Kubla Cant
In Udanax did the current khans
Not decree a plain hemisphere
Where Omega, the abused river, ran
Through metered pipes by man
Down to a sunlit plain.
Twice two k's of blasted ground
With chain link wire were girdled round:
To prevent the inept falling into the sinuous rills,
But there were no gardens bright,
The forests ancient as the hills had been fed to the Satanic mills
Leaving sunny spots of desolation.
But O, that deep romantic chasm of the imagination
Revolted athwart no cedarn cover!
A savage place! As unholy and disenchanted
As e'er beneath a waxing moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in last thick pants were breathing,
The uncomfortable corollary momently was forced;
Amid whose swift half-intermittent burst
Huge fragments of reality vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid those dancing rocks not once or ever
Was flung up momentarily the abused river.
Five men meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and good to the river
Then reach'd the measure of a man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult others heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of a dome of pleasure
Did not float midway on the waves;
Nor was heard the mingled measure
From the fountains and the caves.
No miracle of rare device,
No sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice!
The original continues verbatim
but may assume the sinister reading
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw;
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she play'd,
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.
The dulcimer and the maid have gone back to the Abyss
There is no holy dread, the milk and the fish is poison.
Palinode lost.
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