The Sonic Organization of “Kubla Khan”

The organization of sound in “kubla khan” is impossible to ignore—and yet generations of critics have studiously done just that: ignored it. Naturally, readers have found many things to say about the poem’s abundant local effects (assonance, alliteration, rhyme, etc.), effects which are then made to consort with its famously disputed content, to more or less persuasive effect. But if by “organization of sound” we mean something more than such isolated instances, namely, the manner in which they interweave to form a particular metrical structure, or prospective generic affiliation, the critical silence is striking—all the more so given that “Kubla Khan” can make a creditable claim to being the best-thumbed poem in the vernacular.

Sometimes this silence appears to indicate the conviction that there is really nothing to say, no puzzle in need of solution. That view emerges in George Saintsbury’s reverential yet truncated account of the poem, in the third volume of his History of English Prosody:

… it is not easy to think of a greater piece of poetry than Kubla Khan, and the comparison of the opening strophe with its mother-passage in Purchas is almost a complete object-lesson in the difference between prose and poetry. But though it has not exactly the least prosodic interest, it has the least prosodic interest for us. It is, in point of form, simply an example, immensely improved in form itself, and charged with a double and tenfold portion, of the half-regular ode or lyric, the ‘broken and cuttit’ verse. … In other words it is a satura, composed of batches of octosyllabic and decasyllabic verse, with rhyme arranged at discretion, and sometimes doubled; with rhythm varying, but not beyond the ranges of iamb and trochee. Such fingering of the general scheme had hardly been seen since Comus and Lycidas and the Arcades; but the scheme could not, even to Coleridge himself, have seemed ‘new.’²

Saintsbury’s work is today frequently dismissed as “mere” appreciation, or, worse still, as ideologically suspect—verdicts that offer a poor tribute to his erudition and palpable relish for verse.³ Nonetheless I must confess that the above description chimes very poorly with my own sense of “Kubla Khan.” “Half-regular ode or lyric” hedges its bets from the start. Many of the lines of the poem are neither octosyllabic nor decasyllabic. The specification of “Broken and cuttit” verse is, moreover, more than a little misleading. The term, now sadly obsolete, was coined by King James vi of Scotland, later England’s James i. His Majesties poeticall exercises at vacant houres (1591) defines “Broken and cuttit” as a verse form that tolerates liberal amounts of syllabic variation.⁴ Yet several of King James vi’s own examples from the Scottish court—such as Alexander Montgomerie’s “The Cherry and the Slae”—prove neither lyric nor ode, as Saintsbury suggests; rather, they take the form of the irregular ballad.⁵

The History of English Prosody, then, begs quite as many questions as it answers regarding the prosodic structure of “Kubla Khan.” This being the case, it is all the more surprising to find that subsequent critical literature, which has prosecuted many recondite topics with unstinting abandon, has nonetheless drawn a blank regarding the meter of Coleridge’s elusive poem. There is to my knowledge only one dedicated treatment of the topic, which extends to a five-page article in the Spring 1962 issue of Studies in Romanticism, derived from Alan C. Purves’s doctoral dissertation on Coleridge’s prosody. “[Cjritical attention,” Purves observes, “has centered on the preface and not on the poem, particularly not on the poem’s structure. Most critics have described it as ‘free or irregular’ and have let the matter rest there.”⁶ Purves continues, however, to draw a contrast between those critics who stress the fragmentary character of “Kubla Khan,” and those, like himself, who see rather an organic whole that is metrical as much as thematic:

… For I believe those champions of the poem’s completion have been struck—as was I—by the fact that...