Imagine a band of pirates who helped capture a pile of gold. The pirates are grumbling about how little their shares of gold are…

• Navigator: I didn’t get a thousand gold pieces!
• Senior Deckhand: Aww shuddup, I didn’t get a hundred gold pieces!
• Junior Deckhand: Quit yer whining, I didn’t get ten gold pieces!
• Cabin Boy: You’re all lucky, I didn’t get nothing!

The phrase “I didn’t get X gold pieces” expresses that the speaker did not get a big share. The smaller the X, the more intense the expression. The cabin boy extends this idea as far as X=0, and his complaint that he “didn’t get nothing” trumps the other pirates’ complaints.

For humorous effect, we could add a line for an even lowlier cabin boy: “Oh yeah? Well I didn’t get negative gold!” It’s funny because it doesn’t even make physical sense. Still works, though.

There is a question of logical consistency. In logic, double negative means positive. Not not p is logically equivalent to p. How do we reconcile this with the English double negative? One way is to read the first negation as a modifier on just the verb, not the whole sentence. Thus “didn’t get” is a single compound verb, and “didn’t get nothing” is not a double negative, in the formal logical sense. You didn’t-get something, and what is it that you didn’t-get? Nothing!

When Pink Floyd sing “We don’t need no education”, it’s implicitly the limit point of some milder lines: “We don’t need a PhD” (Roger Waters writes this, rubs his chin… something isn’t quite right… he needs a stronger line… he scratches it out and replaces it…) “We don’t need a baccalaureate of science”. (But Roger still isn’t satisfied. It’s still not strong enough. Maybe…) “We don’t need first grade”. (Hmm, still not strong enough, think, man, think… Oh, I’ve got it!) “We don’t need no education!” Yeah, now we’re talking!

To parse this, we read “don’t need” as one verb, and “no education” as one noun, and “don’t-need X” means “X is already enough or more than enough”, so that “We don’t need no education” means “Even a total lack of education is already enough”.

And how much thought control do we need, Roger? While it’s true that “We don’t need Soviet-style brainwashing”, that doesn’t quite sum up the sentiments Pink Floyd was trying to get at. Maybe “We don’t need some mostly harmless television advertisements”? A little better, but it’s hardly lyrical. Oh, I know… “We don’t need no thought control!” Brilliant

In mathematical terms, the grammar police are running around screaming about basic freshman logic, while the English speakers they resent so much have moved beyond that and are skilfully employing the one-point compactification from abstract topology

FURTHER READING

You might be a prescriptive linguist if…
Prescriptive vs. Descriptive Linguistics
Pink Floyd Lyrics

Echoes

Overhead the albatross
Hangs motionless upon the air;
And deep beneath the rolling waves,
In labyrinths of coral caves,
The echo of a distant time
Comes willowing across the sand,
And everything is green and submarine.

And no-one called us to the land,
And no-one knows the wheres or whys,
But something stirs and something tries,
And starts to climb toward the light.

Strangers passing in the street:
By chance two separate glances meet,
And I am you and what I see is me.
And do I take you by the hand,
And lead you through the land,
And help me understand the best I can?

And no-one called us to move on,
And no-one crosses there alive,
And no-one speaks and no-one tries,
And no-one flies around the sun…

(Long Instrumental)

Cloudless every day you fall upon my waking eyes,
Inviting and inciting me to rise…
And through the window in the wall
Come streaming in on sunlight wings
A million bright ambassadors of morning.

And no-one sings me lullabies,
And no-one makes me close my eyes:
And so I throw the windows wide
And call to you across the skies!

Wish You Were Here

So… so you think you can tell
Heaven from Hell?
Blue skies from pain?
Can you tell a green field
From a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?

And did they get you to trade
Your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
And did you exchange
A walk-on part in a war
For a lead role in a cage?

How I wish,
How I wish you were here.
We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl
Year after year!
Running over the same old ground,
What have we found?
The same old fears.
I wish you were here.

Time

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown,
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.

Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain,
And you are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today…
…And then one day you find: Ten years have got behind you!
No-one told you when to run: You missed the starting gun!

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking,
Racing around to come up behind you again!
The sun is the same (in a relative way) but you’re older:
Shorter of breath, and one day closer to death!

Every year is getting shorter, you never seem to find the time:
Plans that either come to naught, or half a page of scribbled lines…
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.
The time is gone, the song is over
Thought I’d something more to say…

FURTHER READING

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Ten Metaphors for Time
The Obscurometer

That book is the type of book you can read through once and get a lot of enjoyment out of, but the mystery’s plot is a mystery of its own, and it takes many readings and lots of thinking to really understand in all its depth. This is a much subtler and more profound book than Adams’ more well-known Hitchhiker’s Guide series. And part of that is understanding what’s going on with the poem.

When Coleridge published Kublai Khan in the real world, he claimed that it was an unfinished fragment, inspired by an opium trance. As the tale goes, he woke from the trance and was ecstatic to realize he could still remember the full poem. He began writing it and got what we have today, but was interrupted by a “visitor from Porlock”, who distracted him for a full hour. When the nuisance finally left, STC was horrified to discover he’d forgotten the rest of the poem.

Personally, I don’t think this tale is true, at least in the real world (as opposed to Douglas Adams’ world). I think it’s a very clever clue given by the author into the true nature of the poem, which I believe is actually fully complete and coherent as it is. You can read more about that in my analysis.

In the Dirk Gently universe, the myth of the man from Porlock is true… well… eventually. See, there’s a bit of time travel involved.

Early in the novel, Richard (the main protagonist) attends a reading of Kubla Khan at the fictional St. Cedd’s College. The known, published verses are sprinkled throughout this chapter, in between Richard’s reflections on them and other details of the story. The ending line of that chapter is very important but it’s easy to completely miss for the reader unfamiliar with the poem’s history. After the last line– what you and I know as the last line– has already been read, the chapter closes: “And then began the second, entirely more strange, half of the poem.” In Adams’ world, at least pre-time-travel, Coleridge suffers no Porlockian visitor, and publishes a poem roughly twice as long as what we know, and the second half is much stranger than the first (surprising since the “first half”, the poem you and I know, is already so utterly bizarre!)

Long story short, it turns out both Kubla and Rime were actually not authored by Samuel Coleridge at all. Or rather, he authored them, but only as a puppet, influenced by an ancient otherworldly spirit (the opium trance, apparently, made him an easier target). And that spirit is the Ancient Mariner: except instead of a marine ship, he came on a spaceship, he and a whole society of his peers, long before life evolved on Earth. They were forced to make an emergency landing on Earth to do repairs, and the nameless Spirit whom the readers meet, he was the main engineer, and he messed up, blowing up the ship and killing them all in the process. He alone survived, wandering the Earth alone and watching as slimy life began to evolve around him. Hmmm, this sounds a little familiar, doesn’t it… oh right, it’s exactly what happens in the middle of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner!

So where does the Man from Porlock come in to all this? Well, turns out the Kubla Khan poem is really a cryptic set of repair instructions. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was just one cog in an elaborate plot by the ghostly spirit, a plot to go back in time and repair the spaceship correctly and avert an ancient disaster. And it works! With help from Richard and Dirk Gently and co., everything goes according to the “ancient mariner’s” plans– a possessed body, equipped with Coleridge’s hidden instructions, steps through time and is right on course to change history. It’s only then that the remaining protagonists put the pieces together, and realize that if the ancient spaceship is repaired, then life never will evolve on Earth.

They can’t chase after the spirit and stop him: the prehistoric landscape on the other side of the time door is too poisonous for humans to breathe unaided. So instead they use the time machine and visit the year 1797– just in time to interrupt Coleridge and distract him and make him forget the second half of Kubla Khan! Turns out in Adams’ world, the annoying visitor from Porlock was none other than Dirk Gently, Private Eye

Coleridge’s poetry isn’t the only artistic artifact which Adams messes with in his novel. The meddling time travelers are also responsible for the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, among other things– and Douglas manages to tie that in with Kubla Khan as well! “Could I revive within me/ Her symphony and song…” But I’ve already spoiled enough of the story, haven’t I

FURTHER READING

The Kubla Khan Poem
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
A Modern Version of Genesis 1

So far it’s been a fun quick little project to give me more practice incorporating 3rd party scripts into my wordpress theme and throw on some database stuff as well (with the votes). And as for the results, I was pleasantly surprised at how funny some of the random names turned out to be

The names are meant to be funny rather than realistic, of course. I’m also on the lookout for more nouns to use. If you have any suggestions, put them in the forum It’s particularly hard to think of “place” names (like “bar”/”lounge”/”kitchen”/”garden” etc.)

A few examples:

• Amazing Tokyo Squid Garden
• Happy Yokohama Tofu Outlet
• Kintaro’s Exotic Sashimi Tsunami
• Furious Karaoke Eel Palace
• And lots more… Check it out

FURTHER READING

A Goldmine of Engrish
Ninja Koans
Japanese Programming Language Syntax

Conditionals

The “if…then” variations found in almost every high level programming language would be ordered differently. There are various ways to express Japanese conditionals (just as there are in English), but unlike English, they don’t put the conditional marker before the hypothesis, they put it after the hypothesis: instead of “if it rains I’ll go out”, it’s more like “it rains COND I’ll go out”. Interestingly, this is actually closer to the notation used in (Western-invented) mathematical logic: “rains->go out”.

The read test of a conditional syntax comes when the hypothesis gets complicated and the conclusion becomes multi-line. Here’s what an example might look like (syntax is modified from C):

(weather == WxRAIN || weather == WxDRIZZLE) ->
{
  (have_object(“rain gear”))->
  {
    grab(“rain gear”);
    wear(“rain gear”);
  }
  open_object(“door”);
  walk_through(“door”);
}
else
{
  stay_in(“house”);
}

Verb-Object Order

English is SVO (“subject-verb-object”), meaning the verb usually comes before the object, as in “cats eat fish”. Japanese is SOV (“subject-object-verb”), meaning the verb comes last, as in “cats fish eat” (like Yoda-talk). No doubt, this would influence the order of commands. Modifying the above example:

(weather == WxRAIN || weather == WxDRIZZLE) ->
{
  ((“rain gear”)have_object)->
  {
    (“rain gear”)grab;
    (“rain gear”)wear;
  }
  (“door”)open_object;
  (“door”)walk_through;
}
else
{
  (“house”)stay_in;
}

Ambiguity and Context

Japanese is famous for omitting things which are clear by context. The conversation fragment: “I came. I saw. I conquered.” would become: “I came. Saw. Conquered.” You can “kind of usually sometimes sort of” assume that if the subject is omitted, it’s understood to be the last subject which was specified. The same goes for objects, to a lesser extent. Here’s the above program fragment modified for ambiguity and context:

(weather == WxRAIN || == WxDRIZZLE) ->
{
  ((“rain gear”)have_object)->
  {
    grab;
    wear;
  }
  (“door”)open_object;
  walk_through;
}
else
{
  (“house”)stay_in;
}

Disjunctions (“Or”)

It’s a little weird the way the Japanese do disjunctions. Instead of “A or B”, they might say “A ka B ka”. The “ka” here is the question-indicating particle, so it might be built into the programming language as “A? B?” If we modify our bastardization of C accordingly, we get (only the first line is changed):

(weather == WxRAIN? == WxDRIZZLE?) ->
{
  ((“rain gear”)have_object)->
  {
    grab;
    wear;
  }
  (“door”)open_object;
  walk_through;
}
else
{
  (“house”)stay_in;
}

And please, don’t even make me think what treatment XOR would get!

Politeness Levels

Another thing the Nihonjin are famous for is the high amount of attention they pay in their language to politeness, deference, and etiquette. (Actually, it’s kind of misleading to pretend that Japanese is unique like this. We do the same in English– you don’t talk the same to your boss as you do to your girlfriend! It’s just we don’t “see” it in English because we’re native speakers, and we don’t “see” it very clearly in other European languages because they way they do it is so similar to English. The real reason Japanese seems so politeness-obsessed is just because it’s politeness-obsessed in a different way than English.)

Let’s pretend that the code we’re writing is going to be read by the president of the company!

(weather == WxRAIN? == WxDRIZZLE?) ->
{
  ((“honorable rain gear”)have_object)->
  {
    grab please;
    wear please;
  }
  (“honorable door”)open_object please;
  walk_through please;
}
else
{
  (“honorable house”)stay_in please;
}

And last but not least!

Don’t forget, Japanese code would be written from the top to bottom, from right to left!

} {e}       {(
   l         w
 ( s w(}  {( e
 ” e a”    ( a
 h   lh wg ” t
 o   ko er h h
 n   _n aa o e
 o   to rb n r
 r   hr    o  
 a   ra pp r =
 b   ob ll a =
 l   ul ee b  
 e   ge aa l W
     h  ss e x
 h    d ee   R
 o   po ;; r A
 u   lo    a I
 s   er    i N
 e   a”    n ?
 ”   s)       
 )   eo    g =
 s   ;p    e =
 t    e    a  
 a    n    r W
 y    _    ” x
 _    o    ) D
 i    b    h R
 n    j    a I
      e    v Z
 p    c    e Z
 l    t    _ L
 e         o E
 a    p    b ?
 s    l    j )
 e    e    e  
 ;    a    c -
      s    t >
      e    )  
      ;    -  
           >  

FURTHER READING

Eleven Surprising Things about Japanese
Japanese Conditionals
The Adverb Model of Japanese
Teach Yourself Esperanto
Engrish

1. Raccoons are Bears

Japanese people consider raccoons to be small bears, in the same way English speakers consider lions to be big cats. They call them “araiguma”, which means “bear who washes”, a reference to how raccoons are always washing things in rivers.

2. Small Lizards are Bugs

Japanese people consider small lizards to be bugs. To complicate things further, this doesn’t go for large lizards. And here I was thinking the reptile/amphibian families were hard to keep track of!

3. Ninjas and Geisha

The “ja” in “ninja” and the “sha” in “geisha” are actually the same root word, meaning “person”. The reason they seem different is because of rendaku, or “muddied speech”, a phenomenon where “voice” is added to voiceless consonants in certain situations. The thing about rendaku is it’s completely unpredictable, much to the chagrin of JSL students, and that’s why it hits ninja but not geisha.

4. Hoping and Wishing

ESL students from Japan have a lot of difficulty learning when to say “hope” and when to say “wish”. This is because in Japanese, they don’t really distinguish between the two concepts. Actually, the same remark goes for Spanish and probably all the romance languages. Hoping vs. wishing seems to be an uncommon distinction. Kind of changes the way you look at a lot of U.S. political slogans.

5. Affectionate Nicknames

Japanese is barren of affectionate nicknames like “sweetheart”, “dear”, “honey”, or “darling”. They actually know what “darling” means, because it was frequently used in the cartoon Urusei Yatsura (about as well-known over there as The Simpsons is in the U.S.). Even knowing the meaning, nobody outside the cartoon actually uses the word.

6. Alcoholic Veal

Because of how limited Japanese phonology is, they filter a lot of information out when they adopt English words. This sometimes creates unexpected homonyms: for example, “Beer” and “Veal” become perfect homonyms. Cheers

7. Negative Transfer

As between any two languages, sometimes words are borrowed, but not quite perfectly. Two examples are “ham” and “mansion”. The Land of the Rising Sun borrowed ham as “hamu”, but it actually means “lunchmeat”; they borrowed mansion as “manshon”, but it actually means “apartment”. Negative transfer goes both ways. We borrowed “kamikaze” and understand it as a suicide airplane attack, but in Japanese it literally means “divine wind” and refers to the hurricanes which thwarted the Mongol invasions.

8. No Hot Water

To Japanese people, there’s no such thing as water which is hot. Hot water and non-hot water are distinct substances with distinct names, yu and mizu, respectively. Nobody ever speaks of hot mizu or cold yu. Similarly, Japanese distinguish between the adjectives “cold” as in “it’s cold outside” (samui) and “cold” as in “cold to the touch” (tsumetai).

9. Different Types of Rice

I’d say that Japanese are the Eskimos of rice, except that the old “100 words for snow” thing is a total urban myth. Anyway, to a Japanese person, rice growing in a field, rice sitting in a bag, and rice cooked in a bowl, are three completely distinct things (albeit closely related in a natural way, but still distinct).

10. Legs and Feet

The same word, “ashi”, means both “foot” and “leg” in Japanese. I’m sure medical doctors have specialized words corresponding to what English speakers think of as the leg and the foot, but in everyday speech, they’re identified as one single inseparable thing.

11. Green Light

This is really more of a quirk of English, but you’re much more likely to independently discover it if you study some Japanese. In English, we say a stoplight is “green” if it’s any of a number of colors, including green, white, or blue.

FURTHER READING

Japanese False Cognates
Japanese Words You Already Know
Japanese Animal Onomatopoeia
Goldmine of Engrish

I won’t try to BS you. The Esperanto itself will be useless. As soon as I got the benefits from studying it, I data dumped it. The only time I ever encountered it in “real life” was when the King Of All Cosmos spoke it once in We Love Katamari However, the same thing goes for weights at the gym. Lifting a particular dumbbell is useless. You don’t do it because there’s an urgent need to rearrange dumbbells, you do it because it trains your muscles. Esperanto trains the multilingual part of you, the multilingual muscles of your brain. And it doesn’t take years to accomplish that. You could get the benefit within weeks, if you really devoted yourself.

Within a few weeks of learning my first leksiko vorto, I was able to shift my brain out of English Mode. As a native English speaker, my mind had been frozen in perpetual English Mode for the past couple decades. Even when I was studying freshman Spanish in community college, I was thinking about Spanish in English, the inner dialogue inside my head was Anglo. Suddenly, I was set free of all that, and I could shift my mind into “Esperanto Mode”, as though I was a native speaker. And I can’t explain how happy that made me. You just have to experience it for yourself. You could experience it with “Japanese Mode” or “Russian Mode”, but it would take years of difficult study. Zamenhof’s artificial tongue will put your mind “in orbit” very quickly, because it’s such a logical, regular, easy language.

When you switch your inner dialogue to another language– and it doesn’t really matter which language that is– it’s almost like going into a mystical trance. I believe that merely spending time in this altered state of mind will flex your linguistic muscles and prepare you for harder languages. It annihilates psychological barriers, self-beliefs like “I can only speak English” or “Adults can’t learn a second language”. It alters your very self-image from “I am monolingual” to “I am bilingual”, which new self-image gives you an incredible confidence boost when you go on to study Polish, Farsi, Korean, or whatever else your heart desires.

How do you teach yourself Esperanto? There isn’t really all that much to teach. The grammar is extremely easy and intuitive, and you can master it in a week, easily. After that it’s just vocabulary, and you’ll notice that almost all of the vocabulary “makes sense”. That’s because all the root words were carefully chosen to be cognates with as many languages as possible. In a certain sense, the Esperanto vocabulary is actually very small. It’s not that there aren’t many words– there are plenty. It’s that words are built up from root words, in a similar way to English root words but much more systematically, logically, and consistently. There’s something like 2,000 basic roots, from which the entire lexicon is generated by agglutination. Most real-world languages, 2,000 vocabulary items is a drop in the bucket!

There are lessons available for free, and a whole Esperanto language-learning community, over at lernu.net. The community is so intense about trying to spread their language, when you register there, they’ll actually assign you a human, volunteer guide, who will correspond with you over email. All for absolutely free… it’s amazing. If you have money to spend, buy yourself an Esperanto textbook, such as Teach Yourself Esperanto. Even if, like me, you go on to data dump it all when you advance to a “real” language, it’s still quite worth the investment for the huge benefits of having one foreign language under your belt.

Esperantists dream of a world with a common language which everyone can speak. A world where you could go to China, Korea, Russia, Japan, or anywhere in Europe, and communicate effortlessly with the International Language. Is this realistic? Will it ever really occur? It seems like something of a pipe dream, but it would certainly be awesome.

FURTHER READING

Spaced Repetition Systems
Sentence Mining
Five Reasons to Study a Foreign Language
Autodidact: Be A Self-Teacher
Six Reasons to Learn a Language Together
Progressive Training
Will the Languages Of The World ever Merge?

Sage advice for any occasion.

Awww, you’re hurting his feelings =P

Oh dear! My reputation will be ruined!

She sounds serious… Not sure who she’s talking about, but whoever it is, he should probably lay low for awhile

As far as these go, this isn’t really all that badly butchered, I just thought it was funny that such a casual question is uttered by this guy while he apparently stares into some kind of vortex of gloom and despair.

I’m sure this would make perfect sense if the U.S. would just switch to the metric system…

Hmmm… too much info? =P

This guy has some self-esteem issues. I’m sure you would too if a vortex of despair followed you everywhere you went.

This isn’t actually from the anime, it’s a propaganda poster for the Japanese Womens’ Liberation movement

Yeah.. what she said.

Ugh, I hate it when I get told to a girl’s shop.

Life is hard when you speak like a badly translated stereotype.

Well, you know what they say… “Fake it ’til you make it”…

I wonder whether that’s like “Hide and Seek” or…

It sounds to me like this guy has a pretty legitimate reason to be ticked off!

But what if they’re just faking weakness and they clobber you when your defenses are down…

Oh come on, this guy’s supposed to be in high school, when is he gonna act his age =P

A pretty scathing indictment, though the last part sounds almost more like a haiku or a koan or something.

I dunno what you’re trying to find, but cheer up, I’m absolutely sure you’ll find it by the end of Season 1

Nobody walks out of the slit. It’s like a black hole, not even light can escape.

Well, that’s a wrap! Hope you liked the Japanglish! This should be the last installment unless someone who owns some other terrible subtitles wants to volunteer to send me screen captures. I’ll let this guy sum things up once again:

FURTHER READING

A Goldmine of Engrish, Part 1
Romance Movie Cliches
My Anime Tale
Pictures From Japan

———————————————————————-

Kubla Khan
By Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In Xanadu did Kublai Khan
A stately Pleasure-Dome decree,
Where Alph, the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers was girdled ’round,
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

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 the waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her Demon Lover!
And from this chasm with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this Earth in fast, thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced,
Amid whose swift, half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail;
And ‘midst these dancing rocks at once and ever,
It flung up momently the sacred river!
Five miles meandering with ever a mazy motion,
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean.
And ‘mid this tumult, Kublai heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the Dome of Pleasure
Floated midway on the waves,
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device:
A sunny Pleasure-Dome with caves of ice!

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 deep delight ‘twould win me
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome within the 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 in holy dread:
For he on honeydew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise!”

———————————————————————-

SUMMARY

On the face of it, the poem is fragmented and incoherent. The first verse opens with a description of how the ancient Mongol emperor Kublai Khan ordered the creation of some kind of “pleasure dome”. This takes place in the fictional land of Xanadu, where the fictional River Alph flows through fictional caves down to a made-up Sunless Sea.

In the second verse, we learn that the dome is built with a ten-mile diameter or circumference (it’s not entirely clear which). It’s a very lush utopia, complete with gardens and forests. Generally a very pleasant place, you might go on a honeymoon there if it weren’t for the disturbing things to come in the next verse…

Verse three is longer than the first two verses put together. Indeed the first time I read the poem I thought it must have been an error, that it should really be split up, but no, this is how STC designed it. We learn that (presumably within the pleasure-dome), there is a strange chasm on the side of a hill, surrounded by cedar trees. This chasm is a “savage” place, “as holy and enchanted” as any place that was ever “haunted by [a] woman wailing for her Demon Lover”. Within this haunted cavern, there’s all kinds of turmoil– to illustrate, Coleridge compares this to if the Earth itself were heavily panting for breath. From this savage cleft in the hill, a geyser of some kind shoots up, throwing up giant boulders with it, which the poet compares to hail or to grains falling free from the stem as they’re harvested. Things are generally so chaotic that the River Alph itself changes course, running through the forests (something of a flash-flood), but apparently reaching the same destination in the end, the Lifeless Ocean in the measureless caverns. And amidst all this havoc and mayhem, Kublai hears “ancestral voices prophesying war”.

The fourth verse describes the pleasure-dome in this flooded state. There’s a certain beauty amidst the chaos, the “mingled measure” description of noises coming from the fountain and the caves makes it sound like a kind of natural music. Lo and behold: somehow (it’s not exactly clear how), all this chaos led to ice-caves, which Samuel describes as a very rare miracle.

The fifth verse is another long one, and starts with a total shift of gears. In what seems like a total change of topic, the narrator suddenly tells us about a vision or dream he once had. In this vision or dream, he saw a maiden playing a dulcimer (a stringed instrument) singing about a mountain. Unfortunately, he’s forgotten her song. And, he says, if he could only remember it (“Could I revive within me her symphony and song”), he’d be so sublimely delighted that he’d build the Pleasure-Dome of Xanadu “within the air”, that is, he’d construct some kind of floating city or paradise, ice-caves and everything. This would be visible to everyone who heard the song, and all that audience would be so astounded by the sheer wonder of it all, they’d be downright terrified by it, thinking the narrator some kind of wizard or vampire or demon (hence “weave a circle round him thrice”, a reference to a superstition that you could ward off evil spirits by waving your hands in a circle three times).

COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS

In order to completely understand the poem, you need some additional clues given by Samuel Taylor Coleridge with the publication. Coleridge claims the work came to him in an opium trance. When he regained his senses, he could still remember it, and wrote down what would become Kubla Khan. Unfortunately, he was suddenly disturbed by a “visitor from Porlock” who kept him distracted for a full hour. When he was finally free of the visitor, he discovered that he’d forgotten the rest of it, so that the existent poem is just a fragment of the full vision.

At least, that’s the claim made by Coleridge. After thinking about it a long time, I’ve realized this story is probably not true, but that it’s a crucial clue into the true nature of the poem. Kubla Khan is not a poem about Mongol emperors, man-made utopias, catastrophic upheavals, or caves of ice at all. All of that, the entire first four verses, is just a very complicated illustrative device. Illustrative of what? Illustrative of how strongly the narrator wishes he could remember his dream. The whole work is actually a profoundly complete, coherent and self-contained tribute to the dreams we forget when we wake, the lingering residue which remains of them, and our fervent desire to remember those dreams.

If I were to convert the whole poem into a short and casual three-liner but otherwise preserve the basic structure of it, here’s what it would look like:

You know, this really incredible and unbelievable miracle happened a long time ago.
And the reason I bring it up is, I had this really amazing dream once…
Which I can’t remember, but if I could, I’d be so happy I’d recreate that miracle and no-one would believe their eyes!”

Thus the bulk of the poem is irrelevant, and only serves to emphasize and reemphasize just how incredible and unbelievable the legendary miracle was, and thereby underscore just how intensely the speaker wishes to remember the lost dream.

FURTHER READING

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Deep Desires
Lucid Dream Report, 08 May 2009
Solipsism
Ergative Verbs
Ten Metaphors for Love

The poem opens at a wedding-feast. Three wedding-guests are stopped by a mysterious old seaman. Two of them escape, but the third is compelled to listen to his amazing story…

THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER
By Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Navigate to Part: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

PART I

It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
`By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?

The bridegroom’s doors are opened wide,
And I am next of kin;
The guests are met, the feast is set:
Mayst hear the merry din.’

He holds him with his skinny hand,
“There was a ship,” quoth he.
`Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!’
Eftsoons his hand dropped he.

He holds him with his glittering eye -
The Wedding-Guest stood still,
And listens like a three years’ child:
The Mariner hath his will.

The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:
He cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.

“The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared,
Merrily did we drop
Below the kirk, below the hill,
Below the lighthouse top.

The sun came up upon the left,
Out of the sea came he!
And he shone bright, and on the right
Went down into the sea.

Higher and higher every day,
Till over the mast at noon -”
The Wedding-Guest here beat his breast,
For he heard the loud bassoon.

The bride hath paced into the hall,
Red as a rose is she;
Nodding their heads before her goes
The merry minstrelsy.

The Wedding-Guest he beat his breast,
Yet he cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.

“And now the storm-blast came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong:
He struck with his o’ertaking wings,
And chased us south along.

With sloping masts and dipping prow,
As who pursued with yell and blow
Still treads the shadow of his foe,
And forward bends his head,
The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,
And southward aye we fled.

And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As green as emerald.

And through the drifts the snowy clifts
Did send a dismal sheen:
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken -
The ice was all between.

The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!

At length did cross an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came;
As if it were a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God’s name.

It ate the food it ne’er had eat,
And round and round it flew.
The ice did split with a thunder-fit;
The helmsman steered us through!

And a good south wind sprung up behind;
The Albatross did follow,
And every day, for food or play,
Came to the mariner’s hollo!

In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,
It perched for vespers nine;
Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,
Glimmered the white moonshine.”

`God save thee, ancient Mariner,
From the fiends that plague thee thus! -
Why look’st thou so?’ -”With my crossbow
I shot the Albatross.”

Navigate to Part: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS

At first, the wedding-guest is annoyed by the mariner. But the ancient mariner has a certain compelling power in his eyes, and the wedding-guest is spellbound, listening even while he’s supposed to perform duties in the wedding ceremony.

The old seaman tells how his ship set sail. It was struck by a storm, which drove it south, as far as the antarctic regions. There, the sailors were stuck by walls of ice. But an Albatross visited the ship, and it was a bird of good fortune: soon as the sailors gave the bird food and played with it, the ice split apart and they escaped their icy prison, though they still suffered lots of fog and mist.

Halfway through this part of the tale, the wedding-guest hears the ceremony going on without him, and he is distraught that he’s missing it, yet he has no choice but to listen as the mariner goes on.

Near the end of this Part I, the mariner suddenly looks very grieved and distraught. So much so that his listenter has to ask what’s wrong. Then comes the confession: unprovoked, the mariner shot and killed the Albatross.

Jump to Part: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

FURTHER READING

A Modern Version of Genesis Chapter I
10 Metaphors for Death
Gloom and Doom