Xanadu

I have no clever offering for today’s letter – X.  Instead I thought about the words that began with the letter and aside from the usual and drawing a blank I asked the MOTH (Man of The House).  Xanadu, was all he said and my mind was revelling in it’s convoluted stream of consciousness towards how the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge had birthed in me a love of rhyming poetry.

Prose are my thing.  Poetry that rhymes has pulled me in to have a go at writing a few usually for fun occasions when we are celebrating a milestone for someone special.  Other than than I am happy to read the efforts of others and be entertained by their insight and ability to communicate profoundly with few words.  Word pictures my English teacher described poems as.  I think they are more than that and I am sure we each hold close a special poem from some time in our lives.

Here is mine from junior school years.  Those years when we enjoyed poetry as it was.  The years before we deconstructed poems looking for metaphor, alliteration, imagery and sensations.

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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.

 

In 2015 I posted this piece for the letter X when participating in the challenge.