Kubla Kahn and La Belle Sans Merci
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Both Coleridge's "Kubla Khan; or, a vision of a dream" (883) and Keats' "La Belle Dame sans Merci" (894) show both contrasting images of beauty and warmth as well as cold and darkness. "Kubla Khan" is a sensual and sexual expression of nature and man's effect on it. Male and female symbols throughout the poem demonstrate an esthetic yet threatening consortium of man and Mother Nature, within a hallucinatory world. Keats' "La Belle Dame sans Merci", is a supernatural story of a man charmed by sinister powers masked in beauty. Both poets clearly indicated they were speaking of dreams in their poems, Coleridge stated through his subtitle that "Kubla Khan" was a "vision in a dream", whereas, in "La Belle Dame sans Merci", the Knight spoke of a women who lulled him to sleep, "I dreamed-- Ah! woe betide! / The latest dream I ever dreamed" (34-35). At the heart of these dreams are sinister and spellbinding women.
In "Kubla Khan" the speaker mentions a "savage placeholy and enchanted / beneath a waning moon was haunted / By woman wailing for her demon-lover!" (14-16); this woman, only mentioned once in the poem has a profound effect of signifying good and evil; haunting a dark and forbidden place within a beautiful land...