Happy Lunar New Year! :)

Hello everyone –

Saturday, January 28th marks the beginning of the Lunar New Year in the traditional Chinese calendar. The New Year (or Spring Festival) usually occurs on the second New Moon after the Winter Solstice (December 21 or 22). Next Saturday, the Year of the Rooster begins as the year 4715 dawns in East Asia and around the globe. To celebrate the Lunar New Year, I have selected the poem “Kubla Khan” (by Samuel Taylor Coleridge) to share with you because it celebrates the splendor of medieval China under the aegis of Emperor Kublai Khan (reigned 1260-1294), the grandson of Genghis Khan.

“Kubla Khan, or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment” (1816)

By Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

[Coleridge’s Preface to the Poem]

The following fragment is here published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity [Lord Byron], and, as far as the Author's own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits.

In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in 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." The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things , with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!

                            Then all the charm

            Is broken -- all that phantom-world so fair

            Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,

            And each mis-shape the other. Stay awhile,

            Poor youth! who scarcely dar'st lift up thine eyes--

            The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon

            The visions 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.

Yet from the still surviving recollections in his mind, the Author has frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as it were, given to him. Sameron adion aso [in Greek]: but the to-morrow is yet to come.

As a contrast to this vision, I have annexed a fragment of a very different character, describing with equal fidelity the dream of pain and disease.

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:

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.

But O, that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As ever beneath a waning Moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

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.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:

And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure

Floated midway on the waves;

Where was heard the mingled measure

From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw:

It was an Abyssinian maid,

And on her dulcimer she played,

Singing of Mount Abora.

Could I revive within me,

Her symphony and song,

To such a deep delight ‘twould win me,

That with music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

The planet Venus is riding high in the southwestern sky after sunset each evening – another astronomical event! Here’s a poem about Venus as the Evenstar, shining through the late winter gloaming. It’s well worth a look in the early evening sky! :)

“February Twilight”

By Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)

I stood beside a hill

Smooth with new-laid snow,

A single star looked out

From the cold evening glow.

There was no other creature

That saw what I could see --

I stood and watched the Evening Star

As long as it watched me.

 

Happy Lunar New Year to all our subscribers! :)

Rob