Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 30 -- Down to a Sunless Sea
the path was a river of smooth, dark water that ran in under the gate in the palace wall and all
around the buildings behind the wall. A lifted drawbridge hovered over the water.
"Oh, my," Dov said.
And Rivka breathed,
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
Divine Madness: Archetypes of Romantic Love (2010) by John R. Haule, on the other hand,
brings us back to introspection.
Alph, the sacred river, runs
Through caverns measureless to man
DOWN TO A SUNLESS SEA.
It is the source of our deepest unconscious longings and images. When it is "flung up
momently" to the surface, consciousness becomes flooded with its primordial darkness -- but
also with the long hidden mysterious of that underworld of the psyche.
In Nature Mysticism: A Guide (2010), J. Edward Mercer argues for transcendence.
But are such experiences possible for the modern mind? Yes, if we can pierce through the
varied disguises which the institutional material assumes as times and manners change.
Coleridge, for example, is thrown into a deep sleep by an anodyne. His imagination takes
wings to itself; images rise up before him, and, without conscious effort, find verbal equivalents.
The enduring substance of the vision is embedded in the fragment, "Kubla Kahn," the glamour
of which depends chiefly on the mystical appeal of subterranean waters. We are transported
where
Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man,
DOWN TO A SUNLESS SEA.
These three lines make deeper impression than any others in the poem, and form its main
theme.
Nor is the feeling of the supernatural unrecognized. Spirits are near with prophetic promptings.
From a deep ocean the sacred river throws up a mighty fountain, and for a short space
wanders through wood and dale, only to plunge again into its measureless caverns, and sink in
tumult to a lifeless ocean.
And again back to pulp fiction. From A Dance with Dragons (2011) by George R.R. Martin,
The caves are timeless, vast silent. They were the home to more than three score living singer
and the bones of thousands dead, and extended far below the hollow hill. "Men should not go
wandering in this place," Leaf warned them. "The river you hear is swift and black, and flows
DOWN TO A SUNLESS SEA. And there are passages that go even deeper, bottomless pits
and sudden shafts, forgotten ways that lead to the very center of the earth."
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