Souls of Poets dead and gone

Souls of Poets dead and gone,
What Elysium have ye known,
Happy field or mossy cavern,
Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?

Have ye tippled drink more fine
Than mine host’s Canary wine?
Or are fruits of Paradise
Sweeter than those dainty pies
Of venison? O generous food!
Drest as though bold Robin Hood
Would, with his maid Marian,
Sup and bowse from horn and can.
I have heard that on a day
Mine host’s sign-board flew away,
Nobody knew whither, till
An astrologer’s old quill
To a sheepskin gave the story,
Said he saw you in your glory,
Underneath a new old sign
Sipping beverage divine,
And pledging with contented smack
The Mermaid in the Zodiac.

Souls of Poets dead and gone,

What Elysium have ye known,

Happy field or mossy cavern,

Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?

-John Keats

This beautiful ballad was written by Keats as he longed to converse with the long dead patrons of the Mermaid Tavern, whose company included Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and other Elizabethan dramatists.  In the days when many were still illiterate, shops would post signs illustrative of their profession: a shoe for a cobbler, a hat for a hatter, a mermaid with a beer in hand for a bar.  The simplicity of this ballad contributes not only to a unity of poetic voice, but also allows compels us to imagine a group of tavern-goers singing this anthem to a night of merryment.

The mind that broods o’er guilty woes

The mind that broods o’er guilty woes, 
Is like the scorpion girt by fire; 
In circle narrowing as it glows, 
The flames around their captive close, 
Till inly searched by thousand throes, 
And maddening in her ire, 
One sad and sole relief she knows, 
The sting she nourished for her foes, 
Whose venom never yet was vain, 
Gives but one pang, and cures all pain, 
So do the dark in soul expire, 
Or live like scorpion girt by fire; 
So writhes the mind remorse hath riven, 
Unfit for earth, undoomed for heaven, 
Darkness above, despair beneath, 
Around it flame, within it death! 

-excerpted from The Giaour, Lord Byron

 

I remember being awed by this simple, yet beautifully descriptive account of a scorpion self-stinging itself to avoid an encroaching ringlet of fire in which it had been placed by the cruel hopes of amusement.  The metaphor is original:  the conscience as a self-destructive agent upon the self to avoid pain.  The final three lines give narrative drama to the scorpion sting, accumulating caesuras to burst like flames into the final judgement, “death!”

Byron’s own footnote surmised that the scorpion did not sting itself.  Rather the enveloping heat expired the insect before the flames consumed it, the body lost all rigor, and the tail slumped into a natural position, flaccid on the head of the creature. 

Kubla Khan

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 !
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.

Written infamously after Coleridge had recourse to an anodyne of opium and was subsequently interrupted by a fateful vistitor from Porlock.  The poem was finally coaxed into print at Lord Byron’s urging, although in some form or another it was recited for years by Coleridge to his inner circle.

A reviewer said of it that it established Mr. Coleridge as the foremost composer of nonsense verse in the country.  This sentiment is shared by many on a first reading of the poem, but should be tempered if not by thematic sympathy, then at least an outright admiration for the poem’s rhythmics and evocative imagination.  In Kubla Khan the shadows of metaphysics and psychological revelry situate beautifully if understood by the genre tone of his other poems Christabel and Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.