comment-Kubla Khan and the “Mazy Motion” through the Unconscious-3 Kubla Khan and the “Mazy Motion” through the Unconscious

This often striking paper seems a fitting homage to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem – like it, your exploration follows something of a mazy motion, plunging deeper into the poem’s intricacies, amplifying them – until at the end we’re left with a deeper sense of power and longing. As the high priestess to Kubla Khan’s powerful essence, you do a first-rate job. As an interpreter of its treatment of audience, you’re not so engaged. You’ve submitted yourself too much to the poem to stand outside of it & order an argument not caught in its own flow.

You convey a strong sense of this poem as a sinking into the subconscious. Your point about its patterned opening giving way to something much more conflicted, private, and underground is quite convincing. And you have a sophisticated sense of repetition in this poem: contrasting its circularity with linear progression helps you to really pin down “the unconscious, yet progressing mind as it returns to previous thoughts.” It’s easy to see how Kubla Khan, exploiting such patterns, builds intensity even as it seems to revisit its own imagery. I also thought your equation of the “sunny pleasure dome” with poetry based on natural sublimity was quite intriguing (even though “pleasure” and “dome” suggest limits that the sublime wouldn’t obey) – at any rate, there is a sense of interiorized forces existing uneasily with miraculous entities “in air”, and it seems quite right to sense a self-conscious poet behind this division.

For all your energetic tracking of Kubla Khan, though, a clear argument about its audience never takes hold. It’s a tricky assignment for you, given this poem’s self-presentation as a vision in a dream. Nevertheless, there are quite a few scenarios of address that you fold directly into the poet’s mind, without exploring them much. Consider the differences: imposed voices (those ancestral voices), metaphorical voices (like a woman wailing), conditional voices (all would cry), dream voices (a woman with a dulcimer in a vision… singing). Moreover, there’s a difference between Kubla & the narrator, at least at times – they see different things and have different relationships to those around them. If this weren’t enough variation for you to play with, you could have considered the preface to this poem – the suggestion that what we have is much less than what could have been, thanks to intrusion. Add this all up, & I think you get a retreat from straightforward address that you could have highlighted, which would fit quite well in your interest in fragmentation and interiorization.

One caution – make sure you’re being careful when interpreting to sort out what’s ‘actually’ happening and what’s metaphorically happening. The hail & that wailing woman are forthrightly constructions of our narrator’s mind, as he seeks to describe other things (the dancing rocks, the chasm). They seem clues to how he really thinks – and maybe even reflect his assumptions about his (agrarian? woman-fearing?) audience. Similarly, the entire climax of Kubla Khan is set in a conditional tone – it doesn’t actually happen, and once again we get a glimpse into how the poet thinks, rather than what he experiences. This is someone who would like to have an audience that needs to circle him and close its eyes. I wonder whether such desire plunges our narrator all the more into the interiority you so aptly describe.