Enlightenment. By making the caverns indefinable, Coleridge criticizes Khan’s comparatively commonplace creation of the pleasure dome. The “gardens bright with sinuous rills” are used to, in a very complex manner, criticize the preceding image of the “walls and towers… girdled round” (which is used to contrast all the surrounding nature images and is comparatively ugly and out of place, the alliteration of a strong but sickly ‘w’ sound in “with walls” emphasizes this ugliness). Throughout the poem, Coleridge
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