Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 30 -- Down to a Sunless Sea
CHAPTER 30
DOWN TO A SUNLESS SEA
Poet Samuel Coleridge (1772-1834), a founder of
the English Romantic Movement, is known for both
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and his 1816
"Kubla Khan, or A Vision in a Dream," the first
stanzas being,
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
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 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with 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
As with several authors of subterranean fiction -- Poe, Carroll and Doyle, Chapter 16, come to
mind -- drug-induced hallucinations assisted Coleridge's "vision in a dream." But perhaps it
wasn't entirely a dream. Coleridge's reading suggests sources for his acquaintance with
underground rivers.
Scientific Influences
From his student days at Cambridge, Coleridge was acquainted with the emerging science, as
James McKusick documents in "'Kubla Khan' and the Theory of the Earth," Samuel Taylor
Coleridge and the Sciences of Life (2001), Nicholas Roe, Ed. From Roe's introduction,
James McKusick in "'Kubla Khan' and the Theory of the Earth" examines the development of
Coleridge's lyric poetry within the historical and intellectual contexts of geological theory... At
the center of McKusick's chapter are John Whitehurst and James Hutton, advocates of rival
geologies. Whitehurst was a Neptunian, holding that water had shaped the earth, while Hutton
as a Plutonist believed that fire was the formative agent... McKusick shows how "Kubla Khan"
incorporates the most up-to-date elements of geoscience. The poem reconciles the Neptunian
and Plutonic theories in stanzas which might be seen as "a series of geological fragments" --
fragments of the epic on "universal science" in which "cosmology, geology, biology,
hydrography, and agriculture" are interrelated.
Let us look at several volumes with which Coleridge would likely have been familiar.
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