Β On the dream vision of Samuel T. Coleridge and the composition of "Kubla Khan", a poem left unfinished due to the sudden visit of the mysterious "person from Porlock": an illustrative literary case oflla "other" nature of the poetic inspiration on which, among others, Jorge Luis Borges and Fernando Pessoa have written.
di Salvatore Di Domenico
It is said that the English poet Samuel T. Coleridge, during a period of vacation in the Exmoor, around 1797, for some indisposition of the physical or of the spirit he took a sedative of an opiate nature and fell asleep dreamed, say the modern critics, one of his best three compositions, together with the Ballad of the old sailor e CHRISTABEL: kubla khan (or alternatively said, as the author himself notes, vision in a dream). The poem tells the decree of Kublai Khan, king of Tatar who became famous in the West mainly thanks to the stories contained in the Milione Marco Polo, who served in his court for seventeen years, to build a pleasure palace in the capital of the Xanadu kingdom. Here it is translated into Italian (rather freely) by M. Luzi:
In Xanadu he raises Kubla Khan
abode of delights a cathedral
where Alf, the sacred river, flows
for caves forbidden to man
to a sunless sea.Ten miles of fertile countryside
with walls and towers were enclosed:
and there was a glint of streams in the garden
and the frankincense tree had blossomed
and there were forests as old as the clives
that embraced the sunny green countryside.But oh! that dark abyss to the bottom
it tore the hill with its cedar fleece.
It was a sacred and enchanted horrid
as there are others under the moon
waning where a woman moans
troubled by the demon of love!From the abyss in an incessant whirlwind,
as if the ground broke in a sob,
a rushing pool urged at times:
between sudden and intermittent crosci,
with ricochets of hail or vetch
under the scourge of those who thresh, huge
boulders leapt and fragments.Beyond that dance bristling with blocks
the sacred river rose up at times.
Five miles of wandering course
the river ran through woods and valleys,
then it fell through bottomless caves
tumultuous in a dead ocean.And hoarse in the midst of that turmoil in Kubla
avian voices announced the war!
The shadow of the clear abode
floated on the current,
indistinct the echo came
from the caves and the source.It was a rare miracle, a home
on sunny and ice caves!
A girl with a lyre
I saw in a dream once;
she was an Abyssinian virgin,
on that zither he played
and sang of Monte Abora.I could resurrect in me
that living harmony, that song
such delight would flood the blood
than to that long, clear sound
I could lift it into the air
the castle of the sun! the ice caves!And whoever heard it would see it there
and would cry out: Β«Mystery! Mystery!"
eyes on fire and hair blowing in the wind!A circle three times replicated
around him, close his eyelids,
for manna and ambrosia have deliberations,
the milk ruled of Paradise.
The poem, in the original language rhymed and melodic, according to Borges' words "of exquisite prosody", on closer inspection does not present great characters beyond the dreamlike one and is like the unleashing of the poet all his imaginative power. It transports us to a fantastic and remarkable Orient, with mythical aspects and surreal shadows, to say enveloped by the emergence of a hint of the divine to the elusive man in the majestic depth of the landscapes described. Everything is Beyond. A poem which, however, is incomplete (even if on this point the philology of English literature has indulged itself with more than disparate hypotheses, as indeed it did regarding the dating of the text, but we prefer to remain here with the information provided by Coleridge himself, who considers it precisely a fragment) and the reason for the incompleteness is reported by Coleridge himself in 1816, when, following pressure from Lord Byron, the poem is published with a preface by the author.
Thus, in the chapter relating to "Coleridge's Dream" of Dream book, Borges he does not miss any detail of that preface and he skilfully describes how the text read by Coleridge, which is a passage from Purchas in which he speaks of the construction of the great castle by King Kublai Khan ("Here the khan Kubla ordered that a palace be built with an imposing garden attached. So ten miles of fertile ground were surrounded by a wall")" Began to germinate and multiply; the sleeping man guessed a series of visual images and, simply, of words that manifested them; a few hours later he woke up, certain that he had composed, or received as a gift, a poem of perhaps three hundred lines. He remembered them with singular clarity and was able to transcribe the fragment that remains in his works of him. An unexpected visit interrupted him and it was later impossible for him to remember the restΒ».
Well, although Borges continues the chapter bringing the reader's attention to other cases of artists who dreamed of their works, such as Giuseppe Tartini with The trill of the devil o Stevenson with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (and then a work attributed to Caedmon, citing the study The World of Dream by Havelock Ellis) and above all on an enigmatic coincidence of dreams, so that same palace was erected by the Kublai Khan only after he saw it in a dream, and Coleridge, writing before the European dissemination of the Compendium of Stories of RashΔ«d ad-DΔ«n Fadl AllΔh, a Persian historian, could not have known, we focus on that unexpected visit, the visit that irremediably interrupted the writing of the poem.
The unseemly encounter with the person from Porlock it prevented the poet from fully reporting his dream, from remembering it. It is reported by a third-person self-speaking Coleridge as follows, again in the preface:
Β«When he woke up he seemed to remember everything clearly and, taking paper, pen and ink, immediately and quickly wrote down the verses which are preserved here. At this point he was unfortunately called out by a person who had come to Porlock on business and was detained by him over an hour, and when he returned to his room he found with no little surprise and disappointment that, although he retained a vague and imprecise memory of the meaning. general of the vision, everything else, except eight or ten lines and unattached images, had vanished like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been thrown, but alas without them reassembling themselves later! "
If Coleridge's encounter with the person from Porlock in 1797 took place concretely, if this were not an excuse given by the poet to defend himself from the criticisms that accused the poem of excessive fragmentation, as Elisabeth Schneider claims, or if it were this a person in flesh and blood or more likely a spiritual or psychic entity, assumes a relative, secondary importance from the point of view of our interest. What is truly considered important is theactuality of this encounter, the very fact that it happened and it seems, observing the event with an attentive and investigating eye, to be able to deduce some aspects of the deep nature of the imagination and consequently of the poetic inspiration.
The vision it gives of it Person seems to follow this line, gives an esoteric interpretation of it, oriented on an allegorical level. The poetic composition after all, anyone who has lived even once a moment of true and unexplained inspiration, will not be tamed (or at least not completely) by the intellectual-rational forces, and it is not rare that among poets and painters, after having put away the pen or pencil or brush, we say to ourselves: "yet the ultimate meaning of the work escapes me, what I felt and knew in the creative act", so the verb is flanked by the symbol, where the reason that it does not tame the meanings, as the Portuguese poet puts it to paraphrase. Not coincidentally poetry and religion almost coincide at the dawn of civilization, both being ways of connecting with theother, or if you want with theover, or as Pessoa appoints with theabyss. Of the man of Porlock, in Italian in the collection of Esoteric pages, we read through Pessoa of an unexpected annoyance who interferes in the "communication between the abyss and life", he declines it as human impossibility "to communicate (completely) with the Other World of ourselves". What Borges, without too much confusion, could have defined the Β«World of dreamsΒ», Β«perennially unknown because yet being us he is no one, perpetually anonymous because he is being alive it's impersonal " says Pessoa.
In short, in the allegory posed by Pessoa, if it is true that the "Other World" on which (even according to Borges) true literature is based is difficult to access to the conscious part of the mind, or to the "awake man", and never it's at your discretion, but with random timing, then everyone who goes beyond the firm lines of reality sooner or later meets a man of Porlock, who is therefore the allegory of the awakening of the Ego to itself, the remembrance of the spirit that the flesh also exists, the boredom of the poet who realizes that what he fills the sheet with is not real, the stranger who and U.S: in other words it could be said that receiving the person from Porlock is meeting a limit of the human imaginative spirit, an obstacle without fault (after all the person from Porlock could not have known that Coleridge was writing a dream, nor that his interruption would compromise the drafting of the Kubla Khan, Β«we must receive it out of our weaknessΒ» writes Pessoa) a that Otherness in which man often finds himself seeking the ultimate truth or its own well-being, which while living it encounters as a non-place, or a place alien to existence, where is the realm of the imagination, whose peculiarity lies in hiding the degree of reality of things, merging with it and separating from it , in ways that seem far more divine than human, until the Person is received from Porlock.Β
Pessoa's short text is then concluded by evoking a DISIECTA Poetae members of Horatian echo, according to which the poet of whose composition is maintained the native order of the words and thus the harmony is considered healthy and alive, otherwise he is considered broken into pieces, that of the poet - if not of man - only a small part remains, only the beginning and the end of a content that is lost in the creative act, only the immersion and re-emergence in the unknown of inspiration, which is venturing into one's abyss, or into one's dream , where they dissociate Borges and Pessoa, at least linguistically. The question soon returns to be problematic on this point, the most unsolved and ancient of problems, concerning the nature of that Otherness of poetry, that is, whether it is considered human or divine (if in the episode the romantic ideal of a poet as mediator between the human and the divine is not realized), whether it belongs to the poet or whether the possessed poet comes from it. But before making the slightest argument in this sense, crazy and rash, nor feasible, it is appropriate to read some verses that Coleridge leaves us from the height of his poetic vocation, always in that preface which then causes so much discussion in the criticism; "eight or ten lines and unrelated images [...] like images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been thrown":
Then the enchantment everything
it breaks, all the fantastic world so beautiful
It vanishes, a thousand circles branch out
and each one deforms the adjacent one. Wait a little while,
Poor young man who barely dared to raise his eyes:
Soon the current will smooth out, soon
The image will come back! Here, wait
And immediately the vague fragments of beautiful shapes
They tremble again, they recompose themselves, It is again
the pond becomes a mirror.
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