Poem Response

http://www.online-literature.com/coleridge/640/

Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge is my favorite poem by a great margin, I don't respond to any other poems nearly as strongly as I respond to this piece. The rhythm and the sound of the thing are beautiful but it is what I think that Coleridge is talking about that really impresses me. I believe that in the first part of the poem Coleridge is describing the mind and that the "mighty fountain" that rushes through this landscape is experience or perception. This river then sinks into "a lifeless ocean" and the movement of the river through the landscape is called "a miracle of rare device." Coleridge then comments on being overcome with emotion while listening to music and laments his being unable to replicate the internal experience. Coleridge is poetically describing the difference between experience and memory, he is saying that while we may remember a beautiful experience forever the memory will be an insufficient replica of the the actual experience which is only real when it is happening to us. He also speaks of the magical and overwhelming beauty of pure experience as it occurs. There is some of this idea in the final six lines which are among my favorite in all of literature. Coleridge has taken an intricate, beautiful and difficult to express idea and communicated it with a word picture and this, to me, is the purest meaning and ideal function of poetry