On April 10, 1816, Samuel Taylor Coleridge recited his poem “Kubla Khan” to fellow poet Lord Byron, who persuaded him to publish it.
What a poem! So much heavy breathing, mystery, passion! Music, fragrance, rivers and ice and flowers! Silken tents, even! This part of the poem always sucks me in as the cadence rises and then quiets down again. How he gets that kind of movement and physicality in a poem is always amazing to me:
“And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And ’mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.”
The Romantic poets are some of my favorites, especially the British ones. Byron, Shelly, Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth all taught me how to see the world with hungry eyes and a ever-rising level of wonder. Like the speaker in “Kubla Khan” says of the poet,
“… he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.”
Keep well,
CMG
The Frost Place 