Kubla Khan

KUBLA KHAN

                                                                                  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

            Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a well-known English poet, literary critic and philosopher. He was one the founders of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake poets.  His poem represents the culmination of Romanticism in its purest form.  Saintsbury rightly calls Coleridge the high priest of Romanticism.

            Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan was written in 1798 but not published until 1816. It is one of those three poems which have made Coleridge, one of the greatest poets of England, the other two being The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel. Coleridge himself describes this poem as the fragment of a dream which he saw when he had fallen asleep after reading the account of Kubla Khan, a great Mangolian ruler, in an old book of travels written by Purchas.

            Kubla Khan is a brilliant achievement in the field of supernatural poetry.  Coleridge beautifully imagines and skilfully describes the palace of Kubla Khan in the poem.  He achieves a remarkable success in making the description lively and complete. The poem begins with the description of the kingdom of Kubla Khan.  The action takes place in the unknown city, Xanadu.  Kubla Khan was the powerful ruler who could create his pleasure dome by a mere order.  Alpha was the sacred river that passed through Xanadu.  The river flowed through the measureless caves to the sunless sea.  There were gardens in which streams were flowing in a zigzag manner.  The gardens had many flowers with sweet smells and the forests had many spots of greenery.

            There was a wonderful chasm sloping down the green hill.  The cedar trees were growing on both sides of the chasm.  The place was visited by fairies and demons.  When the moon declined in the night it was visited by a demon. She was sad for her lover. From the chasm shot up a fountain violently.  It threw up stones.  They were falling down in every direction. The sacred river Alpha ran through the woods and dales.  Then it reached the unfathomable caves and sank noisily into a lifeless ocean with a tumult.  In that tumult, Kubla Khan heard the voices of his ancestors.  They warned him of approaching war and danger.

            In the second part of the poem Coleridge describes the pleasure dome of Kubla Khan.  Its shadow floated midway on the waves.  There was mixed music of the fountains as well as of the caves.  The pleasure dome was bright with sunlight and also had the caves of ice.  Then the poet tells the reader about a vision that he saw.  In his vision, the poet saw an Abyssinian maid playing upon her dulcimer.  The poet wanted to revive her song and music. The music inspired the poet with divine frenzy.  With the divine frenzy the poet would recreate all the charm of Kubla Khan’s pleasure dome.  The poet would be divinely inspired and so people would draw a circle around him and close their eyes with divine fear.  The poet must have fed on honeydew and drunk the milk of paradise.

            Kubla Khan is a poem of pure romance.  All the romantic associations are concentrated in this short poem.  It contains many sensuous phrases and pictures like bright gardens, incense bearing trees laden with blossoms, sunny spots of greenery etc.  Supernaturalism is also a romantic quality. Kubla Khan is a supernatural poem based on a dream.  There are images and expressions in it which are supernatural in character and create an atmosphere of mystery and awe like ‘caverns measure-less to man’ ‘ a sunless sea’ and ‘deep romantic chasm’ Though Kubla Khan is a fragment, it is regarded as a complete piece and is often hailed as the very definition of Coleridge’s poetry.

Life Doesn’t Frighten Me

Maya Angelou

            Maya Angelou was an American poet and an activist. She fought for the rights of the black people in America. All her poems and novels centre on themes such as racism and identity.  In her poem Life Doesn’t Frighten Me she lists out the things which one should not afraid of.

            The narrator of the poem is a young girl. She may be Maya Angelou herself. She says that she is not afraid of the shadows cast on the wall by the moonlight spreading strange figures. The noises heard by her in the hall also do not frighten her. She can hear the dogs barking down the street.  In the big cloud close to the moon she can see the figure of a ghost. Generally, children are frightened by these terrible figures and scaring noises but not the young girl.

            The young girl is lying on a bed and the bedspread has the image of a dragon breathing flame. But the girl is not afraid of it and rather says boo to it. Outside her window there are guys fighting. They are tough and violent. This doesn’t frighten her. Even panthers in the park and strangers in the dark frighten her little. She takes even the boys bullying her in the class by pulling her hairs or by showing frogs and snakes in a lighter way.

            The girl convinces herself that nothing can frighten her as she has a magic charm – a mantra which is powerful enough to let her walk on the ocean floor. The magic charm is nothing but fearlessness. This sums up the whole message of the poem that anything is possible if you can conquer fear.

           

A Psalm of Life

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

            ‘A Psalm of Life’ is an inspiring poem written by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The poem glorifies life and advises the mankind to follow the path of righteousness.

            The poet says that some pessimistic people consider life as unreal and empty.  They discard it as full of sadness. Such people are dead in their spirit. But the poet believes that life is real and interesting. Grave or death is not the destination of life.  The Bible says, “Dust thou art and to dust returnest”. This statement is applicable only to our body. After our death our body vanishes but the soul exists.

            Life means to act at present.  It is not for enjoyment or for sorrow.  We must not waste time in expecting a more suitable time to come.  At the same time, we should realise that yesterday is dead and tomorrow is far away.  Therefore, we must act right now.  When we act, we must keep faith in god and god will reward us for our act.

            Death envelops both the strong and the weak, the brave and the coward.  We are marching towards our grave.  We are losing our valuable period of life day by day. Life is also a battle field.  We are all soldiers in the world’s broad field of battle.  The poet urges us to be a hero in the battle.  We must not surrender.  We must not be driven like dumb animal in the battle of life.

            While we work, we have to follow the footprints of great men who lived in the past.  By following their noble ideals, we can make our lives great and sublime. Later, our lives will be recorded as examples for the future generation. If any person gets disappointed or fails in his attempt, he may look at the examples set by us and get adequate consolation.

            Therefore the poet advises us to get ride of laziness and be brave enough to face any situation in our lives.

ODE ON A GRECIAN URN

John Keats

            John Keats is one of the celebrated romantic poets.  He occupies a unique position in English poetry as the lover and worshipper o beauty.  He is a poet of sensations.  The poem Ode on a Grecian Urn is written by John Keats in the form of an ode.  In this poem Keats emphasizes that art is permanent and has a lasting beauty.

            John Keats calls the urn a bride of quietness. Though the urn is wedded to quietness, it tells the tale of Greek life in ancient time through the pictures.  The urn is not the child of passion but an adopted child of silence and slow time.  The urn is addressed as a sylvan historian as it records the rustic beauty truthfully.  The poet wonders whether scene depicted on the urn represents life in the vale of Tempe or the life in the dales of Arcady.  He also asks whether the figures carved on the urn are those of men or of gods or of both.

            The poet notices three scenes engraved on the urn – a fair youth playing a pipe, a tree that shelters him and a lover who tries to kiss his beloved.  The poet says that the music of the pipes played on the urn is more pleasing than any song heard by the sensual ear.  The youth playing the pipe will never stop playing and the tree will never shed their leaves.  Similarly, the lover can never kiss his beloved and hence his love for her will never diminish.

            Then the poet describes a procession of men to a holy place.  An unknown priest is leading a heifer to the altar.  The poet wonders from which town the people have come to witness the sacrifice.  It could be a town near a river or sea or on a mountain.  But he is sure that the town will remain empty and silent for ever.

            The poet addresses the beautiful urn and says that with its beauty and silence the urn baffles the human mind.  The urn is a pastoral poem in marble.  Even when this generation passes away, the urn will remain as it has remained for centuries.  Like a prophet, the urn will prophesize the message that beauty is truth and truth is beauty.

DECONSTRUCTION

            The theory of Deconstruction emerged by way of opposition to Structuralism mainly in France under the influence of Jacques Derrida, the renowned French philosopher.  Deconstruction also implies Post-structuralism. Besides Derrida, M.H.Abrams, J.Hillis Miller, Paul de Man and Gayatri Chakravorty Shivak also contributed to the theory of Deconstruction.  But all of them evince the influence of Derrida.

            The term deconstruction may be loosely applied to any rejection of the usual conventions of construction. The New Penguin Dictionary defines it as “ a critical technique which claims that there is no single correct interpretation of a text but that the task of a critic or reader is to dismantle the implied units of work of art to revel the variety of interpretations that are possible”.

            Derrida himself did not give a clear cut definition of deconstruction.  He simply said deconstruction had to be arrived at through a re-reading of texts. According to Derrida, the re-reading of a text shows the multiple meanings at work within language. It breaks the false assumptions that language is capable of expressing constant and unchanging ideas, that the author of the text is the only source of its meaning and that in the order of language writing is secondary to speech.

            Derrida did not define deconstruction as it has no set procedure and logical presentation of its main characteristics.  He only observed that deconstruction had to be arrived at through re-reading of texts.  The theory of deconstruction shows that language is constantly shifting and that a text may have multiple legitimate interpretations. Deconstruction is not dismantling of structure of a text but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Literature is a verbal construction in which words have no fixed meaning. Language is not a stable object and therefore does not yield the same meaning in all conditions and circumstances.

            Derrida’s theory of deconstruction found wide acceptance particularly in USA. It was applied to a broad range of subjects including literary theory, linguistics, art, music, architecture, political science etc.  This led to the re-reading of the texts by Shakespeare and the Greek philosophers.

POST-STRUCTURALISM

            Post-strucuralism emerged in France in the late 1960s.  The two figures who are  associated with this emergence are Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida.  Roland Barthes was earlier recognised as structuralist critic but in the late 1960s his work began to shift from a structuralist phase to a post-structuralist phase both in character and move. This difference can be clearly seen by comparing the two different works of Barthes – The Structural Analysis of Narrative and The Pleasures of the Text. The Structural Analysis of narrative is detailed, methodological and technical whereas The Pleasures of the Text is mere a series of random comments of Barthes on narrative which are arranged alphabetically.

            During this time Barthes published another essay The Death of the Author (1968).This essay marked Barthes’ deviation from structuralism to post-structuralism.  In that essay, Barthes argues that there is a total independence for the text and the text is not concerned with any external notion like what the author might have intended or crafted into the work. This essay asserts textual independence.  Thus, the ‘death of the author’ gave rise to the birth of the reader. As a result, the text which was seen as something produced by the author is viewed as something produced by the reader. The early phase of post-structuralism enjoyed a free play of meanings and the escape from all forms of textual authority. But later, as Barbara Johnson pointed out, post-structuralism became ‘a disciplined identification’.

            The second key figure in the development of post-structuralism is Jacques Derrida. His lecture Structure, Sign and Play is the starting point of post-structuralism. In this lecture, Derrida talks about the ‘decentring’ of our intellectual universe. Earlier man was the measure of all other things in the universe. His norms of dress, behaviour, architecture and intellectual outlook provided firm centre against which deviations and variations could be detected and identified as ‘other’. However, in the twentieth century, these centres were destroyed and eroded. This was caused by the First World War and scientific discoveries. It resulted in the disappearance of absolutes or fixed points. Instead of movement or deviation from a known centre there was a free play. Since there was no authoritative centre to appeal for validation of our interpretations, all interpretations were accepted.

            The post structuralists read the text against itself so as to expose what might be thought of as the textual subconscious where meanings are expressed which may be directly contrary to the surface meaning. They are concerned with the surface features of the words like the similarities in sound, the root meanings of words, metaphor and bring these to the foreground so that they become crucial to the overall meaning. They show that the text is characterised by disunity rather than unity. They concentrated on a single passage and analyse it so intensively that the language explodes into ‘multiplicities of meaning’. They also looked for shifts and breaks in the text and saw them as evidences of what were repressed and passed over in silence by the text.

            The difference between structuralism and post structuralism can be brought under the following four headings:

Origins : Structuralism derives from linguistics. It follows methods, system and reason. Post-structuralism derives from philosophy. It encourages no facts only interpretations.

Tone and Style: Structuralists writing tends towards abstraction and generalization It has a detached tone and coolness of a scientific writing.

Attitude to Language: Structuralists believe that the world is constructed through language and we can have access to reality only through language. The post-structuralists hold the view that reality itself is textual.

Project:  Structuralists induce us to break free of habitual modes of perception or categorisation and believe that thereby we can attain a more reliable view of things. Post-structuralists consider the human beings as the individual and a product of social and linguistic forces.

                           

STRUCTURALISM

            Structuralism is an intellectual movement which began in France in the 1950s.  It is first seen in the work of the anthropologist Claude Levi Straus and the literary critic Roland Barthes.  It is difficult to define structuralism in a single line.  However, it can be defined that a work of art cannot be understood in isolation.  They have to be seen in the context of the larger structures they are part of.

            Peter Barry explains structuralism by taking Good Morrow, a poem by John Donne as an example.  According to him, a structuralist believes that a poem can be understood only if one has a clear notion of the genre which that poem belongs to.  Any single poem is an example of a particular genre and the genre and the example relate to each other.  In the case of Donne’s poem Good Morrow, the relevant genre is the ‘alba’ or ‘dawn song’. A dawn song is a poetic form in which lovers lament the approach of daybreak because it means that they must part.  But the ‘dawn song’ can be understood only by the concept of courtly love.  Further, the ‘dawn song’ being a poem presupposes a knowledge of poetry. Thus, the sturcuralist approach takes the reader further and further away from the text.  It takes him into larger and comparatively abstract questions of genre, history and philosophy rather than closer and closer to it. Peter Barry uses the analogy of chicken and eggs.  He considers the dawn song, courtly love, poetry as the chicken and Donne’s poem as the egg. For structuralists determining the nature of the chicken is the most important activity, whereas for the liberal humanists the close analysis of the egg is important.

            Thus in the structuralist approach to literature there is a constant movement away from the interpretation of the individual work and there is a drive towards understanding the larger abstract structures which contain them.  These structures are usually abstract such as the notion of the literary or the poetic or the nature of narrative.

            The arrival of structuralism in Britain and the USA in the 1970s caused a great deal of controversy because literary studies in these countries had very little interest in large abstract issues which the structuralists wanted to raise.  The Cambridge Revolution in English Studies in 1920s encouraged  close study of the text in isolation from all wider structures and contexts.  It was purely ‘text based’.  But structuralism brought a topsy turvy change in the principles of literary criticism by switching its attention from eggs to chicken.

            Though structuralism began in the 1950s and 1960s, its roots can be traced in the thinking of the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand Saussure.  Saussure concentrated on the functions of language.  He emphasised on how meanings are maintained and established in a language.  He said that the meanings we give to words are purely arbitrary and that these meanings are maintained by conventions only.  For instance, the word ‘book’ does not contain the meaning in itself but it is only we who have given the meaning to it. Secondly, he said that the meanings of words are relational and no word can be defined in isolation. For example the word ‘good’ will have the meaning only when the word ‘bad’ exists. Thirdly Saussure emphasised that language constitutes our world.  Meaning is always attributed to the object by the human mind and expressed through language.

            Then Peter Barry enumerates the functions of the structuralist critics. According to him, the structuralist critics relate the text to some larger structures such as literary genre, a network of intertextual connections or recurrent patterns or motifs. They interpret literature in terms of a range of underlying parallels with the structures of language. 

            Peter Barry cites Roland Barthes’ book S/Z as an example for structuralistic criticism. In S/Z,  Roland Barthes comments exhaustively on Balzac’s famous story Sarrasine. The five codes identified by Barthes in S/Z are:

a)      The proairetic code - This code provides indications of actions (eg. They began again)

b)      The hermeneutic code – This code poses puzzles which creates narrative suspense (eg. He moved stealthily and opened the door)

c)      The cultural code – This code contains references beyond the text ( eg. Baptism, a ceremony to cleanse a person of his sin)

d)      The semic code or connotative code – This code when organised around a particular proper name constitutes a ‘character’ ( eg. He is a good Samaritan)

e)      The symbolic code – This code consists of contrasts and pairings ( eg. Male and female)

After 1966, two new theories in context with structuralism emerged. They are Deconstruction and Post-structuralism.