Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select PoemsColeridge, Samuel Taylor
General
Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
English poetry
44--*The Conclusion to Part the Second*. Campbell thought it "highly
improbable" that these lines were originally composed as a part of
"Christabel." In a letter to Southey, May 6, 1801, Coleridge speaks of
his eldest boy, Hartley, then in his fifth year: "Dear Hartley! we are
at times alarmed by the state of his health, but at present he is well.
If I were to lose him, I am afraid it would exceedingly deaden my
affection for any other children I may have." Then he writes the lines
that we now have as the Conclusion to Part the Second; and adds: "A very
metaphysical account of fathers calling their children rogues, rascals,
and little varlets, etc."
KUBLA KHAN
Kubla Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, was a Mongolian conqueror who
stretched his empire from European Russia to the eastern shores of China
in the thirteenth century. His exploits, like those of his grandfather
and those of the Mohammedan Timur in the next century, made a deep
impression on the imagination of Western Europe. Compilers of
travellers's tales, like Hakluyt and Purchas, caught up eagerly whatever
they could find, history or legend, concerning the extent of his domain,
the methods of his government, or the splendors of his court. The
passage in "Purchas his Pilgrimage" to which Coleridge refers is as
follows:
"In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Palace, encompassing sixteene
miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes,
pleasant Springs, delightfull Streames, and all sorts of beasts of
chase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumptuous house of
pleasure" (quoted in the Notes of the Globe edition).
Coleridge's poem, however, contains suggestions and reminiscences from
another part of Purchas's book, and probably from other books as well.
"It reads like an arras of reminiscences from several accounts of
natural or enchanted parks, and from various descriptions of that
elusive and danger-fraught garden which mystic geographers have studied
to locate from Florida to Cathay" (Cooper).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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