ance of Itfe jails on J r 1 ?>?
him. What manner of man art thou?
Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched With a woful agony, Which forced me to begin my tale; And then it left me free.
And ever ami anon Since then, at an uncertain hour,
throughout his future
life an agony con-That agony returns: straineth him to And till my ghastly tale is told,
travel from land to
latul. This heart within me burns.
I pass, like night, from land to land; I have strange power of speech; That moment that his face I see, I know the man that must hear me: To him my tale I teach.
What loud uproar bursts from that door! The wedding-guests are there: But in the garden-bower the bride And bride-maids singing are: And hark the little vesper bell, Which biddeth me to prayer!
O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been Alone on a wide wide sea: So lonely 'twas, that God himself Scarce seemed there to be.
O sweeter than the marriage-feast, 'Tis sweeter far to me, To walk together to the kirk With a goodly company!?
To walk together to the kirk, And all together pray, While each to his great Father bends, Old men, and babes, and loving friends, And youths and maidens gay!
And to teach, by his
Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
own example, love
and reverence to all To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!
things that God
He prayeth well, who loveth well
made and loveth.
Both man and bird and beast.
/ 445
5. Made the sign of the cross on his forehead. 'Shrieve me': hear my confession and grant me absolution.
.
44 6 / SAMUE L TAYLOR COLERIDG E He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all.6 615 The Mariner, whose eye is bright, Whose beard with age is hoar, Is gone: and now the Wedding-GuestTurned from the bridegroom's door. 620 He went like one that hath been stunned, And is of sense forlorn:7 A sadder and a wiser man, He rose the morrow morn. 625 1797 1798
Kubla Khan
Or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment
In1 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 effect 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.'2 The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses,3 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 awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of
6. Coleridge said in 1830, answering the objection rity' was Lord Byron. of the poet Anna Barbauld that the poem 'lacked 2. 'In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Pal-
a moral': 'I told her that in my own judgment the ace, encompassing sixteene miles of plaine ground
poem had too much; and that the only, or chief with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleas-
fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the ant Springs, delightfull Streames, and all sorts of
moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a prin-beasts of chase and game, and in the middest
ciple or cause of action in a work of pure imagi-thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure, which may
nation. It ought to have had no more moral than be removed from place to place.' From Samuel
the Arabian Nights' tale of the merchant's sitting Purchas's book of travelers' tales, Purchas his Pil
down to eat dates by the side of a well and throwing grimage (1613). The historical Kublai Khan
the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up and says founded the Mongol dynasty in China in the 13th
he must kill the aforesaid merchant because one of century.
