Women, Rustics and Musical Instruments in Literature (PART II)

Written from the depths of the Romantic soul, this poem is a vision through exoticism and music of a world entirely inhabited by the poet’s imagination. Some have observed that such imagery was perhaps fuelled by opium-infused medications that were occasionally imbibed at the time, but this is a gross misunderstanding of the poetic genre. Romantic poets, of whom Coleridge was the epitome, did not need artificial hallucinogens to concoct their sumptuous similes; they did this entirely unaided, such was the world of extreme metaphor in which they thrived. For them, music, poetry and natural scenery were quite enough.

Kubla Khan is the Mongol ruler and Yuan dynasty emperor generally known in Chinese as Hubilie 忽必烈. Fully familiar to a European readership from Marco Polo’s The Travels, Coleridge makes scant attempt to link his Kubla Khan to a genuine historical figure, and the name simply serves as a conduit for exoticism. To construct his poem on an imaginary place, he needed a familiar name that represented this idea and carried these connotations to his readership, and ‘Kubla Khan’ suited his purposes perfectly. Likewise, ‘Xanadu’ is a real location, now situated in Inner Mongolia and known in Chinese as ‘Shangdu’ 上都, of which ‘Xanadu’ is a reasonable early romanisation. It served as the capital of Kubla Khan’s Mongol empire until he moved it to modern Beijing. Again, Coleridge selected ‘Xanadu’ simply for the impression of remoteness and exoticism that it conveys. The letter ‘X’ is the rarest of the 26 letters in the English alphabet and normally occurs in the middle or at the end of indigenous words – fox, axe, taxi, relax, exit – but here it is placed glaringly at the start. This tells the reader that here is a distant place and cultural milieu worlds away from the rural Somerset where the poem was written. A similar English usage is the placename ‘Timbuctoo’ that refers to a remote or distant place but is simply a rendering of Timbuktu in West Africa, certainly not a remote or distant place to someone who lived there.

We all view the world from the depths of our own experience. To a native of Shangdu, Somerset may seem the embodiment of exoticism, and a British ruler a suitable vehicle for a fantastical literary creation that has no relation to a historical personage. When reading a text or interpreting music in performance, the superior version is to enter into the spirit of the mind of the person who created it rather than criticising it. Let us then delve into Coleridge’s poem on its own terms.

The entire poem is grouped into four stanzas, but their lengths are irregular. Almost all the lines end in rhyming words, but the pattern of these is not regular either, and a few lines do not carry any rhymes, including the crucial ‘a damsel with a dulcimer’ (line 37) that introduces the musical instrument. The poem begins with fewer syllables (about eight) to a line, that broadens to 11 or so in the longest second stanza but reduces back to approximately eight in the final stanza as the overall metrical flow quickens in accordance with the maniacal dance that is described.

The first poetic sentence spans the first five lines, and the verb is ‘decree’ (line 2). As the archetypal despotic oriental ruler – in British eyes of the Georgian era – Kubla Khan decrees that his ‘stately pleasure-dome’ is to be constructed, not in an ordinary place that is recognisable but where the river ‘Alph’ flows (line 3), which seems to be a name of a river specially invented by Coleridge for the poem and not a ‘sacred river’ in any mythology or religion reasonably familiar to his readers. It passes through the most unlikely places too – ‘caverns measureless to man’ (line 4) – so somewhere unreachable and unfathomable and, although it flows into the sea, it is a ‘sunless sea’ (line 5), so is it underground? is it on another planet? We are already in a fantasy world.

A large plot of land is demarcated: ‘twice five miles of fertile ground’ (line 6), and, as with Tolkien’s Gondolin or Minas Tirith, it is delightful combination of ‘walls and towers’ (line 7). In these ‘gardens bright’ (line 8) are streams (‘rills’) but these do not run in tidy straight lines but in ‘sinuous’ disarray. The word ‘sinuous’, meaning ‘with many curves’, could be applied to a river, but perhaps more normally to a long and winding melody or the human body. Coleridge’s rills are clearly uniquely attractive. Likewise, his ‘forests ancient as the hills’ (line 10) have amid them clearings that are ‘sunny spots of greenery’ (line 11).

The river does in fact gouge a ‘chasm’ (line 12) in the ‘green hill’ (line 13). It runs obliquely across or ‘athwart’ a covering of cedar trees (the ‘n’ added to ‘cedar’ to make ‘cedarn’ turns the noun into an adjective). Coleridge calls this ‘deep romantic chasm’ a ‘savage place’ (line 14). Here, ‘savage’ means not ‘civilised’, which to him meant European civilisation. This ‘savage place’ is like one where a woman is ‘wailing for her demon-lover’ (line 16) as part of an orgiastic quasi-religious (but not Christian) ceremony that is nonetheless still ‘holy and enchanted’ (line 14), though the moon is ‘waning’ (line 15) and she haunts the place rather than being actually present.

The water in the chasm churns ‘with ceaseless turmoil seething’, giving the impression that the earth itself is breathing heavily ‘in fast thick pants’ (line 18). The pressure of the water causes it time and again, over and over, moment by moment, or ‘momently’ (line 19), to force up a ‘mighty fountain’. Even ‘huge fragments’ (line 21) of rocks are thrust up (‘vaulted’, line 21) in ‘swift half-intermitted burst’ (line 20). Yet they simply seem like ‘rebounding hail’ (line 21), so insignificant are they by comparison with the enormousness of their surroundings. Globules of water frozen into hail may be small, and when they melt they are gone, but they are at least solid and carry intrinsic weight. Not so ‘chaffy grain’ (line 22), that is, grain that still retains the ‘chaff’, which is light and floats. Modern English eschews turning nouns into adjectives by adding the letter ‘y’, but it is still possible: the smell of a ‘fish’ can be ‘fishy’, and a ‘dog’ can be ‘doggy’, but a ‘violin’ cannot be ‘violiny’ and a ‘bassoon’ cannot be ‘bassoony’. Late-18th-century English permitted this more readily, so ‘grain’ resembling ‘chaff’ is ‘chaffy’. Coleridge accentuates the violence of the force exerted here by placing this ‘chaffy grain’ so it lies ‘beneath the thresher’s flail’ (line 22), and we imagine the violent force of the flail whipping down to separate grain from chaff.

The ‘mighty fountain’ (line 19) forces up not only these ‘dancing rocks’ (line 23) but also the ‘sacred river’ itself (line 24). Given the violence of the preceding lines, the river is then tamed as it passes through the palace or ‘pleasure-dome’, and here it simply ‘meanders’ (line 25) through ‘wood and dale’ (line 26) – kindly and homely images – and its motion is complex, twisting and turning, like a maze in fact, or ‘mazy’.

Only then does the river Alph reach the ‘caverns measureless to man’ (line 27) and finally sinks ‘in tumult to a lifeless ocean’ (line 28). At long last its overall geography is clear: first there is a chasm from which the river is thrust up, then there are the five miles of tamed woodland where the river wanders through the pleasure-dome, then come the caverns measureless to man, and finally it runs into the sunless sea, here called a ‘lifeless ocean’.

All this is, however, simply an extended introduction and background ‘tumult’ (lines 28 and 29) to the ‘ancestral voices’ that Kubla Khan heard ‘prophesying war’ (line 30). In European folk mythology, the Mongols were the ultimate conquerors, and their successful subjugation of virtually the whole of the Eurasian landmass in the 13th and 14th centuries evolved into a mythology of war and pillage emerging from the Central Asian steppes that still resonates today. Notwithstanding that when Coleridge penned his poem Europe was on the threshold of the Napoleonic Wars, and the Pax Britannica of the British Empire eventually far exceeded the earlier Pax Mongolica in size and scope, Kubla Khan is portrayed here as a warlike dictator, prone to listening to ancestral voices and their prophecy rather than those of enlightenment, reason and civilisation, concepts in which Europeans perceived themselves as embedded.

The third stanza tells the reader more about the pleasure-dome itself. Hovering above the river, its ‘shadow’ (line 31) floats ‘midway on the waves’ (line 32) of the river itself. Here, the excessively hedonistic and absolutist ruler Kubla, his wings not yet clipped by an elected parliament, heard for his ‘pleasure’ mixing in ‘mingled measure’ (line 33), on the one side the ‘fountain’ and the other side the ‘caves’.

At the end of the stanza, Coleridge informs us that it was ‘a miracle of rare device’ (line 35). The word ‘miracle’ is dangerous. Miracles were and are the property of biblical texts, whether Old Testament or the Gospel parables of Jesus. Coleridge is claiming one here for the pleasure-dome itself, which was certainly not Christian in inception. Neither was it a product of rational science (another late 18th-century preoccupation), since it was both hot and ‘sunny’ yet combined with ‘caves of ice’ (line 36).

Amid the cultural confusion, the reader is undoubtedly impressed by the spectacle, but there is little human content. Kubla Khan is mentioned twice but he does not seem more than a figurehead and is not someone we find endearing. Similarly, the wailing woman and her demon-lover. We are glad we will never meet either again in this savage place or any other.

Then suddenly we have that most gentle of images, the ‘damsel with a dulcimer’ (line 37). So fragile she seems. The word ‘damsel’ can only mean a young unmarried woman. The phrase ‘damsel in distress’ has lingered in the English language to mean a vulnerable woman in need of the succour of a chivalrous gentleman. She is, however, not English but ‘Abyssinian’ (line 39), or Ethiopian as we would say nowadays. Hammered dulcimers are not normally played in Ethiopia, either when it was called Abyssinia or in the present day, and in any case Coleridge would not have known about the authentic folk music of the Horn of Africa, so the term ‘Abyssinia’ is used here, like ‘Kubla Khan’ or ‘Xanadu’, simply for its overtly exotic connotations. We learn she is a ‘maid’, accentuating her graceful femininity, and so lovely is she after the violence of the thresher’s flail and the huge fragments of vaulted rocks that she is now ‘a vision’ (line 38).

As well as playing the hammered dulcimer, which is mentioned twice (again in line 40), she sings. It is not normally easy to sing and play a musical instrument at the same time. With the violin, the instrument is flush on the neck and the bow unlikely to retain its grip securely on the string. It is possible on the piano but not if the note patterns are too complex. Hand-held plucked instruments, for example the guitar and lute, fare better and there are many classical, folk and popular genres that exploit the combination. Playing the hammered dulcimer and singing at the same time is impossible, because the player simply cannot hit notes accurately. Perhaps she was plucking her dulcimer, which is commonly done, but again the multiplicity of strings and their complex arrangement make singing and playing at the same time unlikely. Maybe she was not playing a dulcimer at all and the word is, like the whole poem, no more than a figment of the poet’s imagination, employed for its connotations and nothing more.

The dulcimer is mentioned three times in the King James translation of the Bible, all found close to one another in Chapter 3 of the Book of Daniel of the Old Testament. The context is the persecution of the Jews at the hands of the archetypal oriental potentate Nebuchadnezzar: