Kubla Khan And The Romantic Era

The Romantic Era, which lasted from 1790 to 1820, was a time of imagination, freedom of expression, and appreciating nature. The movement began in Germany, and quickly spread to the United States, parts of Europe, and Latin America. The time period centered on the rejection of the Enlightenment, and embracing one’s individuality. One big player in the Romantic Era was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was born in seventeen seventy two to a clergyman in England, and is the tenth and youngest child. and is considered one of the founders of the Romantic movement. Coleridge attended Cambridge from seventeen ninety one to seventeen ninety four but never graduated. He met William Wordsworth, another founder of the Romantic Movement, in seventeen …show more content…
Both of these are real parts of history, but from this moment on everything else is part of Coleridge’s imagination. He begins by talking about the sacred River Alph (not real) and how it runs through giant caverns “measureless to man” into a “sunless sea”. Then the next stanza begins to describe the gardens around the river and how they are bright and sunny and green. Our first glimpse of the world outside of these gardens is gloomy and frightening, but the world inside the gardens is lively and peaceful and protected. We are then taken back to the river and how dark and gloomy it is. It is haunted by a “woman wailing for her demon-lover”. The river is then described as a fast rushing river and how it turns and jumps and rebounds off the rocks which reminds Coleridge of hail. Then it calms down and meanders “with a mazy motion”. The river runs for five miles through the woods and then reaches the caverns talked about earlier, and then the river sinks into “a lifeless ocean”. The poem then turns back to Kubla Khan and how the sounds of the river make him think of war. Then the speaker jumps to the shadow the dome displays on the ocean. There is a point made here that the dome is hot or “sunny” and the world outside the dome is cold or “ice”. The speaker then jumps to a vision he’s having of a woman playing music on an instrument and how the …show more content…
He personifies the words innocence and love by capitalizing them. He paints a beautiful picture with all the imagery. All of sudden an instrument sitting in the window gets hit by a breeze and music begins to play. He relates the music to a sensual encounter and then transports into a “Fairy-Land” with incredible imagery of what the music makes him see and how it makes him feel. The music propels Coleridge’s imagination. He then says “O the one life within us and abroad, /which meets all motion and becomes its soul” (440). Coleridge is referencing to a higher power. He then says he doesn’t know how someone couldn’t love a world that is so filled with beauty and wonder and a world that God created. He then questions if like the breeze played the harp, then is God “playing” human’s in the same way. (not a bad thing, explain better). The last stanza is Coleridge praising God and thanking him for all the things he has and for loving him despite his sins and flaws. “Wildered and dark, and gave me to possess/Peace, and this cot, and thee, heart-honored maid”