Kubla Khan

dulcimer

Map shows Abyssinia or Ethiopia. The Italians, holding Eritrea and Italian Somaliland, could easily invade Ethiopia in 1935.

However, British armies defeated the Italians during the Second World War.

Leptis Magna, Virginia Water, (right view)The remains of a Roman Temple from Leptis Magna, near Tripoli, were given to the Prince Regent,

(later King George IV), in 1816. After languishing at the British Museum for 10 years they were erected, not necessarily correctly, in Virginia Water by Sir Jeffery Wyatville

Venus de Milo, rediscovered 1820

‘The Artist Overwhelmed by the Grandeur of Antique Ruins’, Henry Fuseli

• On Seeing the Elgin Marbles for the First Time by John Keats My spirit is too weak; mortalityWeighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,And each imagined pinnacle and steepOf godlike hardship tells me I must dieLike a sick eagle looking at the sky.Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep,That I have not the cloudy winds to keepFresh for the opening of the morning's eye.Such dim-conceived glories of the brainBring round the heart an indescribable feud;So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rudeWasting of old Time -with a billowy main,A sun, a shadow of a magnitude.

Ozymandiasby Percy Bysshe Shelley I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge

CHRISTABEL

PREFACE

THE first part of the following poem was written in the year 1797, at Stowey, in the county of Somerset. The second part, after my return from Germany, in the year 1800, at Keswick, Cumberland. It is probable that if the poem had been published in the year 1800, the impression of its originality would have been much greater than I dare at present expect. But for this I have only my own indolence to blame. The dates are mentioned for the exclusive purpose of precluding charges of plagiarism or servile imitation from myself. For there is amongst us a set of critics, who, seem to hold, that every possible thought and image is traditional; who have no notion that there are such things as fountains in the world, small as well as great; and who would therefore charitably derive every rill they behold flowing, from a perforation made in some other man's tank. I am confident, however, that as far as the present poem is concerned, the celebrated poets whose writings I might be suspected of having imitated, either in particular passages, or in the tone and the spirit of the whole, would be among the first to vindicate me from the charge, and who, on any striking coincidence, would permit me to address them in this doggerel version of two monkish Latin hexameters. 'Tis mine and it is likewise yours;But an if this will not do;Let it be mine, good friend! for I Am the poorer of the two.

• I have only to add that the meter of Christabel is not, properly speaking, irregular, though it may seem so from its being founded on a new principle: namely, that of counting in each line the accents, not the syllables. Though the latter may vary from seven to twelve, yet in each line the accents will be found to be only four. Nevertheless, this occasional variation in number of syllables is not introduced wantonly, or for the mere ends of convenience, but in correspondence with some transition in the nature of the imagery or passion.

Jena Romantics: Celebration of the Fragment

• Were interested in the “dynamic of complete incompletion” (Thomas in Roe, p. 511)

• Jena: “In poetry, too, every whole can be a part and every part really a whole.”

Some questions to think about

• Is KK a fragment or complete?

• What is the poem saying about creativity?• `• Who or what is the visitor from Portlock?

• Is KK a failure?

• What is the relationship of the Preface to the poem?