Marianne Moore famously stated that poetry was composed of
'imaginary gardens with real toads in them
Like Moores Palace of Art, the pleasure dome of Kubla
Khan is not presented as a real place but as an ideal symbol of artistic
creation.
The key phrase which signals that the dome is
noty a real but an imaginary construct is:
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,
You cannot actually build a dome with music, but only
with concrete building materiasl. Thus the sense is that music (or Coleridge
conjures up in the listener
merely a symbol of a certain type of ecstatic or Dionysian vision of art and its
associated emotions.
No comments:
Post a Comment