The Myths of Kubla Khan by S.T. Coleridge
ST Coleridge is one of those romantic poets, who possessed strong sets of imaginary skills to build the stanzas of poetry upon them. It was said that he was addicted to opium. Although opium could easily be considered the best form of wine, it has a special definition. According to the Oxford Online Dictionary, opium is a reddish-brown, strong-smelling addictive drug prepared from the juice of the opium poppy, used illicitly as a narcotic and occasionally in medicine as a pain reliever. And Coleridge is said to have taken opium while he was creating one of his masterpieces, ‘Kubla Khan’.
It is said that he had fallen asleep after taking anodyne, which actually points to opium. And he got to such a state that he began to see dreams about the decree of a commando from Kubla Khan. It is also said that before falling asleep, Coleridge was reading about Kubla Khan. But he is Coleridge’s genius if he had created such a poem only by seeing a dream. Yeah! It has been claimed in the pages of history that Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan after waking from sleep.
He would have written around 300 lines, but was interrupted by Porlock staff. It is not mentioned why this person came and what intentions he had. It is only said that Coleridge would have written all the dream visionary that he saw, if he were not interrupted by this man. And from this point of view it might be supposed that the last lines are not really the spontaneous lines, which Coleridge was writing from the beginning, but the contrived lines to end the poetry satisfactorily.
He might also have persisted in denoting the fact that the poetry was the result of his strong visionary imagination. And distraction could simply denote the form of distractions we receive in our life from different sources. So it could also be a symbolism used and claimed by Coleridge, since he never tended to speak materialistically. But like all his other works, he too had maintained the charm of this poem by making it thematically rich. Pure imagination is one of Coleridge’s strengths and the first three stanzas perfectly denote this characteristic in the poem ‘Kubla Khan’. Although the context may seem like history, it is a work of the imagination.