the Pains of Coleridge

[hayati]

Does anyone have a view on my Kubla Khan took so long to publish, and then eventually appears 20 years late with the Pains of Sleep?
Is it because they both deal with the inner world of sleep and fantasy? :confused:

[Virgil]

No never knew that. But could it be the sexual imagery and connotations? Just speculating.


edit: I just remembered. Coleridge was very lazy and never felt he finished the poem and I think never got to finishing it. The poem came to him in a dream and he jotted it down the next morning, and I think had intentions of completing it. If you look at the ending, it's not really finished. I think he had intentions of a grander poem, but couldn't see it through and then tagged on an ending. But I feel it's complete the way it is.

[Jay]

From what we were told in one of my lectures, the claim published by Coleridge was some kind of an 'advertisement'. (reacting to Virgil's edit)

Coleridge's note published with the poem:

The following fragment is here published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity [Lord Byron], and, as far as the Author's own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits.

In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas's Pilgrimage: ``Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.'' The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!

I'm not sure how to quote a teacher's powerpoint presentation to a lecture so... this is a note from that powerpoint.


At the end of the manuscript of the poem, Coleridge appends the real circumstances behind its composition:
~quotation from the manuscript~
This fragment with a good deal more, not recoverable, composed, in a sort of Reverie brought on by two grains of opium, taken to check a dysentry, at a Farm House between Porlock & Linton, a quarter of a mile from Culbone Church, in the fall of the year, 1797.
Add. MS 50847, f.lv

Back on the original topic: I'm afraid I don't have a clue, didn't even know that.

[hayati]

Any thoughts on the Pains of Sleep? What is it that keeps him awake?

[rabid reader]

Does anyone have a view on my Kubla Khan took so long to publish, and then eventually appears 20 years late with the Pains of Sleep?
Is it because they both deal with the inner world of sleep and fantasy? :confused:

Kubla Khan was the result of an Opium benge Coleridge was on, and before he finished his poem he passed out. He never was able to return to that state and finish his poem... think the ending was made by another poet after he died.

[antiquary]

He never was able to return to that state and finish his poem... think the ending was made by another poet after he died.
As published by Coleridge in 1816 (eighteen years before his death) the poem ends


Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drank the milk of Paradise.

Has someone continued it further?