Nicholas ([info]wzdd) wrote,
@ 2008-11-10 01:53:00
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This blog gets more and more specialised, but not in any particular direction.
I just found a whole bunch of different readings of the last few lines of Coleridge's Kubla Khan, here. This is the bit they're talking about:


A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw :
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
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!


I think there are two interesting things about these readings. First is the pronunciation of "Abora". This can be pronounced with slight emphasis on the first syllable, or it can be pronounced with a strong, lengthened second syllable. The first pronunciation sounds more like a place name to me, but the second one means you get a vague rhymey thing happening with "saw". I wonder if there is a better description than "vague rhymey thing".

The second interesting thing is the emphasis in the line "I would build that dome in air". I have always spoken it with the emphasis on air, as if the miraculous thing about the statement is that the pleasure-dome could be constructed through words alone -- but also implying that it was at one point not built in air, i.e. it physically existed. But the first reader (Sheen) puts the emphasis on I, and thus removes the assumption I had made that the speaker in the poem was talking about something that ever existed, even in the poem's universe. I like that suggestion: Paradise can exist purely in one's imagination.


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