Christabel & Kubla Khan: A Vision in a Dream (Unabridged) E-Book

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• Herausgeber: e-artnow
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 27

Beschreibung

This carefully crafted ebook: "Christabel & Kubla Khan: A Vision in a Dream (Unabridged)" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Christabel is a long narrative poem in two parts. Coleridge planned three additional parts, but these were never completed. The story of Christabel concerns a central female character of the same name and her encounter with a stranger called Geraldine, who claims to have been abducted from her home by a band of rough men. Coleridge aimed to write Christabel using an accentual metrical system, based on the count of only accents: even though the number of syllables in each line can vary from four to twelve, the number of accents per line never deviates from four. Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream is a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. According to Coleridge's Preface the poem was composed one night after he experienced an opium-influenced dream after reading a work describing Xanadu, the summer palace of the Mongol ruler and Emperor of China Kublai Khan. Upon waking, he set about writing lines of poetry that came to him from the dream until he was interrupted by a person from Porlock. The poem could not be completed according to its original 200–300 line plan as the interruption caused him to forget the lines. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834) was an English poet, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets.

Leseprobe

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Christabel & Kubla Khan: A Vision in a Dream (Unabridged)

e-artnow, 2015

Contact: [email protected]

ISBN 978-80-268-3986-6

Table of Contents

Christabel

Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment

Christabel

Table of Contents

Preface

Part I

The Conclusion to Part I

Part II

Conclusion to Part II

Preface

Table of Contents

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 finished at either of the former periods, or if even the first and second part 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.

Yes 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 metre of the 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.

Part I

Table of Contents

‘Tis the middle of night by the castle clock, And the owls have awakened the crowing cock; Tu — whit! — Tu — whoo! And hark, again! the crowing cock, How drowsily it crew.

Sir Leoline, the Baron rich, Hath a toothless mastiff bitch; From her kennel beneath the rock She maketh answer to the clock, Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour; 10Ever and aye, by shine and shower, Sixteen short howls, not over loud; Some say, she sees my lady’s shroud.

Is the night chilly and dark? The night is chilly, but not dark. The thin gray cloud is spread on high, It covers but not hides the sky.