忽必烈汗 (詩)

《忽必烈汗》（Kubla Khan /ˌkʊblə ˈkɑːn/）是塞繆爾·泰勒·柯勒律治寫的一首詩，1797年完成，1816年出版。根據柯勒律治自己寫的序，這首詩的靈感來自他讀了一部描寫忽必烈時代元上都的作品後，晚上吸食鴉片後做的夢。醒來的他開始複述夢中想到的詩句，直到被「波洛克來客」（Person from Porlock）打斷。這導致他忘掉了後面的內容，這首詩也因此無法按原定的200至300行寫完。他一開始沒有打算出版這首詩，僅留下來給朋友私下閱讀，直到1816年在拜倫勳爵的推動下才正式出版。

這首詩在風格上與柯勒律治寫的其他詩有很大不同。這首詩的第一節描述了河邊的大都和忽必烈的宮殿。第二節描述的是來自異域的阿比西尼亞女子自然而美妙的歌聲。第三節（也是最後一節）描述敘事者本人和他聽到歌聲的驚喜。

柯勒律治的一些同時代人不喜歡這首詩並認為「夢中得來」的說法不真實，但大多數現代評論家認為這是柯勒律治最好的作品之一。它被認為是典型的英國浪漫主義詩歌，常見於各種英語詩歌集^[1]。其原稿現藏於大英圖書館^[2]。

歷史

時間

《忽必烈汗》很可能寫於1797年10月，但由於直接證據缺乏，確切日期難以確定。柯勒律治一般都會給他的詩標註日期，但卻沒對《忽必烈汗》這麼做^[3]。

柯勒律治後來在別的地方說它創作於1797年。柯勒律治的「克魯手稿」（Crewe manuscript）中，柯勒律治的註釋說它是「1797年秋天」寫成的^[4]^[5]。在1816年這首詩第一次出版時的序言中，柯勒律治又說是「1797年夏天」在薩默塞特郡長期逗留期間創作的^[6]。1797年10月14日，柯勒律治給約翰·塞爾沃爾寫了一封信，雖然沒有直接提到它，但提到了許多詩中出現的細節^{[註 1]}^[8]。

夢

1797年9月，柯勒律治住在英格蘭西南部的下斯托伊，經常與威廉和多蘿西·華茲華斯在附近的匡托克丘陵散步^[9] ，散步路線即今「柯勒律治之路」（Coleridge Way） ^[10]。1797年10月9日至14日之間的某個時間，當柯勒律治說他完成了悲劇《奧索里奧》時，他離開斯托伊前往林頓。在回程中，他得了病並在位於卡爾本教堂（Culbone Church）附近的阿什農場（Ash Farm）休息^[9]，這就是他作夢的地方。

根據他自己寫的序言，他當時正在讀塞繆爾·珀切斯的《珀切斯的朝聖》（Purchas his Pilgrimes），其中有一則忽必烈的故事，他讀完後就睡着了。然後，他說他「在深度睡眠中持續了大約三個小時…在這段時間裏，他堅信這首詩不可能少於兩三百行....醒來時他全詩都記得很清楚，便拿起筆、墨水和紙，立即急切地寫下記着的詩」^{[註 2]}。但不幸地是他被打斷了：^[12]「此時，他不幸被來自波洛克的一個有事的人叫了出來……在回到房間時，他震驚而沮喪地發現，雖然他對之前的幻覺還保留着一些模糊混沌的回憶，但除了八或十個零散的句子和圖像外，其餘的都已經消失了」^{[註 3]}。「波洛克來客」（Person from Porlock）這個說法由此而來，後世被用來描述被打斷的天才想法。約翰·利文斯頓·洛斯教授這首詩時就告訴他的學生，文學史上最該死的就是這個「來自波洛克的有事的人」^[13]。

柯勒律治的說法有一些疑點。比如珀切斯的書其實是很罕見的，不太可能出現一個偏僻的農場，這本書將近1,000頁，因此也不太可能有人會帶着它旅行^[14]。一種說法是柯勒律治只是在什麼地方讀過珀切斯的書，這時候突然想起來了^[15]。此外，他的手稿說他是吃了兩格令鴉片，但序言中說的是「由於輕微的不適，吃了止痛藥」^[16]。

出版

寫完之後，柯勒律治時常給他的朋友們朗讀這首詩，1798年曾讀給華茲華斯兄妹，但並沒有立刻尋求出版。他在1816年4月10日將這首詩讀給拜倫勳爵。拜倫說服柯勒律治出版這首詩。1816年4月12日，柯勒律治與出版商約翰·默里簽訂了一份80英鎊的合同^[17]。序言解釋說：它是「應一位當之無愧的大詩人的要求印刷的，就作者自己的觀點而言，與其說有什麼詩歌上的價值，不如說是出於心理上的好奇。" ^[18]柯勒律治的妻子也不贊成出版^{[註 4]}，柯勒律治的朋友查爾斯·蘭姆則擔心這首詩的印刷版缺少朗讀版的力量。^{[註 5]}

1816年5月25日，它與《克里斯特貝爾》（Christabel ）、《睡眠的痛苦》（The Pains of Sleep）一起出版^[21]。柯勒律治還給《忽必烈汗》加了一個副標題「片段」（A Fragment），告訴讀者它本來就是不完整的^[22]。該作品的初版分為兩節，第一節在第30行結束^[23]。柯勒律治在世時，這首詩一共出版了四次，最後一次出版於1834年的《詩作》（Poetical Works）中^[24]。最後一次出版的標題進一步擴展為「或夢中的幻象。一個片段」（Or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment）。在後世的一些柯勒律治詩歌選集中，序言與副標題一起被刪除。有時現代版本的序言會缺少第一段和最後一段。^[25]

評價

儘管拜倫勳爵和沃爾特·司各特等人對它贊愈有加，但這首詩一開始並未出名，銷量也不佳。最初的評論者發現它雖然有些亮點，但總體上差強人意。然而，隨着評論家開始將柯勒律治的作品視為一個整體，《忽必烈汗》得到了越來越多的讚美。

註釋

[註 1]
"I should much wish, like the Indian Vishna, to float about along an infinite ocean cradled in the flower of the Lotos, & wake once in a million years for a few minutes – just to know I was going to sleep a million years more...I can at times feel strong the beauties, you describe, in themselves, & for themselves – but more frequently all things appear little – all the knowledge, that can be acquired, child's play – the universe itself – what but an immense heap of little things?...My mind feels as if it ached to behold & know something great – something one & indivisible – and it is only in the faith of this that rocks or waterfalls, mountains or caverns give me the sense of sublimity or majesty!"^[7]
[註 2]
"continued for about three hours in a profound sleep... during which time he had the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two or three hundred lines ... On Awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved."^[11]
[註 3]
"At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock... and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purpose of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away."^[11]
[註 4]
她寫給托馬斯·普爾："Oh! when will he ever give his friends anything but pain? he has been so unwise as to publish his fragments of 'Christabel' & 'Kubla-Khan'...we were all sadly vexed when we read the advertisement of these things."^[19]
[註 5]
蘭姆寫給華茲華斯"Coleridge is printing Xtabel by Lord Byron's recommendation to Murray, with what he calls a vision of Kubla Khan – which said vision he repeats so enchantingly that it irradiates & brings Heaven & Elysian bowers into my parlour while he sings or says it; but there is an observation: 'never tell thy dreams,' and I am almost afraid that 'Kubla Khan' is an owl that won't bear daylight. I fear lest it should be discovered by the lantern of typography and clear reducing to letters, no better than nonsense or no sense."^[20]

參考文獻

引用

[1]
Hit Singles by Joshua Weiner. Poetry Foundation. 13 September 2017 [13 September 2017]. （原始內容存檔於2020-08-02）.
[2]
Manuscript of S T Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan'. The British Library. [13 September 2017]. （原始內容存檔於2019-06-17）.
[3]
Holmes 1989 p. 165
[4]
Manuscript of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan'. British Library. [January 25, 2020]. （原始內容存檔於17 June 2019）.
[5]
Holmes 1989 qtd. p. 162
[6]
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christabel, Kubla Khan, and the Pains of Sleep, 2nd edition, William Bulmer, London, 1816. Reproduced in The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach, Penguin Books, 2004.
[7]
Holmes 1989 qtd p. 167
[8]
Holmes 1989 pp. 166–167
[9]
Holmes 1989 pp. 161–162
[10]
The Coleridge Way. Somerset Rural Renaissance. 2007 [2 July 2010]. （原始內容存檔於23 November 2008）.
[11]
Holmes 1998 qtd. p. 435
[12]
Holmes 1998 p. 435
[13]
Perkins 2010 qtd. p. 39
[14]
Fruman 1971 p. 337
[15]
Bate 1968 pp. 75–76
[16]
Perkins 2010 p. 39
[17]
Holmes 1998 p. 426
[18]
Sisman 2006 qtd. p. 417
[19]
Holmes 1998 qtd. p. 431
[20]
Holmes 1998 qtd. p. 429; Doughty 1981 qtd. p. 433.
[21]
Holmes 1998 p. 434
[22]
Ashton 1997 pp. 112–113
[23]
Yarlott 1967 p. 145
[24]
Mays 2001 p. 511
[25]
Perkins 2010 pp. 39–40

來源

Anonymous. "Samuel Taylor Coleridge". The Church Quarterly Review. Vol 37 (October 1893 – January 1894). London: Spottiswoode, 1894
Anonymous. Westminster Review. Vol 67 (January, April). Philadelphia: Leonard Scott, 1885.
Ashton, Rosemary. The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.
Barth, J. Robert. Romanticism and Transcendence. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003.
Bate, Walter Jackson. Coleridge. New York: Macmillan, 1968.
Beer, John. Coleridge the Visionary. New York: Collier, 1962.
Bloom, Harold. "Introduction" in Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase, 2010.
Bloom, Harold. The Visionary Company. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.
Burke, Kenneth. "'Kubla Khan': Proto-Surrealist Poem" in Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.
Caine, T. Hall. Cobwebs of Criticism. London: Elliot Stock, 1883.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Christabel, &c. 3rd. London: John Murray. 1816.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Coleridge, Ernest Hartley , 編. The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Oxford University Press. 1921.
Doughty, Oswald. Perturbed Spirit. London: Associated University Presses, 1981.
Eliot, T. S. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975.
Fruman, Norman. Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel. New York: George Braziller, 1971.
Fulford, Tim. "Slavery and Superstition in the Poems" in The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge. Ed. Lucy Newlyn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Furst, Lilian. Romanticism in Perspective. New York: St Martin's Press, 1969.
Holmes, Richard. Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772–1804. New York: Pantheon, 1989.
Holmes, Richard. Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804–1834. New York: Pantheon, 1998.
House, Humphry. Coleridge. London: R. Hart-Davis, 1953.
Jackson, J R de J. Coleridge: The Critical Heritage. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970.
Kastner, Joseph. A World of Naturalists. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1977.
Knight, G. W. "Coleridge's Divine Comedy" in English Romantic Poets. Ed. M. H. Abrams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.
Lang, Andrew. "The Letters of Coleridge". Littell's Living Age. Vol. 206 (July, August, September). Boston: Littell and Co., 1895.
Lowes, John. The Road to Xanadu. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927.
Mays, J. C. C. (editor). The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poetical Works I Vol I.I. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Mays, J. C. C. "The Later Poetry" in The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge. Ed. Lucy Newlyn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
McFarland, Thomas. "Involute and Symbol" in Coleridge, Keats, and the Imagination. Ed. J. Robert Barth and John Mahoney. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990.
Milton, John. Verity, A. W. (Arthur Wilson) , 編. Paradise lost. Cambridge University Press. 1910.
Peart, Neil. "Xanadu". "A Farewell To Kings": Rush, 1977.
Perkins, David. "The Imaginative Vision of 'Kubla Khan': On Coleridge's Introductory Note" in Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase, 2010.
Radley, Virginia. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. New York: Twayne, 1966.
Rauber, D. F. "The Fragment as Romantic Form", Modern Language Quarterly. Vol 30 (1969).
Roe, Nicholas, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the sciences of life, Oxford University Press, 2001 [2022-04-01], ISBN 978-0-19-818723-3, （原始內容存檔於2022-05-06）
Rzepka, Charles. The Self As Mind. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.
Schneider, Elisabeth. "Kubla Khan" in Coleridge. Ed. Kathleen Coburn. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1967.
Sheppard, John. On Dreams. London: Jackson and Walford, 1847.
Singh, Sukhdev, Coleridge and the New Criticism, Anmol Publications, 1994 [2022-04-01], ISBN 978-81-7041-895-5, （原始內容存檔於2022-04-01）
Sisman, Adam. The Friendship. New York: Viking, 2006.
Skeat, T. C. Kubla Khan. The British Museum Quarterly. 1963, 26 (3/4): 77–83. ISSN 0007-151X. JSTOR 4422778.
Stillinger, Jack. "Pictorialism and Matter-of Factness in Coleridge's Poems of Somerset" in Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase, 2010.
Watson, George. Coleridge the Poet. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966.
Wheeler, Kathleen. The Creative Mind in Coleridge's Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981.
Woodberry, G. E. "Samuel Taylor Coleridge" in Library of the World's Best Literature. Vol VII. New York: R. S. Peale and J. A. Hill, 1897.
Yarlott, Geoffrey. Coleridge and the Abyssinian Maid. London: Methuen & Co, 1967.

外部連結

Full text of the poem （頁面存檔備份，存於互聯網檔案館）
Explicated for an undergraduate class （頁面存檔備份，存於互聯網檔案館）
Kubla Khan Analysis （頁面存檔備份，存於互聯網檔案館）, another explication of the poem by JM Schroeder
LibriVox中的公有領域有聲書《Kubla Khan》

[8] [註 1]
"I should much wish, like the Indian Vishna, to float about along an infinite ocean cradled in the flower of the Lotos, & wake once in a million years for a few minutes – just to know I was going to sleep a million years more...I can at times feel strong the beauties, you describe, in themselves, & for themselves – but more frequently all things appear little – all the knowledge, that can be acquired, child's play – the universe itself – what but an immense heap of little things?...My mind feels as if it ached to behold & know something great – something one & indivisible – and it is only in the faith of this that rocks or waterfalls, mountains or caverns give me the sense of sublimity or majesty!"^[7]

[13] [註 2]
"continued for about three hours in a profound sleep... during which time he had the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two or three hundred lines ... On Awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved."^[11]

[15] [註 3]
"At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock... and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purpose of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away."^[11]

[23] [註 4]
她寫給托馬斯·普爾："Oh! when will he ever give his friends anything but pain? he has been so unwise as to publish his fragments of 'Christabel' & 'Kubla-Khan'...we were all sadly vexed when we read the advertisement of these things."^[19]

[25] [註 5]
蘭姆寫給華茲華斯"Coleridge is printing Xtabel by Lord Byron's recommendation to Murray, with what he calls a vision of Kubla Khan – which said vision he repeats so enchantingly that it irradiates & brings Heaven & Elysian bowers into my parlour while he sings or says it; but there is an observation: 'never tell thy dreams,' and I am almost afraid that 'Kubla Khan' is an owl that won't bear daylight. I fear lest it should be discovered by the lantern of typography and clear reducing to letters, no better than nonsense or no sense."^[20]

[1] [1]
Hit Singles by Joshua Weiner. Poetry Foundation. 13 September 2017 [13 September 2017]. （原始內容存檔於2020-08-02）.

[2] [2]
Manuscript of S T Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan'. The British Library. [13 September 2017]. （原始內容存檔於2019-06-17）.

[3] [3]
Holmes 1989 p. 165

[:0-4] [4]
Manuscript of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan'. British Library. [January 25, 2020]. （原始內容存檔於17 June 2019）.

[5] [5]
Holmes 1989 qtd. p. 162

[:1-6] [6]
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christabel, Kubla Khan, and the Pains of Sleep, 2nd edition, William Bulmer, London, 1816. Reproduced in The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach, Penguin Books, 2004.

[7] [7]
Holmes 1989 qtd p. 167

[:2-9] [8]
Holmes 1989 pp. 166–167

[Holmes_1989_pp._161-162-10] [9]
Holmes 1989 pp. 161–162

[11] [10]
The Coleridge Way. Somerset Rural Renaissance. 2007 [2 July 2010]. （原始內容存檔於23 November 2008）.

[Holmes_qtd._p._435-12] [11]
Holmes 1998 qtd. p. 435

[Holmes_1998_p._435-14] [12]
Holmes 1998 p. 435

[16] [13]
Perkins 2010 qtd. p. 39

[17] [14]
Fruman 1971 p. 337

[18] [15]
Bate 1968 pp. 75–76

[Perkins_p._39-19] [16]
Perkins 2010 p. 39

[20] [17]
Holmes 1998 p. 426

[21] [18]
Sisman 2006 qtd. p. 417

[22] [19]
Holmes 1998 qtd. p. 431

[24] [20]
Holmes 1998 qtd. p. 429; Doughty 1981 qtd. p. 433.

[26] [21]
Holmes 1998 p. 434

[27] [22]
Ashton 1997 pp. 112–113

[28] [23]
Yarlott 1967 p. 145

[29] [24]
Mays 2001 p. 511

[30] [25]
Perkins 2010 pp. 39–40

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[註 1]

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[註 2]

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[註 3]

[13]

[14]

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[18]

[註 4]

[註 5]

[21]

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[20]