Reading Kubla Khan: A Mischief Café Dream

“Poems should be taught in poem ways, ” said my youngest. That might involve cinnamon, she added.

I agree. It might also mean reading Ulysses in the woods. Or, a week later, taking tea on cranberry towels set down on that same secluded woodland platform where Ulysses was read.

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The official kickoff for our new Mischief Café—tea, toast, and poetry at home—is October 29, in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. But all good mischief needs its own subversion, as Lewis Hyde notes about mischief-makers in Trickster Makes this World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. “He is the character in the myth who threatens to take the myth apart.”

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So while the official kickoff is on its way, my eldest and I went back to the woods for an unorthodox Mischief Café. I had planned to include the plastic duck who seemed to be a fixture at the platform, but when we got there he was gone. And, my daughter apologized, she’d forgotten to bring something mischievous (my request), so we decided to take off our hiking shoes, set out our cranberry towels, read Kubla Khan with tea and untoasted toast, and let that be enough.

“I kept trying to figure a way to get a toaster to the woods, ” said my daughter. And we laughed about the heated-tongs iteration of the dream, and we laughed about the whole idea of bringing a toaster to the woods. Though I secretly wondered if all innovation begins with what appear to be crazy dreams.

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I’d brought along two books as sources for possible readings, but, except for one poem from Kooser, it was not to be. My daughter had printed out a copy of “Kubla Khan, ” its own kind of dream, and so reading Kubla Khan would take center stage.

She read it to me, in hushed tones, across our buttered (but not toasted) cinnamon bread. Besides The Highwayman, “Kubla Khan” is apparently her all-time favorite poem. I did not know that. We reread some of the lines we noticed were repeated in variations and noted that dreams do that—seem to repeat, and yet turn the vision as they go. She told me Coleridge had a habit of saying his poems came from dreams, and that, for the poems he wasn’t so pleased with, he’d claim he’d forgotten the best part of the poem. We agreed that “Kubla Khan” feels finished, though, and so we thought he should just let it go. The poem is lovely and needs no defense from its poet. As for the matter of the poet, she pointed out that he is actually in the poem, doubting himself…

    Could I revive within me
    Her symphony and song,
    To such deep delight ‘twould win me
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome within the air!

Perhaps my daughter was hesitant to break the dream, but she did not seem interested in reading more poems. Our conversation turned to matters of humanity’s propensity for periodic destruction and the importance, perhaps, of providing experiences of controlled chaos or battles. I said “sports.” She said, “The Olympics” and “Saturnalia.” I had never heard of Saturnalia, which provides for the subversion of roles, like masters serving slaves for the day.

We also discussed certain dismal approaches to teaching essays, and I asked her how she thought they should be taught. “People should read the greatest essays, not try to write terrible ones. They should explore what makes those essays great.” And, since she said the root of all good essays is the ability to present a cogent argument, we decided that students and children should not be shut off when they attempt, in the regular course of life, to argue. Rather, they should be encouraged to make their best points, and if “they win, ” then they should be able to carry on with what they were doing (and were about to potentially get in trouble for).

After what seemed too soon (but we had to leave to pick up her sister from choir), we packed the empty thermos, our tea cups, and Kubla, and we walked out of the woods in the near-dark. The trees curved over us like a soft cave. She told me it felt like a dream.

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man…

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Kubla Khan

    Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.

In Xanadu did Kublai Khan
A stately Pleasure-Dome decree,
Where Alph, the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
    Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers was girdled ’round,
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But, oh! That deep, romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill, athwart a cedarn cover:
A savage place! As holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath the waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her Demon Lover!
And from this chasm with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this Earth in fast, thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced,
Amid whose swift, half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail;
And ‘midst these dancing rocks at once and ever,
It flung up momently the sacred river!
Five miles meandering with ever a mazy motion,
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean.
And ‘mid this tumult, Kublai heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
    The shadow of the Dome of Pleasure
    Floated midway on the waves,
    Where was heard the mingled measure
    From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device:
A sunny Pleasure-Dome with caves of ice!

    A damsel with a dulcimer
    In a vision once I saw:
    It was an Abyssinian maid,
    And on her dulcimer she played,
    Singing of Mount Abora.
    Could I revive within me
    Her symphony and song,
    To such deep delight ‘twould win me
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome within the air!
That sunny dome, those caves of ice,
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry: “Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle ’round him thrice,
And close your eyes in holy dread:
For he on honeydew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise!”

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Photos and post by L.L. Barkat.

Make your own Mischief Café? Bring poetry home (or to the woods).

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L.L. Barkat

L.L. Barkat is the Managing Editor of Tweetspeak Poetry and the author of six books for grown-ups and four for children, including the popular 'Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing.' Her poetry has appeared on the BBC and at NPR, VQR, and The Best American Poetry.

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