Author's note: This, ladies and gentlemen, is my presentation for Paper 6 (Romanticism). The topic, quite simply, was our subjective interpretation of the last few lines of Coleridge's infamous Kubla Khan. Why or how it turned out this way, wonder not! I was bored and that's the be all and end all of the story.
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Acknowledgement: Before I begin, I must thank my dear friend Raunaq Schoelsy, without whose crazy ideas this presentation would have been dull, drab and boring (like everyone else in this class), but completed a week ago, and I would have submitted the other two assignments that were due today.
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The Rime of The Ancient Doper
It is an ancient poet
And he stoppeth one of three
"By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stoppest thou me?"
The classroom's doors are opened wide,
And I am next up to speak
For the presentation I am about to give
I have been preparing a week.
He holds her with his skinny hand,
"There was a poem," quoth he
"Hold off, unhand me, greybeard loon,"
Eftsoons his hand dropped she.
He holds her with his glittering eye
Kriti Sharma stood still
And listens like a three-years' child
The poet hath his will
'In my youth I led what was
Termed a dissolute lifestyle
On an opium high I always lived
And dreamt of making a pile'
'Then one day my lyrical ballads
With Wordsworth published were
And I was fully aware of how they would have
Created a verray stir.'
'I had a reputation to uphold
My dignity was at stake
Lack-lustre poems had I produced,
From all corners I would have got flak.'
'And so I turned to sex and scandal
Abstraction personified
I became a true blue poet, kid
And like all poets I tried.'
'Like all poets I tried, my child,
Like all poets I lied
Then Kubla came to my rescue one day
What followed is a matter of great pride.'
'For a doper like myself then
It was no big deal
To cook up imaginary stories
And pretend that they were real'
'So thus began what you now know
As the Saga of Kubla Khan
But guilty as charged I plead my child
For it was an elaborate plan.'
'I read about the Khan, I did,
And dreamt a dreamy drill
I dreamt that Kubla wanted a palace
A pleasure-dome, if you will.'
'Naturally then, even in the dream
Compose poetry I must
A claim of some three hundred lines
Seemed but only just.'
'Then wake I did and wrote furiously
Wrote a heck of a lot about Xanadu.
But then, existentialist crisis stuck
The pen stopped. O what to do!'
'Words, words everywhere
Not one word but to write
Words, words everywhere
This poor poet's plight!'
'I'd exhausted the description I'd read
And the poem I knew wouldn't work
So I made up that story and blamed it all
On the imaginary man from Porlock.'
'It worked quite well, I must admit,
For a bunch of such blatant lies,
For I on honey dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of paradise.'
'Yet conscience racks my soul
And the agony oft returns
Until my ghastly tale is told
This heart within me burns'
The poet, whose eye now opaque,
Whose beard with age is hoar,
Is gone, and now the teacher must
Throw me out the door.
She went like one that has been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser woman
She rose the morrow morn.
(P.S.: The bit about working on this for a week and not doing the assignments was a lie. I submitted both my assignments the same day. As for the presentation, well, this was written on my way to college (i.e. in the phatphat (and if you do not know what that is, don't ask)) and then parts of it were added as people did their presentations.)
P.P.S: If you read it and understood zilch, I'd suggest you read this here and this and this too and then come back to read this post. Quite tedious, yes, but should be worth it.
