Kubla Khan, the unfinished poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is something of a mystery to literary critics being not only unfinished but fragmented. The story told by Coleridge was that on waking from an opium induced dream he recalled a fantastic poem, but was interuppted by a visitor as he hurried to write it down and later could only recall fragments. The first stanza contains the lines "Where alph the sacred river ran / through caverns measureless to man /down to a sunless sea." I thought of this over the years, why was the river called Alph (or Aleph maybe,) the first letter of the ancient Aramaic alphabet? Alpha in Greek, the beginning? What did that signify? Then a medieval artist helped me out.
Where Aleph the sacred river ran,
always, from the beginning,
the first moment of "I am,"
when in Angelo's vision the divine hand
reached down, down through darkness,
touched the mind, awoke the man.
A light shone, a small, pale pool
in the darkness all around.
Beyond the wan light's feeble reach,
infinite darkness before, behind;
Shakespeare's unexplored land,
a cavern measureless to man?
In the boundless darkness only a sound:
the music of the spheres, voice of the turtle? Surrounded by the light and bounded
by our humanity we lost sight of things
that move in the eternal night.
All through our time the sacred river ran,
serving to guide us and connect us,
illuminating every step, from Alpha to Omega.
Every idea, each grain of knowledge
was borne by the current of the stream,
revealed by the flow of the sacred river.
Eventually savants conceived the notion
that the sunless ocean and all things in it,
all things known, unknown and beyond knowing
could be controlled by the inventions
of such fond fools as they. Believing all things
lay within the light they never look beyond
its limits to explore the infinite darkness
of the caverns measureless to man.
Yet in the darkness answers dwell
that only yield the secret to thosewho delve
into the darkness of themselves.
Welcome!
The poems in this beautifully bound book are a result of over twenty years of observations. Observations of the world around us and on the telecommunications network. All of the hate, love, heroism, disasters, and those who help.
Beautif
A Collection of Voices from Around the World is more than just a poetry compilation. It is a partnership of poets from around the globe brought together by an internet poetry forum. That forum, poetrypages.com, has been the home of many a fine poet s
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that only yield the secret to those who delve
into the darkness of themselves.
I find this deeply thought-inciting and meaningful. Thank you, Ian. Love and peace to you,
Régis