Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

“Kublah Kahn” 149reflected in the river, that winded through the valley with insufferablebrightness” (Vallins 38). Clearly, then, Coleridge often associatedthe sublime with astonishingly awe-inspiring natural features—thesame sorts of features that appear later in his famous poem. In aletter dated 22 August 1796, for instance, he describes a place called“Dove-Dale” as, “without question, tremendously sublime” (Vallins38), while in a manuscript dated November 1800 he describes aview of “bits and edges” of “Mountains . . . in the most sublime style”(Vallins 44). Repeatedly, however, in his comments on landscapes, it ismoving water (often in the form of waterfalls) that Coleridge seemsto consider sublime, and in some cases his reports uncannily resemblethe descriptions of bursting water in “Kubla Khan.” Thus, in one letterdated 6 August 1802, he mentions “a most splendid waterfall” (Vallins50), and then, a little later in the same letter, the following passageoccurs, which strikingly resembles phrasing in his great poem:. . . at length two streams burst out & took their way down, oneon [one] side a high Ground upon this Ridge, the other on theother—I took that to my right . . . & soon the channel sank allat once, at least 40 yards, & formed a magnificent Waterfall—and close under this a succession of Waterfalls 7 in number, thethird of which is nearly as high as the first. (Vallins 51)Similar passages occur in later letters as well (e.g., Vallins 54, 67),and in general the selections reprinted in Vallins’s chapter titled“Coleridge and the Sublimity of Landscape” are frequently reminiscentof the kind of sublime landscapes and natural features depictedin “Kubla Khan.”It was not only nature, however, that Coleridge sometimes praisedas sublime. Thus, in his chapter on “Transcendence in Literatureand the Visual Arts,” Vallins quotes a passage in which Coleridgedescribes the poet as “one who carries the simplicity of childhoodinto the powers of manhood; who, with a soul unsubdued by habit,unshackled by custom, contemplates all things with the freshnessand wonder of a child,” particularly with “the childlike feeling ofdevout wonder” (85; see also 86)—the same sort of devout wonderthat seems amply on display in “Kubla Khan.” Even more strikinglyrelevant to the poem is another passage in which Coleridge proclaimsthat “Gothic art is sublime. On entering a cathedral, I am filled with