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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Interpretations of Coleridge's Kubla Khan have varied widely. The commonest view has always been that the poem is a beautiful meaningless vision, “delicious nonsense” to be read or heard as pure music. Many ingenious and some over-ingenious explanations have however been published, the most extraordinary being that of Mr. Robert Graves, which Professor Lowes demolished with obvious gusto. According to this theory Mrs. Coleridge is represented in the “Abyssinian maid” whose music the poet could not remember; the “caves of ice” are Dorothy Wordsworth, whose love for Coleridge is thus shown to be purely intellectual; and the closing lines of the poem describe Coleridge's own superego getting after him about his opium. After this pseudo-Freudian flight, a mere literal interpretation will no doubt come as an anti-climax. It seems necessary now, however, to revise certain traditions, most of them outgrowths of Coleridge's own note prefixed to the poem upon its publication in the Christabel volume of 1816. The note is too familiar to require full quotation. The poet says that he had been prescribed an “anodyne, … from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair” while reading Purchas. “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 awaking,” Coleridge continues, with what seemed a complete recollection of the whole, he “instantly and eagerly” wrote down the lines that are preserved. After an interruption by a man from Porlock on business, he was unable to recall the rest.
1 The Meaning of Dreams (London, 1924), pp. 145-158.
2 The Road to Xanadu, pp. 593-596.
3 Alice Snyder, “The MS of Kubla Khan,” LTLS, Aug. 2, 1934, p. 541.
4 For the sources here, see Lowes, pp. 374-376; and Lane Cooper, “The Abyssinian Paradise in Coleridge and Milton,” Mod. Phil., iii (1906), 327-332. Cf. also the closing lines from another “Fragment” on “Melancholy”:
Ashe (Coleridge, Poetical Works, ed. Ashe, London, 1890, ii, 164n) regarded these lines as part of the original version of 1794. If this is correct, they anticipate by several years Kubla's voices amid the “tumult” prophesying war. E. H. Coleridge is probably correct, however, in believing that these lines were a later addition (Poems, Oxford ed., 1940 reprint, p. 74n; he dates the poem “?1794”).
5 In a few small and unimaginative details the MS. note is more specific, the phrase a quarter of a mile from Culbone Church especially.
6 Lowes, pp. 93, 104, 343, 363, 401, 412 (italics mine).
7 Meyer H. Abrams, The Milk of Paradise (Cambridge, 1934), pp. 4, 46.
8 Originally published in Jour. Amer. Med. Ass., May 1919; quoted here from C. E. Terry and M. Pellens, The Opium Problem (N. Y., 1928), p. 497. This latter work is the standard modern treatment of the subject, published under auspices of the Committee on Drug Addiction with the intention of assembling all significant modern contributions to the knowledge of opium.
9 Ibid., p. 501, where the general statement is further confirmed by Hare and others. See also E. S. Bishop, The Narcotic Drug Problem (N. Y., 1920), p. 47; and Lawrence Kolb, Pleasure and Deterioration from Narcotic Addiction (National Committee for Mental Hygiene, N. Y., 1925. Reprint No. 211), pp. 11-12.
10 R. and S. Wilberforce, Life of William Wilberforce (London, 1838), I, 173-174. It is worth noting that there is no air of secrecy or apology about this passage, though the biographers are highly conventional and by no means equally frank on other subjects.
11 His original classification was based on a much larger number of cases—more than a thousand of patients in the large U. S. hospital at Lexington, Kentucky, an institution exclusively devoted to treatment and study of drug addiction.
12 “Types and Characteristics of Drug Addicts,” Mental Hygiene, ix (1925), 312-313. Both Coleridge and De Quincey, it will be recalled, often took their opium in the form of laudanum, in sufficiently large quantities to have a very strong alcoholic effect. Kolb's conclusion is borne out by M. J. Pescor (A Statistical Analysis of the Clinical Records of Hospitalized Drug Addicts, Public Health Reports, Supplement No. 143 [Washington, 1938], pp. 17-18) who, out of 1036 cases studied at the Lexington hospital, classified only 3.8 per cent as psychiatrically normal individuals, accidentally addicted.
13 J. R. Rees, “Psychological Factors in the Prevention and Treatment of Alcohol and Drug Addiction,” Lancet, ccxxiii (1932), 929.
14 Other writers who agree with Kolb and Rees are quoted by Terry and Pellens, notably Henderson, Dercum, Dana, Mackin, Jelliffe and White, Rhein, Neff (pp. 493-504). Alexander Lambert, who studied some 1500 cases, wrote the section on opium addiction in Nelson's Loose-Leaf Medicine. The craving for opium, he says, “is always an emotional impulse,” and its victims are “psycho-neurotic” individuals in whom “alcohol and drug addiction is but the expression of the desire for relief from a strain which cannot be borne” (Terry and Pellens, p. 148). More recent presentations of the same view are those by J. B. Miner (Jour. of Abnormal and Social Psychology, xxviii [1933], 119-122); R. H. Felix (Mental Hygiene, xxiii [1939], 567-582); and many others. The last-named—Felix—has had, like Kolb and Pescor, the advantage of observing thousands of drug addicts in the Lexington hospital.
15 A. Andaló, “Studio Critico-Letterario e Medico-Psicologico sulle Tossicomanie di Alcuni Grandi Poeti,” Ann. Osp. Psichiat. Perugia, xxxi (1937), 1-58. This paper I have not been able to see; my report of it is from Psychological Abstracts, 1939.
16 Pleasure and Deterioration from Narcotic Addiction, p. 20. This is the statement in his summary. Earlier he discusses two kinds of pleasure, that which accompanies the relief from extreme pain or distress and “positive” pleasure which gives a sense of ease that the person does not normally experience. He records finding a very few cases in which apparently stable persons had experienced the latter kind of pleasure.—(Ibid., pp. 1-4).
17 Ibid., p. 2. “Stable” and “unstable” are used as the broadest and least controversial psychological terms. They are of course absolute names for what is properly relative and variable—every one is perhaps unstable in some sense. The general distinction, however, is clear; psychologists would disagree only on borderline cases.
18 Ibid., pp. 5-6. I have omitted three statements which duplicate, except in wording, the first three above.
19 Ibid., p. 6.
20 R. B. Brown, “The Effect of Morphine upon the Rorschach Pattern in Post-Addicts,” Amer. Jour. of Orthopsychiatry, xiii (1943), 339-343, and elsewhere.
21 See the Confessions, and the article on “Dreams” in Collected Writings, ed. Masson (London, 1896), xiii, 333 ff. and elsewhere.
22 “Coleridge and The Ancient Mariner” in Nineteenth-Century Studies (Ithaca, 1940), pp. 29n-30n.
23 Kolb, Pleasure and Deterioration …, p. 6, for example. But these are commonplaces in psychological literature.
24 It is notable, for instance, that the only actual dream recorded in Keats's letters (according to the index in the Buxton Forman edition, Oxford, 1931), though not an opium dream, yet exhibits several of the special “opium dream” features (ii, 352). De Quincey, and apparently Coleridge as well, was subject to dreams of fear and guilt even as a child. Cf. also such literary dream-poems as Shelley's “Marianne's Dream” and his “Fragment: A Wanderer” (Complete Poetical Works, Oxford ed., 1935 reprint, pp. 532-535, 653). These are illustrations drawn at random; they could doubtless be multiplied by an hour's search.
25 “The Story of the Use and Abuse of Opium,” Amer. Jour. of Pharmacy, ciii (1931), p. 19.
26 Such reasons may have been given, of course; but I have not met them in the literature on the subject. See especially Kolb, Clinical Contribution to Drug Addiction: The Struggle for Cure and the Conscious Reasons for Relapse (reprinted from Jour. of Nervous and Mental Diseases, lxvi, No. 1 [July 1927]); and Pescor, op. cit., pp. 1-5.
27 Pleasure and Deterioration from Narcotic Addiction, pp. 13-14.
Two individuals have reported to me their own experience with what they believed to be opium visions. But those of one, it turned out in response to questions, had occurred in the midst of an almost fatal illness—meningitis complicated with other things—during which the patient had been constantly delirious. The other person was also ill, had been suffering extreme pain, and at the time of the visions still had a very high fever accompanied by intense headache. The first person reported his visions as actual hallucinations; the second reported merely vivid kaleidoscopic images. Conceivably these phenomena might have been caused by the narcotic; but the physical condition of the patients is more than sufficient to account for them on the basis of well-known medical fact as well as of common experience. The dreamers' readiness to assume opium as the cause, even under these conditions, illustrates the strength in the popular mind of the opium tradition.
28 The acuteness of these symptoms perhaps varies according to the degree of instability in the patient. See Kolb's account of one man who had suffered from hallucinations before he became addicted and who heard “voices” during his cure from addiction (Pleasure and Deterioration …, p. 12; also his Clinical Contribution …, p. 8). The confusion of symptoms arose naturally out of early ignorance of the mechanics of addiction and withdrawal, before it had been clearly established that withdrawal symptoms occur in the midst of addiction if an accustomed dose is delayed or if the addict is not maintaining an extremely regular schedule for his doses. The confusion has been largely perpetuated through ambiguity in the arrangement of Levinstein's description of symptoms in 1877, which was so full and—for its day—so accurate as to have become the classical scientific account (E. Levinstein, Die Morphiumsucht. [transl. by Chas. Harrer, 1878], from which the passage on symptoms is quoted in Terry and Pellens, pp. 431-443). This confusion was first clearly pointed out by W. M. Kraus in 1918 (see Terry and Pellens, p. 460). More detailed observations that bear on the point appear in a recent important series of studies by A. B. Light and E. G. Torrance (“Opium Addiction,” Arch. of Internal Medicine, xliii [1929]; see especially pp. 209-210).
29 E.g., Kolb, Clinical Contribution …, p. 17. Such dreams are a natural consequence of the acute emotional as well as physical disturbances regularly associated with “withdrawal.”
30 I quote from the version sent by Coleridge in a letter to Southey, September 10, 1803 (Letters, ed. E. H. Coleridge [Boston, 1895], i, 436).
31 From others' accounts of Coleridge's behavior at this time we may doubt that his abstinence from opium was complete or systematic. In the light, however, of his more recently published letters (Unpublished Letters, ed. E. L. Griggs [New Haven, 1933], i, 272-295) there can be no doubt that he was doing without it much of the time. The one symptom mentioned in these letters that is more clearly referable to his “gout” than to opium withdrawal is the subsequent swelling of his hands (ibid., p. 287).
32 Letters, i, 435. To Mrs. Coleridge he wrote on September 1: “While I can walk twenty-four miles a day, with the excitement of new objects, I can support myself; but still my sleep and dreams are distressful, and I am hopeless. I take no opiates … [editor's omission periods] nor have I any temptation; for since my disorder has taken this asthmatic turn opiates produce none but positively unpl[easant effects]” (ibid., p. 434 [conclusion in brackets by editor]). See also ibid., pp. 440-441.
33 Unpublished Letters, i, 272-273.
34 Ibid., p. 280. He refers to his abstinence also on pp. 270, 275; to his hysterics, pp. 275, 280; and to his disorders of stomach and intestines, perspiration, pains, improved strength in spite of miseries, etc., throughout the September and October letters. These are all characteristic “withdrawal” phenomena (Light and Torrance, loc. cit., xliii, 209-210; xliv, 11-14; also passages already cited in Terry and Pellens, etc.).
35 Unpublished Letters, i, 297. Miss Kathleen Coburn of Toronto informs me that Coleridge's unpublished notebooks bear out this account of his effort to give up opium in the fall of 1803. According to her information, Coleridge took a large quantity of laudanum on November 23, but was again trying to abstain during part of December.
36 Loc. cit., p. 41.
37 Kolb, Pleasure and Deterioration, p. 1.
38 Bald, loc. cit., p. 36.
39 The date is given as October 1803 by Bald, who apparently understands the passage in a different sense. Coleridge's expression is cryptic here, but in a letter to Southey on August 7 he had been explicit on the same subject: “While I wrote that last sentence [he had been recalling the past], I had a vivid recollection, indeed an ocular spectrum, of our room in College Street, a curious instance of association. You remember how incessantly in that room I used to be compounding these half-verbal, half-visual metaphors. It argues, I am persuaded, a particular state of general feeling, and I hold that association depends in a much greater degree on the recurrence of resembling states of feeling than on trains of ideas, that the recollection of early childhood in latest old age depends on and is explicable by this, and if this be true, Hartley's system totters. If I were asked how it is that very old people remember visually only the events of early childhood, and remember the intervening spaces either not at all or only verbally, I should think it a perfectly philosophical answer that old age remembers childhood by becoming ‘a second childhood!‘ … I almost think that ideas never recall ideas, as far as they are ideas, any more than leaves in a forest create each other's motion. The breeze it is that runs through them—it is the soul, the state of feeling” (Letters, i, 427-428).
40 Cf. the similar statements of modern addicts, p. 789-790, above.
41 Works, i, 42, 47-48, and elsewhere.
42 H. A. Eaton, ed. A Diary of Thomas De Quincey 1803 (N. Y., 1927), pp. 156-157.
43 We need not be as categorical on this point as is Dr. Wood, p. 791 above.
44 Abrams, p. 3. The same is true of the brief historical sketches in Terry and Pellens; in Wood, loc. cit., p. 18; and in D. I. Macht, “History of Opium and Some of Its Preparations and Alkaloids” (Jour. Amer. Med. Ass., lxiv [1915], 477-481).
45 The difficulty, if not the impossibility, of securing a conclusive proof founded on controlled experiments with such subjective phenomena as dreams will be obvious to anyone familiar with experimental techniques.
46 If Coleridge was accurate in saying that he had taken “two grains” of opium, and if by that he meant, as he probably did, crude opium, the amount was not large by present-day standards. Professor Bald cites eighteenth and nineteenth century works containing presumably standard prescriptions of considerably smaller doses than are usual today (loc. cit., pp. 30-32). Asked whether Coleridge's two grains would have been likely to produce a “profound sleep” in his chair of three hours, two modern professors of medicine (not specialists on opium) gave different replies. According to one, it was quite possible. According to the other, it was very improbable: any effect beyond a slight euphoria, he indicated, would be unlikely even in one unaccustomed to using opium. Nothing can be stated with certainty, however, on this subject, for natural crude opium varies in its morphine content and in Coleridge's day no legal standardization had taken place. Probably this variation accounts for the very cautious medical prescriptions of former times cited by Professor Bald.
47 For an illuminating discussion of Coleridge's various uses of the term “reverie,” see Bald, loc. cit., pp. 37-41. This is a whole subject in itself: it can only be glanced at here.
48 Unpublished Letters, i, 281. This is in the same letter that informs Wedgwood of his taking nothing, “spiritual or narcotic, stronger than Table Beer.” See p. 793, above.
49 Cf., however, Shelley's “Marianne's Dream,” which is much more laborious, less expert and much less poetic, but which makes Kubla Khan look like an exercise in logic.
It is my own belief that Coleridge's original inclination toward day-dreaming, encouraged by the use of opium, had combined with his introspective habit of observing closely his own mental processes and with his interest in Hartleyan psychology to make him consciously capture and use in some of his poetry the content and perhaps one might say the “technique” of the day-dream.
50 Lowes, pp. 400-401, 412.
51 Dejection: an Ode, Section V (italics mine).
52 Ll. 42-46 (italics again mine).
53 There is also the imagined presence of a woman in both—though this depends on which version of Dejection we use for comparison.
54 Poems (ed. E. H. Coleridge, p. 413). The idea appears also in Coleridge's letters.
55 Lowes, p. 378.
56 In Purchas. See Lowes, pp. 361-362.
57 Cf. Coleridge's line in Dejection addressed to the wind: “Thou mighty Poet, e'en to frenzy bold!”—Section vii.
58 The usual Jowett translation is given here, since Coleridge himself presumably used the Greek.—Dialogues of Plato (Oxford, 1942), third ed., i, 501-502.
59 Lowes, pp. 374-376, 590-591.
60 Loc. cit.
61 Dulcimer, “once I saw,” and “Abora,” if intended as rhymes, are much more irregular than the other imperfect rhymes in the poem.
62 Professor N. B. Allen has suggested a slightly different meaning. He regards the latter part of the poem as an expression of regret at having forgotten the dream. He also finds the source of the final description in Coleridge's own physical appearance (“A Note on Coleridge's Kubla Khan,” MLN, lvii [1942], 108-113.).—Coleridge was, of course, in one sense writing of himself; but it was himself in the person and with the trappings of the traditional poet-seer—himself, in other words, transformed—not merely S. T. C. in the mirror. It may be remembered that Poet-seer was the role to which Coleridge always aspired, though his emphasis shifted in time from the poet's to the seer's side of this character. Mr. E. H. W. Meyerstein offered an interpretation of the poem very similar to mine, founded, however, on the contention that the poem is not a fragment at all but is complete as it stands—a contention which I do not think sound (TLS, Oct. 30, 1937, p. 803).
