The Greatest Lost Masterpiece of All Time

Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Like Blake, Keats and Shelley, a great conceptualist set free by the fires of the enlightenment, a mind that reached beyond the narrow strictures of the world and let loose pure imagination in his words.

You can keep your Wordsworth, his Daffodils and his shades of the prison house.

Coleridge, one of the most underrated of the romantic poets, classed with Wordsworth and the non-entity Southey as a Lake poet.
What an insult.

Those of us who find our souls lifted by the intensity of 'The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner' can only mourn that one of our greatest poets could never give us his greatest vision.

I feel a sense of loss every time I read Kubla Khan.

For those who do not know the story of this poem, here we go.

Coleridge was an Opium user. Now, there was nothing particularly unusual about that at the time. The Victorians were slightly less judgemental about using drugs to find your muse than we are, and without wishing to sound like an advert for the use of such stimulation, look at the quality (or lack thereof) of our current poet laureate, Mr Motion.

Coleridge had retreated to the Somerset coast for a period of reflection. He had smoked a fair bit of Opium that day, even by his own standards before going to sleep. He had one of those intense dreams, no doubt fuelled by that intense speculation that can come with mind altering drugs.

The East was just being opened up then. The Orient was still a strange world, but one which was slowly making its way into the living rooms of England.
It was still a strange hemisphere and the romance of Kubla Khan, known through the tantalising tales of Marco Polo still enchanted.

Coleridge awoke with a vision. A vision he knew would be the most beautiful he would ever have. This would be the greatest poem he had ever written, and the rest of his life would pale by comparison.
He knew this with absolute certainty.

And here is how he began.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

And then there was a knock at the door.
Coleridge ignores it.
The guy is persistent.

I'm sure we can all picture the resigned irritation on Coleridge's face as he opens the door.
It is a salesman from nearby Porlock. I'd love to say Coleridge told him where to stick it, but the great visionary was too polite.
And it cost him.

Half an hour later, the salesman is gone.
But so is Coleridge's vision.

He wracked his brains, but could not bring back his dream.

The obvious solution was try more Opium, but after days of Opium dreams, the vision in question had not returned.

Eventually Coleridge conceded defeat and appended his lament for his lost vision to the glorious lines he had managed to produce.

And so Kubla Khan, as we know it, ends thus;

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

And so we look forlornly on what promised to be one of the finest compositions in the English language.
And mourn.

Bloody Salesmen!!!