The Yeats Journal of Korea/한국 예이츠 저널 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14354/yjk.2002.17.75
Vol. 17 (2002): 75-86
Yeats and Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”
Young Suck Rhee (Hanyang University)
I
Considering the fact that he had a clear eye and quick mind, Coleridge could have
taken something from Yeats if he had been a contemporary to him. But he was born a
century earlier, and it is Yeats that might have learned some idea and craft of verse
from Coleridge. Like Coleridge, Yeats seems to have learned a lot from a variety of
sources-for one, from Romantics, such as Blake and Shelley, who have made many
scholars make a lot of efforts to establish connections between them. However, it seems
strange to me that Coleridge as an influence has long been neglected, and it is only
recently that Matthew Gibson in his book, Yeats, Coleridge and the Romantic Sage,
dealt with Coleridge as a possible influence upon Yeats and his poetic work.
I read Gibson’s book with interest to find many newly revealed facts that may
throw light upon the poetry of Yeats. What is particularly fascinating to me is, Gibson
in his Appendix provides “Yeats’s Coleridge Collection.” (177-83) According to Gibson,
Yeats had books by Coleridge that included Biographia Litteraria, Biographia
Epistolaris, The Friend, Poems, The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Select
Poetry and Prose, Table Talk and the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, etc. In
addition to these books of Coleridge, Yeats had such books as: John Charpentier, The
Sublime Somnambulist; Joseph Henry Green, Spiritual Philosophy: Founded on the
Teachings of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge; H. N. Morris, Flaxman, Blake,
Coleridge and Other Men of Genius Influenced by Swendenborg; John H. Muirhead,
76
Young Suck Rhee
Coleridge as Philosopher.
And in Biographia Literaria and The Friend, as well as Muirhead’s Coleridge as
Philosopher and Charpentier’s Coleridge the Sublime Somnambulist, there exist many
marginal notes, underscoring, and markings by Yeats. As Gibson says, it is difficult to
know when Yeats obtained all these books, because he could afford to “buy books
regularly only in old age.” (181) It was possible for Yeats to have bought them earlier,
but it is safe to imagine that he must have bought them around the time when he
received the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1924; it is around this time that Yeat had
material success, as Ellmann sums it up:
With his new burst of intellectual vigor came material success. When Yeats
returned to his own country in the spring of 1922, after several years of residence
chiefly in England, he found himself a famous man. Queen’s University, Belfast,
gave him an honorary degree in July, and Trinity College, Dublin, so often the
subject of his denunciations years before, gave him another in December. At the
end of the year President Cosgrave appointed him, as a reward for his services to
Ireland, to the Senate of the newly formed Free State. In 1924 he was awarded
the Nobel Prize for Literature and could think of himself as a writer of European
importance. (The Man and the Masks 244)
II
It seems plausible, then, that Coleridge could have given an influence on the poems
Yeats wrote from the early 1920’s until his death in 1939. That period includes major
books of poetry by Yeats, such as: Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The
Tower (1928), The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1931), “A Full Moon in March”
(1935), and The Last Poems (1936-1939).
My attempt in this paper is to locate some of the poetic traces of Coleridge in the
later poems of Yeats. Although Gibson in the book mentioned above has already
combed the too small fishing ground with a very tight net, I still think that I can find
out a lot of fish to catch, which Gibson failed to net. To do so, I read the three of
Yeats and Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”
77
Coleridge’s poems, “Kubla Khan” (1797-98), “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
(1798), and “Christabel” (1798-1800). In this paper, I try to read “Kubla Khan” to a
fuller extent while for the other two, which are long poems, I just locate, in some of
Yeats’s poems, possible influences that Coleridge might have had on Yeats; those will
be a guide for me or other scholars to do more comparative studies or carry out
further researches. Instead of aiming to search for objective evidences to prove his
influence on Yeats, I will point out some similarities in Yeats’s poems- images, lines,
the general mood of a poem, etc. that might have originated from those in Coleridge. It
is not very rare that in literary works, even without comparing detail with detail in
sources, it seems clear enough for a perceptive reader to see many things echoing and
running across through many works and through many authors: thus, the pleasure of
reading literary works side by side.
“Kubla Khan” is a mysterious poem, which is at once surreal and hyper realistic,
as is Yeats’s “The Cap and Bells.” “The Cap and Bells” is included in The Wind
among the Reeds, which was published in 1899. As mentioned above, it is reasonable
to think that Yeats might be under the influence of Coleridge after he had obtained
some of the important primary sources, such as his books of poetry and those of
criticism. However, in temperament, both Yeats and Coleridge had something in
common: their identical poetic temperament is, I think, the reason that both poets
seemed to be in a similar condition when they each conceived the poems, even before
Yeats came under the influence of Coleridge; both showed a propensity toward the
supernatural although they diverged in the craft of poetry; that is, Yeats was no less
religious, compared with Coleridge, and yet, Yeats kept distancing himself from
Christianity, whereas Coleridge seems to have been a religious person, as exemplified in
his “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Yeats had not dealt with an orthodox religion,
like Christianity in his poems, while Coleridge had in “The Rime,” which reads to
some like a religious moral. For instance, Coleridge’s position as to his poetry is
indirectly revealed in an exchange of opinions on his “The Rime”:
Coleridge said in 1830, answering the objection of the poet Anna Barbauld that
the poem [“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”] “lacked a moral”: “I told her that
78
Young Suck Rhee
in my judgement the poem had too much; and that the only, or chief fault, if I
might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader
as a principle or cause of action in a work of pure imagination. It ought to have
no more moral than the Arabian Nights’ tale of the merchant’s sitting to eat dates
by the side of a well and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up and
says he must kill the aforesaid merchant because one of the date shells had, it
seems, put out the eye of the genie’s son.” (Abrams 438)
Yeats would not have based “a work of pure imagination,” “The Rime,” upon a
framework of moral; Coleridge did not intend to, as he said, but “The Rime” reads like
one with a principle of a Christian love. It is this that makes the two poets different.
despite the fact that they both consider poetry “a work of pure imagination.”
At this moment, it is necessary to listen to what Yeats says about Coleridge, as
this will help us have an idea what Yeats and Coleridge are, in relation to Christainity,
the art, as well as the idea, of poetry, and the supernatural. Here is the passage from
Yeats’s Autobiographies:
I think that the movement of our thought has more and more so separated certain
images and regions of the mind, and that these images grow in beauty as they
grow in sterility. Shakespeare leaned, as it were, even as craftsman, upon the
general fate of men and nations, had about him the excitement of the playhouse;
and all poets, including Spenser in all but a few pages, until our age came, when
it came almost all, have had some propaganda or traditional doctrine to give
companionship to their fellows. Had not Matthew Arnold his faith in what he
described as the best of his generation, Browning his psychological curiosity,
Tennyson, as before him Shelley and Wordsworth, moral values that were not
aesthetic values? But Coleridge of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, and
Rossetti in all his writings, made what Arnold has called that ‘morbid effort’, that
search for ‘perfection of thought and feeling, and to unite this to perfection of
form’, sought this new, pure beauty, and suffered in their lives because of it. The
typical men of the classical age (I think of Commodus, with his half-animal
beauty, his cruelty, and his caprice) lived public lives, pursuing curiosities of
appetite, and so found in Christianity, with its Thebaid and its Mareotic Sea, the
needed curb. But when can the Christian confessor say to those who more and
more must make all out of the privacy of their thought, calling up
Yeats and Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”
79
perpetualimages of desire, for he cannot say, ‘Cease to be artist, cease to be poet’,
where the whole life is art and poetry, nor can he bid men leave the world, who
suffer from the terrors that pass before shut eyes. Coleridge, and Rossetti, though
his dull brother did once persuade him that he was an agnostic, were devout
Christians, and Stenbock and Beardsley were so toward their lives’ end, and
Dowson and Johnson always, and yet I think it but deepened despair and
multiplied temptation.
Dark Angel, with thine aching lust
To rid the world of penitence:
Malicious angel, who still dost
My soul such subtil violence!
.............................................................
Why are these strange souls born everywhere today, with hearts that Christianity
was shaped by history, cannot satisfy? Our love-letters wear out our love; no
school of painting outlasts its founders, every stroke of the brush exhausts the
impulse, Pre-Raphaelitism had some twenty years; Impressionism thirty perhaps.
Why should we believe that religion can never bring round its antithesis? Is it
true that our air is disturbed, as Mallarme said, by ‘the trembling of the veil of
the Temple’, or that ‘our whole age is seeking to bring forth a sacred book’?
Some of us thought that book near towards the end of last century, but the tide
sank again. (313-4)
This long passage is taken from Book IV. The Tragic Generation in The Trembling of
the Veil (1922), the first draft of which had about 42,000 words, and Yeats expanded it
to be a book of more than 100,000 words, by 1938. So, this passage must have been
added to it much later than 1922. In this, Yeats has chosen two poets, calling them
poets of what Matthew Arnold calls “morbid effort” who try to search for ‘perfection of
thought and feeling, and to unite this to perfection of form’: they “sought this new,
pure beauty, and suffered in their lives because of it.” They are Coleridge and Rossetti.
It is almost certain that Yeats sees Coleridge’s poetry as having a perfect form. As we
saw above, Yeats seems to have had “Coleridge of the two poems” in mind, “Kubla
Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and it is quite plausible that Yeats
would go to these poems of Coleridge for an ideal form of poetry, whether consciously
80
Young Suck Rhee
or unconsciously. Another point that Yeats raises is, “Why are these strange souls born
everywhere today, with hearts that Christianity, as shaped by history, cannot satisfy?”
Yeats seems to be one of those strange souls with “hearts that Christianity cannot
satisfy.” Of course, Coleridge is one of them; they both wrote “strange” poems.
III
What is interesting to me is that Yeats in “Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931” is as
much a moralist as Coleridge in “Kubla Khan.”
How Coleridge created “Kubla Khan” in 1797 is curiously interesting, just as Yeats
was composing his “The Cap and Bells” in 1893. When he was writing the two
“fragments,” Coleridge seems to be under the influence of medicine, while Yeats had
had a strange dream on two successive occasions. Their creativity was set ablaze by the
extraordinary conditions, one being drunk with opium and the other being heightened by
a repeated dream. Let me give Yeats’s note on how he starts this poem:
I dreamed this story exactly as I have written it, and dreamed another long dream
after it, trying to make out its meaning, and whether I was to write it in prose
or verse. The first dream was more a vision than a dream, for it was beautiful
and coherent, and gave me a sense of illumination and exaltation that one gets
from visions, while the second dream was confused and meaningless. The poem
has always meant a great deal to me, though, as is the way with symbolic
poems, it has not always meant quite the same thing. Blake would have said ‘The
authors are in eternity’... and I am quite sure they can only be questioned in
dreams. (Jeffares 59)
And through the introductory note to Coleridge’s own poem “fragments,” we can
understand in part how Coleridge was trying to write poetry on the basis of inspiration;
despite the fact that his idea of poetry seems to have been founded on inspiration, it
did not write itself; it was a painstaking process the poet had to go through. Here’s
what he ended up with, what he calls a fragment. (Abrams 439-40) In the summer of
Yeats and Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”
81
1797, he took an anodye to ease his pain, and fell asleep in his chair while he was
reading Purchas’s Pilgrimage: “Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built,
and a stately garden thereunto: and thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with
a wall.” On awaking, he began to compose lines, when a visitor came and stayed for
over an hour with him. When he came back to writing it again, all the images were
gone, “with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest
passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone had been
cast.” Here is the fragment:
Then all the charm
Is broken-......
...........................................................
The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon
The vision will return! And lo! he stays,
And soon the fragments dim of lovely forms
Come trembling back, unite, and now once more
The pool becomes a mirror.
Coleridge wrote another poem “as a contrast to this vision,” which is also a
fragment; he described “with equal fidelity the dream of pain and disease,” which is
“Kubla Khan.” (Abrams 440)
“Kubla Khan” consists of three stanzas: the first stanza has 11 lines, the second 19,
and the third 24. In stanza 1, there is a description of the place called Xanadu, where
Kubla Khan orders a palace to be built. It is in this stanza that I find some connection
between Coleridge and Yeats. Frist here is the first stanza of “Kubla Khan”:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
82
Young Suck Rhee
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
And the first stanza of Yeats’s “Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931”:
Under my window-ledge the waters race,
Otters below and moor-hens on the top,
Run for a mile undimmed in Heaven’s face
Then darkening through ‘dark’ Raftery’s ‘cellar’ drop,
Run underground, rise in a rocky place
In Coole demesne, and there to finish up
Spread to a lake and drop into a hole.
What’s water but the generated soul?
Beside this stanza by Yeats, I would put part of the middle stanza of “Kubla Khan”:
how strikingly similar they look:
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a hazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean: (Abrams 440)
Coleridge goes along the meandering river, whereas Yeats allegorizes the flowing of the
river. Yeats allegorizes by making the waters
.... finish up
Spread to a lake and drop into a hole.
What’s water but the generated soul?
The hole-soul rhyming must be read as an intention of Yeats’s to give a great deal of
meaning to the soul-like journey of the waters; whereas Coleridge, as quoted above,
Yeats and Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”
83
keeps following the river flowing through to a lifeless ocean, in which the reader has
no intimation that Coleridge, too, has a message. At least not until the second stanza’s
final two lines that follow the matter-of-fact description of the river.
....
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The general impression is that there is a similarity, the kind that Yeats might have
taken, whether it was the image of the sacred river, Alph, or it was the mood, the
impression of the mysterious and holy aurora borealis coming from in and around the
two fragments of “Kubla Khan.”
Once we have passed by the facade of similarity, there looms up a difference
between the two poems: in Coleridge’s the river runs through the caverns too deep for
man to measure winding up in a sunless sea, though the river in the middle stanza
meanders in a much similar way to Yeat’s “waters.” Compared to this rather
mysterious, yet straightforward movement, the “waters,” in Yeats’s poem, under “my”
window-ledge goes through many stages of journey: running for a mile undimmed in
Heaven’s face, darkening through dark Raftery’s cellar and dropping and running
underground, rising in a rocky place in Coole demesne, spreading to a lake, and finally
dropping into a hole. It is like a soul jouneying. If the waters in Yeats’s poem is a
metaphor of a journeying soul, and if the river in Coleridge’s is simply a description of
a mysterious river that flows without any taste of allegory, who tends to be more
moral? Yeats sounds to be, in this particular poem. The Yeats in this poem is more
like the Coleridge in “The Rime.”
“Kubla Khan” is surreal, compared with Yeats’s “Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931,”
and maybe as surreal as Yeats’s “The Cap and Bells.” When we read the two poems,
we see that nothing is in the nature of phantasmogoria. Things are described
realistically; however, the accumulated effect is “phantasmogoric.” “Kubla Khan” and
“The Cap and Bells” both look to me like one of Rene Magritte paintings, in which
he creates “the illusionistic, dream-like quality.” Born in Belgium, Margritte went to
84
Young Suck Rhee
Paris in 1927, where he stayed there for three years, becoming a member of the
movement of Surrealism. As Margritte says of his work that “people who look for
symbolic meanings fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the image... The
image must be seen such as they are.” (Phaidon 283) Both poets in their poems depict
the natural scenes objectively without coloring any of the words in them symbolically,
but the images presented turn mysteriously poetic, turning them into surreal poems.
Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is also a fine example of such a
poetic realization. “The Rime,” as well as “Christabel,” another supernatural poem of
Coleridge, is a beautiful poeticizing of “Surrealism.” Of course, this movement started
in Paris, in 1920’s, and I wonder if the Surrealists had known Coleridge’s work.
It is with this perspective of Surrealism that I may only reluctantly have to agree
with Gibson’s reading of “The Rime.” Gibson says that “Coleridge employs a gothic
scenario to dramatise the psychological sense of sin through real, ontological events-the
severance of man from an interconnected universe, or ‘Life-in-Death’-until he learns to
love that universe once more and gain grace through benevolent feeling.” (101) It is a
reading all right, if you must look for a meaning from a poem, like “The Rime.” And
Gibson spends a lot of space tracing what kind of a philosopher Coleridge might have
been (or was, rather) in this poem. But is it that much necessary? To read and enjoy
the pure form and poetry that originates and emerges from “The Rime.” How delightful
and phantasmogoric to go through the beautiful unfolding of scene after scene before
our eyes. Did Yeats not praise the perfection of form in “The Ryme” and “Kubla
Khan”? In a similar context, Gibson focuses on the poem’s message when he compares
Yeats’s “Byzantium” with “The Rime.” Yeats’s is, according to him, a “most extreme
statement on art’s ability to incarnate the spiritual in material form. Art gives simplicity
to life by uniting the physical form to spiritual eternity in work.” (101) To me, it is a
much more complex, and extremely beautiful, poem, strangely echoing “The Rime.” It
is a poem, in five stanzas, that is recreating what Coleridge had done, about a hundred
years ago. In form, Yeats tries to be perfect, like Coleridge. and in content, he treats
art and culture, whereas Coleridge did art and religion. In detail, it is beyond
comparison to make them look identical.
In closing, what I suggest is that we read images as images, not attaching too
Yeats and Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”
85
much significance, which will deprive us of the joy of reading poetry. For instance,
Gibson tries another comparison between Coleridge’s “Christabel” and Yeats’s “To
Dorothy Wellesley.” Gibson’s most fascinating point is that Wellesley is a lesbian, just
as Geraldine in “Christabel” is ambiguous enough to be seen as a lesbian. My close
reading tends to agree with his; however, Yeats’s is a poem, the homage paid to the
wonderful woman poet and friend. It sounds and looks surreal and beautiful, recalling
the beginning of “Christabel.” But however tempting it is, reading the first stanza in
“To Dorothy ...” in such a way is to distort the whole poem. It is to me to be read as
another poem with a surreal quality, with images of beauty. “Christabel,” too, if it is
read as images, gives an abundance of feeling of beauty and mystery over human
emotion and nature.
Works Cited
Abrams, M.H., General Editor, The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 7th ed.,
Vol. 2, 2000.
Ellmann, Richard. The Man and the Masks. New York: W.W. Norton, 1979.
[Macmillan, 1948]
Gibson, Matthew, Yeats, Coleridge and the Romantic Sage. London: Macmillan Press
Ltd, 2000.
Jeffares, A. Norman. A New Commentary on the Poems of W.B.Yeats. London: The
Macmillan Press, 1979.
Paidon Press [editors not shown]. The 20th-Century Art Book. London: Phaidon Press
Limited, 1996.
Yeats, W. B. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach. ed. The Variorum Edition of the
Poems of W. B Yeats. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1940.
_________. Autobiographies. London: Macmillan, 1955.
86
Young Suck Rhee
와 Coleridge의 “Kubla Khan”
Yeats
우리말요약
이영석
이 논문은
다.
Yeats는
Gibson의
Coleridge의
1920년대부터
최근의 저서,
3편
supernatural poetry
Coleridge에
중
“Kubla Khan”에
초점을 맞추었
대해 관심을 보이는 것으로 보인다. 특히,
Yeats, Coleridge and the Romantic Sage
(2000년)는
Coleridge
에 대한 심도 있는 연구서이며, 앞으로 두 시인의 비교연구에 참고가 될만한 자료
이다.
그런데도, 이 책을 정독하면,
다. 본 논문은
Gibson의
Yeats을
왜곡시킬 수 있는 많은 요소들이 발견된
이 책을 출발점으로 했으나, 두 시인의 비교 과정에서 상당
한 입장의 차이를 보인다. 이 논문은 두 시인의 뛰어난 두 시,
“Kubla Khan”과
“Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931”을
본질에 보다 가
보다 많이 조명하면서,
까이 가는 방법을 제시하고자 했다. 그 중하나가
접근이다. 즉, 이미지는 이미지로 읽으라는 것이다.
Yeats시의
Rene Magritte식의 “Surrealism”적