521 prompt #2, or "'Kubla Khan' Would Be Cooler With Robots"

I’d like to focus on looking at Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and Shelley’s “Ode To The West Wind” as examples of texts that fit Lawrence Buell’s description of “environmental texts”.

I was originally drawn to these two works specifically out of all of last week’s readings simply because they seemed to me to share a common theme in their acknowledgement of the circularity of natural processes. Now, Buell’s framework gives me a chance to see if they have a more detailed relationship.

Buell’s first requirement seems to be met by both poems. I’ve always at least halfway believed that within the torrent of beautiful imagery that is “Kubla Khan”, there’s a little bit of colonization going on. Maybe I’m just a pessmist or have started to go insane from grad school and now see colonization everywhere, but there’s always been a contrast for me between the natural world in the poem and the pleasure-dome that is incorporated by its builder fluidly - though not seamlessly - into that natural world. Even Coleridge’s desire to recreate the pleasure-dome shows, for me, a desire to put words to something that is essentially beyond words. It’s a desire I myself have had many a time as well, and I can understand it, but it’s still an attempt to quantify and/or enclose the unquantifiable. Maybe that’s the message meant by Coleridge’s inclusion of human history into natural history: a constant desire to explicate or control, even if the desire is simply to be able to celebrate nature…but there’s also an acknowledgment that such things are maybe a bit beyond our abilities.

In Shelley’s “Ode…”, human history is perhaps portrayed as slightly less aggressively. It is nature and nature alone, Shelley seems to be saying, that is capable of inspiring us to greatness. We are reliant on it, and he acknowledges this without any pretense of conquering, claiming, or building. Instead, he just begs nature to give him a hand.

Similarly, Buell’s second requirement is closely related to the first, but perhaps different enough to warrant a few more words. Human interest, even more significantly than not being “the only dominant interest” in both works, is displayed as secondary and subordinate to the interests of nature. Interestingly, human nature is also shown to be seemingly frustrated by this subordination.

The third requirement is the tricky one for me to draw a connection to, honestly. But I’ll try anyway. For all of Shelley’s and Coleridge’s insistence upon humanity’s subordination to the natural world, they seem to not be directly interested in implying our responsiblity towards the natural world. My guess is that this is because to them the natural world is so awesome, so powerful, that the idea of wringing your hands over whether you remembered to recycle your newspaper or not would seem silly, perhaps, in the mindset of these poems. That doesn’t mean that in the time between the writing of these poems and today, a time in which we have arguably developed technologies and lifestyles that are environmentally impactful enough to alter the natural processes that Shelley and Coleridge foreground in their poems, things haven’t changed. I think the lack of a direct ethical imperative in these poems is more a function of the time that Coleridge and Shelley lived in than anything else.

The fourth requirement on Buell’s list is actually the one, like I mentioned earlier, that caused me to choose these two poems in the first place. I think one of the absolute most fundamental points of both of these poems is the interest in nature as a cycle. In “Ode…”, the first three of the five stanzas, before Shelley goes off on urging nature to provide inspiration/sustenance/etc., speak clearly of the west wind, the “destroyer and preserver”, as the harbinger of autumn, the indicator that nature’s wheel has once again begun to turn from birth to death.

“Kubla Khan”’s relationship to nature-as-cycle is more based on imagery alone and is a little less obvious, but I think the connection can be seen by comparing the pseudo-sexual (and therefore spring/birth/etc. related) imagery seen through the poem with the mentions of the caves of ice and the “deep romantic chasm”, which is described as “a savage place” from which, actually, the life-giving fountain springs.

I think, taking into account the fact that in the ensuing years nature has become less awe-inspiring to a lot of us based on the fact that we can now “control” it, and therefore the idea also that we are responsible for its well-being has also grown, that both Shelley and Coleridge’s poems fit Buell’s requirements.