Kubla Khan Kibbles and bits -I always thought the name sounded like a dog food brand:)

None of the Odes really seemed to capture my fancy, so I decided on good ol' Kubla Khan. I remember reading this in highschool, and as weird as it was...and as hard to understand...I still find it very interesting. Especially this part:

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!

I find this to be a strange comparison, and one I dont quite understand the meaning of. The fantastical, almost sacred landscaped place described in the first stanza is compared in lines 14-16 as a haunted cursed place where a woman longs for her demon-lover( this phrase captures my attention every time). All of this takes place beneath a waning moon...what an atmosphere! Anyways, the first thing I think of is the possible connection between the woman and her demon- lover, and Eve and the serpent. So from there, that gets me thinking about maybe the first description of the place as a kind of paradise versus temptataion? I dont know if this is making sense...Im just trying to get all my thoughts down. I guess the connection Im trying to make (somewhere in here hah) is that the of the dream place and possibly the Garden of Eden. This all starts, like I said before, with the line "woman wailing for her demon-lover". For after this taste of temptaion in which the woman is earning, begging for it, and then up until about line thirty, the dreams atmosphere becomes very dark and violent; war-like. It has the feeling of a convergence of a man-made disaster and natural disaster. Once again this gets me to thinking about the effect of Eve and her giving into temptation.

I apologize if that came out as a big jumble to everyone else, which it probably did.

This is my comment on Kelsey Moore's post ( It still wont let me comment on other peoples)

This got me to thinking alot about one of our lessons on Socrates in my Western Civ class the other day...especially your last two sentences. The root of the lesson was this idea that history is worth studying because although details change, human nature is always the same and we can be more wise in our own time by studying what happened in the past because people are not all that different. I find this true with literature too, this idea of jealousy, escapism, satire, love and unattainable love. Through literature, we learn that these traits never really die or leave human nature.