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ROMANTICISM AND ORIENTALISM:ORIENTALIZING THE ORIENT IN ROMANTIC POETRY
A Thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University
In partial fulfillment of the requirements for
the Degree
Master of Arts
In
English: Literature
by
Parminder Kaur Johal
San Francisco, California
August 2018
Copyright by Parminder Kaur Johal
2018
CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL
I certify that I have read Romanticism and Orientalism: Orientalizing the Orient in
Romantic Poetry by Parminder Kaur Johal, and that in my opinion this work meets the
criteria for approving a thes’s submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the
degree Master of Arts in English: Literature at San Francisco State University.
--------------------
Wai-Leung Kwok, Ph.D.Associate Professor of English
Lawrence Hanley, Ph.D.Professor of English
ROMANTICISM AND ORIENTALISM:ORIENTALIZING THE ORIENT IN ROMANTIC POETRY
Parminder Kaur Johal San Francisco, California
2018
This thesis examines Eastern representations in the works of Romantic poets that
contributed to Orientalism. Even though there were many provocateurs that fueled
stereotypes of the East, my study hones in on the poems Dy Samuel Taylor Coleridge and
Percy Bysshe Shelley. Through a literary analysis of Coleridge's Kubla Khan and
Sheliey’s Ozymandias, efforts are made to reach the conclusion whether Coleridge and
Shelley misrepresent the Orient. 1 argue that the works of these highly celebrated poets
adhere to the underlying stereotypes popular during the Romantic Era, thus raising issue
with the reliability—or raiher unrenai'-liiy—of their works. In addition to analyzing
representations, I examine travel literature within the cultural and historical context of
their lives to better understand influences that shaped their perspectives and informed
their writing.
I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the conteni of this thesis.
Chair, Thesis Committee
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It is believed in the Punjabi culture that with the blessings of your elders, all things are
attainable. Which is why, I would like to give many thanks to my elders—my
grandparents, and parents—it is your blessings and encouragement that has made this day
possible. I would also like to express my gratitude to my brother and friends for their
continuous support and unfailing faith in me. Further, my sincere thanks to my professors
for their guidance, motivation, and reassurance through this entire process; it hasn’t been
easy, but definitely worth it. My heartfelt gratitude and appreciation to my best friend,
my humsafar—Baba Ji—you are my light. Thank you.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction.......................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter One: Historical Context..........................................................................................7
Chapter Two: Orientalizing the Orient in Coleridge’s Kubla Khan .............................17
Chapter Three: Orientalizing the Orient in Shelley’s Ozymandias.................................. 42
Work Cited.........................................................................................................................63
1
Romanticism and Orientalism:Orientalizing the Orient in Romantic Poetry
Introduction:
Now, this is the road that the White Men tread
When they go to clean a la n d -
iron underfoot and the vine overhead
And the deep on either hand
We have trod that road—and a wet and windy road
Our chosen star fo r guide.
Oh, well for the world when the White Men tread
Their highway side by side!"
—Rudyard Kipling, A Song o f the White Men
Barbaric. Exotic. Grotesque. Sublime. The East has captured the attention of the
West for centuries, but rarely in a pcs: ve light. In his acclaimed text Orientalism,
Edward Said describes the phenomenon of making claims about the East by the Wesi as
‘Orientalism’. In a detailed description of Orientalism, Said calls it a ‘corporate
institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it,
authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, and ruling over it: in short,
Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restricting, and having authority over the
Orient’ (3). The West undeniably builds its identity by creating binaries in which the East
is always portrayed antithetical to the West. The results of such a creation are transparent:
2
a ‘man-made’ history that has turned the East into a strange land occupied by mysterious,
primitive savages.
Prominent traces of Orientalism, according to Said, can be found in mul pie
discourses in the 18* century. The provocateurs that embraced and fomented the binaries
were many, such as ‘poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and
imperial administrators’ who used the East/West dichotomy ‘as the starting point for
elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning
the Orient’ (2-3). The conjuring of these generalizations was not merely for what Said
calls ‘necessity of imagination’, rather, it was a calculated attempt made by the Empire to
dominate the East. In analyzing the relationship between the Occident and the Orient, the
Occident’s hegemonic control over the Orient is transparent. According to Said, ‘one
cannot posjibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European
culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically,
mil "arily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively’ (3). Certainly in controlling the
production of knowledge, the Occident was not only able to maintain hegemony, but also
claim cultural superiority over the degenerate Orient
In examining the Orient in Orientalism, Said makes an interesting point
substantial to my thesis, as he notes: ‘the Orient is not an inert fact of nature. It is not
merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just there either’, rather the history of the
Orient and Occident is man-made (4-5). This is most apparent in the East/West
3
dichotomy created by the Empire and its provocateurs as they falsified an entire region
and its population for their political, socio-economic, and monetary advantage. Therefore,
Said claims, ‘Orientalism... is not an aiiy European fantasy about the Orient, but a
created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been a
considerable maten ii investment’ (6). As noted above, Said gives a through list of agents
that produce such investments—my research hones in on one of them, poets from the
Romantic Era
My aim in this thesis s to bring under the scope works of Romantic poets who,
i iformed by English interest in foreign cultures, reproduce the Orient in their respective
poems. The Orient was a flourishing discourse in the 18th and 19th century, and the
Romantic writers were avid readers of the material in addition to being active
constituents in its production evident in the works of acclaimed poets as Lord Byron,
William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and more. Shaped
by a premeditated Western power discourse, the poets approached the subject of the
Orient not as merely writers, but also as potential Orientalists. In this thesis, I analyze and
expose misrepresentations of the Orient in the works of Romantic poets Samuel Taylor
Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley. I argue that these celebrated poets imported
stereotypes of the Orient without regard to the effect it had on their subjects, thus
qualifying them as Orientalists in Saidian terms
4
Poetic works of these two writers that promote stereotypes of the Orient are
multiple, but for this study, I consider two of their most notable poems: Coleridge’s
KublaKhan (1797 1816) and Shelley’s Ozymandias (1818). As mentioned previously,
the timeframe surveyed for the study is the British Romantic Era, which lasted roughly
from 1770-1835. The British Empire was thriving during these years, becoming an
irreconcilable global power that controlled over 450 million people—a fact Coleridge and
Shelley likely knew, A more specific timeframe analyzed coincides with the poets' life
span—Coleridge (1772-1834), Shelley (1792-1822) —in an effort to establish their
respective life histories and examine their works in the context of those histories.
The methodology used to yield results in my research is a literary analysis
coupled with a biographical analysis. Before I move forward to a literaiy analysis, I
explore influences in Coleridge and Shelley’s biographies to showcase how they were
shaped by their life experiences. In my examination of the poets’ biographies, I place
great emphasis on cultural and historical influences, or rather promoters as I call them, to
gain a better understanding of their surroundings that fueled misconceptions of the East.
After grounding the foundation of this thesis through an examination of biographical,
cultural and historical contexts, I move forward to the literary analysis of the poems.
Here I embrace Said’s approach where in addition to investigating poetic devices as
imagery, metaphor, poetic language, setting, and style I place Coleridge and Shelley’s
poems in juxtaposition to the Orient. By doing th", Said recommends, we are better able
5
to investigate the writer’s intent through ‘the kind of narrative voice he adopts, the type
of structure he builds, the kinds of images, themes, motifs that circulate in his text—all of
which add up to deliberate ways of addressing the reader, containing the Orient, and
finally, representing it or speaking in its behalf (20). Through this method, a better
understanding of the writer’s position is gained.
Informed Purpose
I have approached this research with a purpose—an intention to investigate and
expose Orientalism further in an era that hosts some of poetry’s finest authors. There are
many critics, theorists, and scholars who precede me that have laid open the constructs of
Orientalism, but not many have applied their research to the influx of literature infused
with flawed representations of the Orient. In their respective works, Edward Said in
Orientalism and Rana Kabbani in Imperial Fictions, the authors call for the next
generation of scholars—the Orient—to carry the research further, to talk back. In
Orientalism, Said calls for the ‘contemporary’ generation to rise to the challenge, as he
states: ‘For contemporary students of the Orient, from university scholars to
policymakers, I have written with two ends in mind: one, to present their intellectual
genealogy to them in a way that has not been done, two, to criticize—with the hope of
stirring discussion’ (24). No doubt Said’s work has stirred plenty discussions, debates,
and even criticism, but for the ‘contemporary’ generation as I, it has filled the gaps in our
knowledge by answering questions that we so desperately seek answers for.
6
In Imperial Fictions, Kabbani makes a similar statement—a request—that strikes
a chord. Kabbani writes: ‘Would I have written the pages that follow any differently
today? Yes, I would have made them fiercer than they are. But this is a task that awaits
another generation - that of my children, perhaps - who will have to live in a world of
‘blowback’ - a world in which extremists on both sides set the rules’ (16). To supersede
impressive scholars as Kabbani and Said is nerve-racking, yet their words of
encouragement ignite an unwavering will to continue efforts to bring the Orient and
Occident to the forum. Using this thesis as a medium, I have tried to shed light on a
period and its constituents that often go unnoticed for their contributions to Orientalism.
7
Chapter One: Historical Context
There is a difference between knowledge o f other peoples and other times that is the
result o f understanding, compassion, careful study and analysis fo r their own sakes, and
on the other hand knowledge—if that is what it is—that is part o f an overall campaign o f
self-affirmation, belligerency and outright war. There is, after all, a profound difference
between the will to understandfor purposes o f co-existence and humanistic enlargement
o f horizons, and the will to dominate fo r the purposes o f control and external dominion.
—Edward Said, xiv
Knowledge. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘knowledge’ as ‘The fact or
state of having a correct idea or understanding of something’, thus placing rigorous
emphasis on ‘fact’ and ‘correct idea’. Above, Edward Said’s sentiments regarding the
entity mimics the acknowledged definition as he too calls forth a ‘careful study and
analysis’ for generating ‘knowledge’, But, according to the literary critic, the so called
‘knowledge’ produced during the eighteenth and nineteenth century about the Orient was
inconsistent with the ‘facts’ about the Orient; rather, it was an overall campaign of self-
affirmation, belligerency and outright war/ The West’s conquest for ‘knowledge’ was
sustained by imperial motives to dominate and exploit the Orient both politically and
economically, since, remarks Said, ‘To have such knowledge of such a thing is to
dominate it, to have authority over it. And authority here means for ‘us’ to deny
autonomy to ‘it’—the Oriental country—since we know it and it exists, in a sense, as we
know it’ (32).
8
In establishing the East/West—‘us’/ ’it’ dichotomy, the Occident was able to
supplement the Orient with brute qualities in order to justify colonization while
maintaining its innocence. In doing so. writes Kabbani in her work, ‘The image of the
European coloniser had to remain an honourable one: he did not come as exploiter, but as
enlightener. He was not seeking mere profit, but was fulfilling his duty to his Maker and
his sovereign, whilst aiding those less fortunate to rise toward h i lofty level’.1 But, the
Empire’s ‘honourable’ facade was quite problematic, and narcissistic. Said argues that
even in documenting the Orient, the Empire was really documenting itself The
production and advancement of a culture requires an opposition, or what the critic calls
an ‘alter-ego’. Via the reinforcement of misrepresentations, the West created its ‘alter-
ego’ in the East by supplementing it with disturbing insensitive images, hence an identity
opposite of its own. Unfortunately, the influx of misrepresentations of the Orient aroused
public imagination, creating space for elaborate misguided work.
Even though Said establishes me late 18th century as the rough start of
Orientalism in Europe, it could be traced back to earlier centuries. Prior to the European
invasion, the East was an unexplored distant power with an admirable history. In their
‘Introduction’ to a collection of essays titled The Arabian Nights in Historical Context:
Between East and West, editors Saree Makdisi and Fe.. city Nussbaum give the reader a
glimpse of the East’s splendor in addition to highlight ig the West’s perspective of the
1 Rana Kabbani, Imperial Fictions: Europe’s Myth o f Orient (London 2008) 24-25.
9
power. According to the editors, ‘Europeans had been alternately interested in, fearful of,
and obsessed with the Arab and Muslim world since at least the Arab conquest of Spain
and Sicily in the eighth and ninth centuries. The Crusades brought Europeans into contact
with what many of them ultimately came to think of as the vastly superior civilization of
the Arab-Muslim world’ (3-4). The Orient was well deserving of being called a ‘superior
civilization’ as it successfully controlled much of Asia, Africa, and even Western Europe
from early as the seventh century. Ironically, Usama ibn Munqidh, a well-known
medieval Muslim poet known for documenting the magnificence of the Banu Munqidh
dynasty (1081-1157), noted that the East found the West atrocious, or in Arabic term,
franf 2
Following the Crusades, Europe’s perception of the East changed dramatically as
it entered the ' Age of Discovery’ in the fifteenth century. Makdisi and Nussbaum note
that Europe ‘having assimilated, digested, and all but forgotten that earlier moment of
contact with (and inspired by) Arab and Asiatic culture, seemed primed for something
entirely new’ which was imperialism. Europe began with an extensive overseas
exploration of lands it previously lacked physical contact with, such as the Americas,
Asia, Africa, and Australia. Through the guise of foreign trade, •: penetrated, dominated,
colonized, and enslaved these continents, hence emerging as a global power. But,
Europe’s imperialistic motives were not that easily achieved when it came to the East.
7 Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum, eds. The Arabian Nights in Historical Context: Between East and West (New York 2008) 3-4.
10
The technique executed by the Empire required that ‘the Orient needed first to be known,
then invaded and possessed, then re-created by scholars, soldiers, and judges’, and then
only did Europe ‘finally destroyed the Orient’s distance, its cloistered intimacy away
from the West, its perdurable exoticism’ (Said 92). Through an analysis of Coleridge and
Shelley’s poems, chapters two and three show how the poets take part in ‘re-creat[ing]’
the East.
Without a doubt the age of exploration had made a lasting impression on the
European population and culture during the Romantic era. As the British Empire
expanded its territories, travelers ventured out to explore previously unexplored regions.
Travel tales, and travel journals became a thriving commodity, as a wider marketplace
emerged for the popular genre. Thus, travel writing became a benefactor in shaping
perspectives of the English audience as confirmed by Wallace Cable Brown: ‘The great
vogue for writing and reading of Near East travel books between 1775 and 1825 naturally
had a marked influence on contemporary thought and activity’ (qtd. in Oueijan 5). In this
chapter, I place the poets within the cultural and historical context of their time in relation
to travel literature to better understand the influences that shaped their perspectives about
the East. The ‘Orient’ in these travel texts were not ‘merely there’, they had ‘a history
and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary’ that was centuries in the making.
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York 1994) 4-5.
11
That ‘history’ is also explored since it helped promote the poets Orientalist frame of
mind.
Travel Literature
Literature about the Orient in the Romantic period was not a new phenomenon,
but due to the ‘Age of Discovery’, a new awareness had formed. Translations of multiple
texts into Western language(s) incited public curiosity in addition to encouraging new
social trends as ‘literature, painting, and engraving, home d6cor, and fashion, garden
design, and architecture’, and travel literature.4 Not taking into consideration the mass
influx of travel literature in the previous centuries, just between 1800 and 1950, more
than 60,000 travel narratives were written (Said 204). In comparison, Eastern travel
literature about the West was minimal—which Said notes, is where the West’s strength
laid since it was able to conceive the Orient according to its own standards. So, what is
travel literature and how rtd it influence and shape Coleridge and Shelley’s perspectives
in regards to the Orient?
Kabbani best describes travel literature as ‘a mean of gathering and recording
information.. .in societies that exercise a high degree of political power’ (17). In critically
analyzing the genre of travel literature from its inception in the medieval times, travelers
approached the East w«th an informed purpose—to serve the Empire. Kabbani asserts
that, ‘The traveller begins his journey with the strength of a nation or an empire
4 Susan Taylor. “Orientalism and the Romantic Era.” Literature Compass 1.1 (2004) 2.
12
sustaining him (albeit from a distance) militarily, economically, intellectually and, as is
often the case, spiritually’ (17). In his observations and writings about the Orient, the
Western traveler had to remain faithful to the colonial relationship that supported him. He
was selective in producing and sharing information that reinforced his nation’s Orientalist
tradition. Thus, the selectiveness imported stereotypes that supplied the East with
‘irretrievable state o f ‘otherness’”.5
The stereotypes that became the groundwork for am sis as Coleridge and Shelley
were not merely produced overnight, rather, they were centuries in the making via the
apparatus of travel writing. As mentioned in earlier paragraphs, the West took interesl in
the East as early as the Eight century, but unable to comprehend or contain the powerful
Islamic Empire, the Christian West adopted a polemic style of writing to deal with the
Orient. Europe’s aggressive polemic against Islam forged a ‘pattern of stereotyping... that
was a guarantee of Western self-respect and a projection upon the rest of the world of
Western values. The medieval picture of Islam was replete with errors that were willful,
and contained w-thin itself a high degree of mythomania’.6 An ideal example of such a
polemic was the work of twelfth century historian/travel writer Gerard of Wales who
described ‘Muhammed’s teachings to be concentrated on lust, thus particularly suitable
for Orientals, since they ltved in a climate of change’.7 The dichotomy that emerged from
Rana Kabbani, Imperial Fictions: Europe’s Myth o f Orient, 24.6 Ibidem, 39
Ibidem, 36.qtd. in Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making o f an Image (Edinburgh, 1960) 270.
13
such observations became conventional in literature during the middle ages and onwards,
which was supported and transported by travelers as Alexander, Mandeville, Marco Polo,
Odoric and many more.
In moving forward, it becomes crucial to reiterate Said’s claim that the Orient was
not simply a product of the imagination, rather, ‘the relationship between Occident and
Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex
hegemony’ (5). In order to maintain hegemony over the Orient, the West controlled and
manipulated the knowledge it produced and passed on. Hence, the stereotypes propagated
in travel literature about the East in the Middle Ages were inherited by the Renaissance
England in full force. The Renaissance consumed, reinforced, and expanded upon the
received knowledge by contributing mass travel literature of their own to the corpus.
Thus, the travel writing genre developed, or rather matured, as it now included ‘an
amalgam of many literary genres, such as autobiography, fiction, journal, memoir, as
well as dsciplines (cosmography, geography, ethnography, archaeology)’ (Mitsi 9). The
influence on the public was substantial as travel literature attempted to fulfill the public’s
keen interest in a world outside of their own. Elizabethan England capitalized on such
knowledge, as Kabbani confirms:
The Elizabethan stage, preoccupied as it was with the melodramai 3, the
passionate and the violent, drew heavily on the available stock of Eastern
character so vivia in the public imagination. The Saracen, the Turk, the Moor, the
14
Blackamoor and the Jew were key villains in the drama of the period, crudely
depicted as such by lesser playwrights, but drawn with more subtle gradation by a
Marlowe or a Shakespeare. (44)
The ideas disseminated by the corpus created what Kabbani calls a ‘stock of Eastern
character’. In order to satiate the public’s ‘imagination’, writers as ‘Marlowe’ and
‘Shakespeare’ made use of the ‘stock’ and brought to life characters from travel literature
as the ‘Saracen, the Turk, the Moor, the Blackamoor and the Jew’ that were read by
generations to come, including Coleridge and Shelley
In March 1768, renowned editor Ralph Griffiths wrote in ike Monthly Review, ‘Of
all the various productions of the press, none are so eagerly received by us Reviewers,
and other people who stay at home and mind our business, as the writings of travellers’.8
Griffiths statement echoed the sentiments of the 18th Century public as the genre of travel
writing incited enthusiasm wh»e surpassing its predecessors by becoming more inclusive.
Due to ‘economic and technological’ advancements, travel became more accessible to the
middle class, hence leading to more travel literature. In his book Pleasurable Instruction,
Charles Batten asserts that ‘Africa, India, the Spice Islands, and the Americas - places
previously visited mainly by ships’ captains, adventurers, and explorers - now with
growing frequency inspired travel descriptions from relatively new classes of people’ (2).
8 qtd. in Charles L Batten, Pleasurable Instruction: From and Convention in Eighteenth-Century Travel Literature (Berkeley, CA: University o f California Press, 1978), 1.
15
The ‘new classes of people’ included novelists and poets as Defoe, Fielding, Johnson,
Byron, and more'
I have, until now, demonstrated how the genre of travel writing developed over
the course of multiple centuries. As the imagined Orient got passed on from one period to
the next, it became more powerful, resilient, and recurrent. By the eighteenth century, the
popularity of travel literature was unparalleled as it became a significant part of everyday
life. Being avid readers and writers, poets as Byron, Moore, Keats, Coleridge, and
Shelley were shaped and inspired by the inherent Orient that was consistently present in
their lives from a young age. Kabbani notes that being a travel literature enthusiast,
Byron encouraged poets as Thomas Moore and Coleridge to read travel literature infused
with false Oriental descriptions ‘since he thought it would provide [them] with necessary
meat for an Oriental poem’ (64). Byron was adamant that their work would be received
well by the public, and it was since Lalla Rookh and Kubla Khan became the Romantic
Era’s most revered poems.
Edward Said calls the collection of knowledge about the Orient disseminated by
West as systematic. He asserts, ‘In the system of knowledge about the Orient, the Orient
is less a place than a topos, a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seems
to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of a text, or a citation from someone’s
work on the Orient, or some bit of previous imagining, or an amalgam of all these’ (177).
9 Ibidem, 3.
16
In their work, Coleridge and Shelley assumed similar dispositions as they too grounded
their writing on other works of travel. For instance, being a devout travel literature
reader, Coleridge particularly held in high regard Purchas’ Purchas His Pilgrims (1625),
Chamber’s Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772) and Bruce’s Travels to Discover
the Source o f the N ik (1790). When writing Kubla Khan, Coleridge borrowed from all
these texts, whether it be in regards to Kubla Khan’s history, landscape, or ‘pleasure
dome’. Shelley read numerous travel accounts as well, but he particularly cherished
Diodorus Siculus’ Bibliotheca Historica, Volney's LesRuines, ou Meditation sur les
Revolutions des Empires (1791), and Denon’s Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt, During
the Campaigns o f General Bonaparte in that Country (1803). He drew on all three for his
description of Ramesses n.
In this chapter, I have attempted to contextualize travel literature in relation to
Coleridge and Shelley’s life. In my review of the genre of travel writing, I have also
aimed to depict how the stereotypes of the Orient were created and imported from one
period to the next. It is apparent that the poets inherited the tradition of stereotypes from a
complex colonial past, but how they employed them was premeditated. In addition to an
analysis of Kubla Khan and Ozymandias, chapter two and three examine travel literature
read by the poets when writing their poems to showcase how their perspectives were
informed, and stereotypes formed, by the unstable texts.
17
Chapter Two: Orientalizing the Orient in Coleridge’s Kubla Khan
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea. (1-5)
Du-ng a visit with Lord Byron on April 10,1816, essayist and poet James Henry
Le*3h Hunt became spell-bounded when witnessing Coleridge’s reading of Kubla Khan
to Byron. Hunt wrote, ‘I remember the other's coming away from him, highly struck with
his poem, and saying how wonderfiilly he talked. This was the impression of everyone
who heard him.’10 Similar to Hunt, Byron too was entranced by Coleridge’s enigmatic
poem, as he became instrumental in encouraging the publication of it. On April 12,1816
Byron arranged for reputed publisher John Murray to publish Kubla Khan along with
Christabel and The Pains o f Sleep for the sum of 80 pounds. Kubla Khan, combined with
the other two poems, came to be collectively published on May 25, 1816.
The work went through multiple editions as it became greatly admired by
Coleridge’s contemporaries as Charles Lamb, Walter Scott, and many more. Texts that
were printed from 1816 to 1829 were published with a homage to Lord Byron who
Coleridge held in high esteem for his continuous support. The note reads: ‘The following
10 qtd. in D. Hogsette, ‘Eclipsed by the Pleasure Dome: Poetic Failure in Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan.’” Romanticism on the Net, no. 5 (1997) 3.
18
fragment is here published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity’, ‘poet’
being Lord Byron.11 During Coleridge’s life, Kubla Khan was published four times from
1816 to 1834. Yet, displeased by the fragmentary nature of the poem and to ward off
criticism, the poet modified the title multiple times. Beginning with the 1816 pamphlet,
he supplemented the poem with the subtitle ‘A Fragment’—the final adjustment made in
Poetical Works of 1834 where the subtitle was expanded to ‘Or, A Vision in a Dream. A
Fragment The only other known revisions made to the poem before its publication
were discovered in the 1810 Crewe Manuscript.
Coleridge’s 1816 publication of the poem was accompanied by a Preface that
explained the production of the poem. The Preface claims that the ‘Author’ received the
poem in a daydream after he fell asleep consuming opium and reading the following
passage in Purchas his Pilgrimage: ‘Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be
built, and a stately garden thereunto: and thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed
with a wall’.1 The dubious nature of the Preface elicited numerous responses from his
contemporaries and modem day critics, many denouncing the story of the poem’s origin.
In the Eclectic Review (June 1816), Josiah Conder raised doubt whether Kubla Khan was
‘composed during sleep’ since ‘there appears to us nothing in the quality of the lines to
11 qtd. in footnote— ‘Kubla Khar*', The Norton Anthology o f English Literature (Norton 2006) 446.12 J. C. C Mays, ‘The Later Poeby The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge (Cambridge 2002) 511.13 There is a discrepancy between what the ‘Author’ quoted and what is written in Purchas's Pilgrimages. The passage Coleridge refers to is as follows: ‘In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Patace, encompassing sixteene miles ofplaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleasant Springs, delightful1 Streames, and all sorts o f beasts ofchase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumptuous house o f pleasure, which may be removed from place to place. ’
19
render this circumstance extraordinary.’14 In Kubla Khan and Orientalism, Nigel Leask
echoes Conder as he concludes, ‘despite Coleridge’s disclaimer in the 1816 Preface that
his fragmentary ‘Vision in a Dream’ was presented to the public rather ‘as a
psychological curiosity, than on the grounds of any supposed poetic merits’, it represents
highly self-conscious and highly structured poetic achievement’ (1).
K.M. Wheeler makes the point that by focusing on the origin, the Preface
distances the reader from the ‘imagery and content of the poem’—the Orient, and ‘away
from factual details and concern for their accuracy’.15 In this chapter, my aim is to bnng
the focus back on the ‘imagery and content’ as I question the legitimacy of Eastern
representations in Kubla Khan. I will evaluate the Eastern representations in Coleridge’s
poem to conclude whether Coleridge promoted stereotypes of the Orient. The task will
commence by addressing the reception of the poem to confirm that the poet did
perpetuate stereotypes reaffirmed by his contempora.;es. Moving forward, I will examine
texts—Oriental in nature— mentioned in chapter one in the context of Coleridge’s life to
showcase how they shaped his perspectives and influenced his poem. Lastly, I will
analyze the representations in Coleridge’s poem to bring to light the misrepresentations
of the Orient.
14 J R de J Jackson, Coleridge: The Critical Heritage (New York 1970) 212.15 qtd. in Nigel Leask, ‘Kubla Khan and Orientalism: The Road to Xanadu Revisited. ’ Romanticism 4.1 (1998)2.
20
The Reception of Kubla Khan
In response to Coleridge’s reading of Kubla Khan that left a deep impression on
Leigh Hunt—he authored a piece praising the poem in The Examiner (October 21,1821)
as part of h.3 ‘Sketches of the Living Poets’ series. Hunt convinced the readers of The
Examiner to have in their grasp a copy of Coleridge’s poems: ‘Every lover of books,
scholar or not, who knows what it is to have his quarto open against a loaf at his tea ...
ought to be in possession of Mr. Coleridge's poems, if it is only for ‘ChristabeF, ‘Kubla
Khan’, and the ‘Ancient Mariner’.’ He especially urged the audience’s interaction with
Kubla Khan as it summoned the Orient:
‘Kubla Khan’ is a voice and a vision, an everlasting tune in our mouths, a dream
fit for Cambuscan and all his poets, a dance of pictures such as Giotto or
Cimabue, revived and re-inspired, would have made for a Storie of Old Tartarie, a
piece of the invisible world made v isile by a sun at midnight and sliding before
our eyes... Justly is it thought that to be able to present such images as these to
the mind, is to realise the world they speak of. We could repeat such verses as the
following down a green glade, a whole summer’s morning.16
For Hunt, Kubla Khan evoked in him images of the exotic ‘world’. As I mentioned in the
previous chapter, the stereotypes of the Orient were ages in the making—passed on from
one period to the next using literature as an apparatus. By referencing ‘Cambuscan’ and
16 qtd. in J R de J Jackson, Coleridge: The Critical Heritage. (New York 1970) 475-476.
21
‘Old Tartarie’ Hunt confirms that Kubla Khan summoned in him the Orient of his
predecessors: Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘The Squire’s Tale’ in The Canterbury Tales—an
Oriental tale in the Middle Ages. ‘The Squire’s Tale’ promotes the grandeur of the exotic
land o f ‘Old Tartarie’ ruled by King ‘Cambuscan" — ‘cambyuskan’ in the Tales, where
the O r sru consumes exotic foods, wears lavish clothes, and receives magical gifts. Using
The Examiner as his platform, Hunt acknowledged Coleridge’s Orient while intensifying
it further for the reader.
Coleridge’s Kubla had a lasting effect on his friends in his literary circle as well.
Charles Lamb,17 a poet, essayist, and close friend of Coleridge, expressed in a letter to
Wordsworth how the poem transcended him to a euphoric dimension: ‘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’.18 In his essay
‘Witches, and Other Night-Fears’ (1823), Lamb expressed frustration that his imagination
failed to create 01. ;ntal visions like Coleridge in Kubla Khan: ‘There is Coleridge, at his
will can conjure up ice domes, and pleasure-houses for Kubla Khan, and Abyssinian
maids, and song of Abora, and caverns’.19 Contrary to Coleridge’s claim in his Preface
that the poem was received ‘in a Dream . Lamb professed that the poet ‘at his
17 Lamb and Coleridge met as schoolboys, and remained friends until Coleridge’s death in 1834. There are many correspondences between the two sharing life events and their works.18 D. Ward, Coleridge and the Nature o f Imagination: Evolution, Engagement with the World, and Poetry. (New Yoric 2013) 133.19 C. Lambs, ‘Witches, and Other Night Fears’ (London 1823) The British Library: Digital file.
22
V--J1 .. conjure[d] up’ the Oriental images in Kubla Khan—a quality Lamb envied and
attempted to imitate.
Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd had the privilege of listening to Coleridge’s recitation
of Kubla Khan after its publication, and the impression that it left on him was significant.
Talfourd stated:
But more peculiar in its beauty than this [Coleridge’s recitation of ‘Christabel’],
was his recitation of Kubla Khan [sic]. As he repeated the passage—
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!
his voice seemed to mount, and melt into air, as the images grew more visionary,
and the suggested associations more remote.20
Coleridge’s powerful recitation of Kubla Khan captured the imagination of Talfourd to
such an extent that he became compelled to note his observations. Through its ‘imagery’
Kubla Khan transported Talfourd to a dimension that brought the Orient closer while
making it more palatable. By making the ‘suggested associations more remote’,
20 Hogsette, ‘Eclipsed by the Pleasure Dome’, 2.
23
Coleridge preserved the distance between the ‘East’ and ‘West’— ‘us’ and ‘it’—while
further cementing the stereotypes in both Talfourd and the audience’s consciousness.
Tim Fulford makes a befitting observation that Coleridge’s Oriental poems had
‘talismanic power to enthrall his countrymen/women to ways of perceiving the world that
were unconvenr onal and foreign’. His capacity to ‘defamiliarize the local, estrange the
familiar, decentre the British from themselves’ is on display in the reviews of Kubla
Khan discussed in the preceding paragraphs (233). In their assessment of the poem,
Coleridge’s contemporaries solidified the inaccurate representations of the Orient in the
poem using very public platforms that further dispersed misrepresentations. Fulford notes
that the highly charged Oriental imagery of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan made an impression
on the likes of Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Moore who came to imitate kim.
Kubla Khan and its Muses
In the previous chapter, travel literature was exposed as a benefactor that
promoted stereotypes of the East. In this section, I examine the influence of travel
literature on Coleridge and his writing of Kubla Khan while aiming to contextualize some
of these texts the poet cited as sources. But first, I begin with exploring Oriental texts,
especially The Arabian Nights, that shaped Coleridge’s views of the Orient. According to
Makdisi and Nussbaum ‘Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron—to name
the most obvious examples—were all weaned on the Nights, and they all developed their
24
poetry in context of Britain’s burgeoning interest in Orientalism’ (5).21 In fact, similar to
travel literature, the oriental tales echoed the British Empire’s political agenda as it
articulated communal images of the Orient in an effort to reinforce the differences
between East and West. The tales came to dictate 18* century English writers’ thoughts
and fantasies in addition to laying the groundwork for their Oriental work.
L The ‘Orient’ in Oriental Tales
Jn a letter to Coleridge, Charles Lamb oosed a question regarding the nature of
influence of the Arabian Nights on the poet: ‘Think what you would have been now if
instead of being fed with Tales and old wives fables in childhood, you had been crammed
with Geography and Natural History.’22 In a correspondent, Coleridge acknowledged that
h’s father ventured to introduce him to corresponding subjects mentioned by Lamb, but
the poet’s heart yearned for the Nights:
I heard him with a profound delight & admiration: but without least mixtures of
wonder or incredulity. For from my early readings of Faery Tales & Genii, &c &c
21 Calling it only a ‘partial list9, Makdisi and Nussbaum name numerous other writers who were inspired by The Arabian Nights in their works. The editors state: ‘Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele, Eliza Haywood, and Samuel Johnson round much to admire and imitate in the exotic tales, while James Beattie and Hemy Fielding, among others, criticized them as implausible. Similarly, the objections o f Bishop Atterbury, Lord Kames, and Henry James Pye focused on the book’s wild extravagances, disproportion, and amorality as the very antithesis of neoclassical tenets. Other readers included Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Frances Sheridan, John Hawkesworth, Clara Reeve, Maria Edgeworth, William Beckford, Samuel Coleridge, Robert Southey, Walter Savage Landor, Richard Johnson, Mary Hays, Elizabeth Hamilton, William Wordsworth, Charlotte Dacre, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Thomas Moore, Waite* Scott, Alexander Kinglake, Robert Louis Stevenson, Benjamin Disraeli, Alfred Tennyson, Richard Burton, Oscar Wilde, and E. M. Forster.’ (12-13)22 Tim Fulford, ‘Coleridge and the Oriental Tale’, The Arabian Nights in Historical Context Between East and West (Oxford 2008) 214.
25
- my mind had been habituated to the Vast -& I never regraded my senses in any
way as the criteria of my belief... Should children be permitted to read Romances,
& relations of Giants & Magicians, and Genii? --1 know all that has been said
against it; but I have formed my faith in the affirmative.23
In recalling his state of mind as a child, Coleridge reveals the Nights continuous influence
in his life. He often found himself in a predicament when pressed by his father to choose
the Sciences, but the poet embraced ‘readings of Faery Tales & Genii’ even though his
father severely disapproved. Livid by the effect the tales produced, Coleridge’s father
burned his son’s copy of the Arabian Nights, thus making Coleridge even more of ‘a
dreamer’.
Coleridge’s reading of the Oriental texts affected his sensibilities deeply as child,
blurring his distinction between imagination and reality. Fulford explains that the Nights
‘left the young Coleridge in a state o f ‘fearful eagerness’, ‘haunted by specters’, prepared
to believe things for which he had no sensible evidence’; it made ‘that world., real
enough to change the boy’s perception of the daily surroundings in which he lived’ (214-
215). Coler tlge’s experience at a neighboring Baronet’s mansion marked this change,
serving as some sorts of rites of passage where the poet’s imagination became projected
on to his reality. Coleridge recalled ‘my first entrance into the mansion of a neighboring
baronet, awfully known to me by the name of the great house, its exterior having been
23 Ward, Coleridge and the Nature o f Imagination, 31.
26
long connected in my childish imagination with feelings and fancies stirred up in me by
the perusal of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments’ 24 For Coleridge, the Nights brought
the dull baronial halls to life filled with Oriental qualities that incited sensations of the
pleasing, the terrible, and the surprising 25 The mansion transformed into an Oriental
palace consisting of luxurious spaces, irregular architecture, and grand halls—eliciting a
more intensifying experience with the Orient.
The Oriental tales provided a model of writing for Coleridge apparent in his
poetical work. For instance, in examining The Rime o f the Ancient Mariner, there are
parallels between Coleridge’s poem and The Merchant and the Genie tale as they both
exude elements of the supernatural and the exotic. Fulford confirms this: ‘The dislocation
of conventional causality, the sudden appearance of narraotorial moralizing, the enclosure
of the voyages with a framing story, were all features o f ‘The Merchant and the Genie’
that give the poem its nightmarish fascination’ (220). Those who loved the Nights
appreciated the amalgamation of the real and illusionary in The Ancient Mariner, but
others criticized the poem for its lack of moral value and unrestrained imagination. Anna
Laetitia Aikin Barbauld was one such critic, and in his Table Talk (May 31, 1830),
Coleridge recorded her criticism:
24 S. T Coleridge, The Complete Works o f Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed Professor Shedd. Vol. 2. (New York 1853) 137.25 In Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772), Sir William Chambers notes that Chinese gardens consisted of scenes respectively characterized as the pleasing, the terrible, and the surprising. The Baronet s mansion, I believe, induced similar emotions in Coleridge that may be categorized as the pleasing, the terrible and the surprising.
27
Mrs. Barbauld once told me that she admired The Ancient Mariner very much,
but that there were two faults in it, — it was improbable, and had no moral. As for
the orobat;:.ty, I owned that that mignt admit some question; but as to the want of
a moral, I told her that in my own judgement the poem had too much; and that the
only, or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so
openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of such pure
imagination. It ought to have had no more moral than the Arabian Nights’ tale of
the merchant’s sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well, and throwing the
shells as le, and lo! a genie starts up, and says he must kill the aforesaid
merchant because one of the date shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the
genie's son.26
Coleridge’s response to Mrs. Barbauld confirms three things: Coleridge read the Nights,
his work was heavily influenced by the Oriental tales, and his work falls in the same
conventions of morality as The Merchant and the Genie. But, Coleridge’s morality
differed from that of Mrs. Barbauld. Where Mrs. Barbauld’s, a poet and abolitionist,
morality was grounded in orthodox Christianity, Coleridge believed that morality should
be delivered obliquely as in the case of the Merchant and the Mam- ;r. Yet, Coleri ige’s
take on morality is questionable. Even though he placed The Merchant and the Genie on
26 qtd. in Fulford, ‘Coleridge and the Oriental Tale’, 217.
28
a morality pedestal, it still promoted an unreliable view of the Orient, but—unaffected—
Coleridge continued to propagate the Orient for his readership.
Coleridge’s Kubla Khan was deeply influenced by the Eastern narrative The Tales
o f the Genii, a collection of pseudo-oriental fantasy tales modeled after the Arabian
Nights. Unlike the Nights that originated from the folkloric tradition prevalent in
countries as India, Persia, Iraq, Syria and Egypt, The Tales o f the Genii developed out
of Sir Charles Morell’s obsession to imitate the Oriental tale’s exotic ethos of mystery
and fantasy.17 The parallels between The Tales o f the Genii and Kubla Khan are best
captured by Fulford, as he finds that Coleridge’s ‘deep romantic chasm' and a ‘woman
wailing for her demon-love’ imitates scenes in the Hassan Assar; or The History o f The
Caliph o f Bagdat tale:
In The Tales o f the Genii a pair of lovers meet in a verdant valley: each
approaches the other ‘but, alas, ere the happy couple could meet, the envious earth
gave a hideous groan, and the ground parting under their feet, divided them from
each other by a dismal chasm...Wild notes of strange uncouth warlike music were
heard from the bottom of the pit’ (Genii i. 135).28
There is also an uncanny resemblance between Kubla’s ‘gardens’ and the groves of
Shadaski mentioned in The Talisman o f Oromanes; Or", The History o f the Merchant
Abduah.
27 He published under pseudonym James Ridley.28 Fulford, ‘Coleridge and the Oriental T ale\ 227. Fulford is quoting from the tale Hassan Assar; or, The History o f The Caliph o f Bagdat, the third tale in The Tales o f the Genii collection.
29
They contain a pavilion which ‘stood upon a rising mount, in the midst of a most
beautiful green...The center of the pavilion opened to the lawn, which was beset
with elegant tufts of the most delightful verdure. ..At the bottom of the lawn ran a
clear and transparent stream, which gently washed the margin of the green’ (Genii
i. 67).29
The description of Shadaski’s ‘pavilion opened to the lawn, which was beset with elegant
tufts of the most delightful verdure’ is echoed in Kubla’s ‘pleasure-dome’ surrounded by
‘So twice five miles of fertile ground/ With wall and towers were girdled around: / And
there were gardens bright with sinuous rills’ (6-8). Further, Kubla’s ‘pleasure-dome’ and
‘gardens’ unfolding to "Alph, the sacred river’ imitates Shadaski’s arrangement of his
groves where the ‘pavilion’ and lawn’ open to a ‘clear and transparent stream’
EL Travel Literature
In 1 s Preface, Coleridge admits to getting his idea for Kubla Khan from Samuel
Purchas’ collection of traveler’s tales Purchas his Pilgrimage,30 thus reaffirming Said’s
claim that knowledge of the Orient ‘seems to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment
of a text, or a citation from someone’s work on the Orient’ (177). The exact passage in
Purchas that Coleridge used as his source is as follows:
29 Ibidem, 227 Fulford is quoting from the tale The Talisman ofOromanes; Or, The History o f the Merchant Abduah, the first tale in The Tales o f the Genii collection.30 The full title o f work is Purchas his Pilgrimage, Or Relations o f the World and the Religions Observed in All Ages and Places Discovered, from creation to the Present.
30
In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Palace, encompassing sixteen miles of
plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleasant Springs,
delightfuli Stream es, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest
thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure, which may be moved from place to
place31
Ironically, Purchas’ description of Xanadu was based on the description of the famous
traveler Marco Polo, who travelled to the Emperor’s palace in the late 13th century 32
Purchas reworks Polo’s account (quoted in the footnote) to make his text more exotic and
pleasing for the reader. For instance, Polo describes a structure that is capable of being
moved as follows: ‘The whole is constructed with so much ingenuity of contrivance that
all the parts may be taken asunder, removed, and again set up, at his majesty's pleasure’;
in comparison, Purchas exaggerates the description by calling it ‘a sumptuous house of
pleasure’, thus letting the reader insinuate that the structure is likely a harem. In his
Preface and poem, Coleridge too alters information so it fits the parameters of his poem.
Whereas both Polo and Purchas conclude that the land surrounding the palace is ‘sixteen
31 qtd. in footnotes o f ‘Kubla Khan’, The Norton Anthology o f English Literature (New Yoik) 446.32 Excerpt from The Travels o f Marco Polo, the Venetian that Purchas copied, and changed in his text is as follows: ‘Departing from the city last mentioned, and proceeding three days1 journey in a north-easteriy caused direction, you arrive at a city named Shandu, built by the grand khan Kublai, now reigning. In this he caused palace to be erected, of marble and other handsome stone, admirable as well for the elegance of its design as for the skill displayed in its execution... the building runs another wall to such an extent as to enclose sixteen miles in circuit of the adjoining plain, to which there is no access but through the palace. Within the bounds of this royal park there are rich and beautiful meadows, watered by many rivulets, where a variety o f animals o f the deer and goat kind are pastured, to serve as food for the hawks and other birds employed in the chase, whose mews are also in the grounds. . The whole is constructed with so much ingenuity of contrivance that all the parts may be taken asunder, removed, and again set up, at his majesty's pleasure.’ 126
31
miles’ long, Coleridge changes it to ‘ten miles’ in the Preface, and ‘So twice five miles’
in the poem (1. 6). The various amendments made to Polo’s text by Purchas makes it an
unreliable source for Coleridge, but the poet seems to show little concern for the
inaccuracy. Rather, Coleridge makes modifications to Purchas’ text for the effectiveness
of his poem, contributing to the erroneous knowledge about the Orient.
Another influence on Coleridge was Sir William Chambers Dissertation on
Oriental Gardening (1772), a travel text that introduced the Chinese gardens to Europe.
In a letter to his close friend Fredrick Chapman, Chambers confessed that his account of
the Chinese gardens was fabricated to attract an audience: ‘it is a system of my own
which as it was a bold attempt of which the Success was very uncertain, I fathered it upon
the Ch'nese who I thought lived far enough off to be out of reach of Critical Abuse’.
Chambers believed that Chinese gardens satisfied all the senses, dividing the effects
produced by the gardens into the pleasing, the terrible, and the surprising. He orchestrated
oriental scenes in his text to evoke contrived sensations of the Dleasing, the terrible, and
the surprising in his readers in an effort to shape their imagination.
Chambers Dissertation had a riveting effect on Coleridge’s imagination that
crossed over to Kubla Khan. Essential images of the Orient found in Kubla Khan were
imported by the poet from Chambers manufactured text. In addition to the oriental
Chinese gardens, Chambers mentions portable tents called the ‘Miau Ting, or Hall of the
33 Chambers’ letter to Fredrick Chapman in Stockholm, date 28 July 1772. Cited in Harris, Crook, and Harris, Sir William Chambers: Knight o f the Polar Star, 158.
32
Moon’, ‘composed each of one single vaulted room, made in the shape of a
hemisphere’ These ‘vaulted’ tents are reminiscent of Kubla Khan’s ‘stately pleasure-
dome’ (1- 2). The ‘pleasure’ aspect of the ‘pleasure-dome’ is borrowed from Chambers
description that the structures were where ‘the Chinese princes retire, with the - favorite
women, [where] they feast, and give a loose to every sort of voluptuous pleasure’ 35
Chambers further mentions that these gardens and buildings are surrounded by ‘clear
running water, which falls in rills from the sides of a rock in the center’, the purity and
clarity of the water is echoed by Coleridge in ‘ Alph, the sacred river’, while the ‘rills’ are
reproduced in the line And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills’ (3,8). The origin
of Coleridge’s lines ‘The shadow of the dome of pleasure / Floated midway on the
waves’ (31-32) can be found in the following description by Chambers: ‘many little
islands float upon its surface, and move around as the current directs, .with arbors,
containing beds of repose, with sophas, seats, and other furniture for various use’ (31).
Coleridge was also fascinated with James Bruce’s Travels to Discover the Source
o f the Nile (1790), a travel narrative that surveyed the history and culture of Abyssinia
(Ethiopia). Coleridge’s admiration for Bruce is on full display in ReligiousMusings,
where he quotes a passage from the Travels as an explanatory footnote to the image of
‘Simoom’ in his poem. Coleridge also shared his appreciation for the text with his friends
from his circle; in a letter to Lady Beaumont, Dorothy Wordsworth wrote Coleridge says
34 W. Chambers, A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening. (London 1772) 30.35 Ibidem, 31.
33
that the last edition of Bruce’s Travels is a book that you ought by all means to have’
Leask finds that there is a striking resemblance between Bruce’s ‘Ozoro Esther1 and
Coleridge’s ‘Abyssinian maid’ ‘The powerful erotic interest of Bruce’s narrative and
especially his portrait of his royal patroness Ozoro Esther is surely discernible in
Coleridge’s almost feverish evocation of the ‘Abyssinian Maid’ and her 'symphony and
song’ (16). In The Road to Xanadu, John Livingston Lowes also observes that
Coleridge’s Xanadu, especially lines 12-16, imitates the area surrounding the fountains
where the Nile begins37
Analyzing Representations in Kubla Khan
Kublai Khan—The Great Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, was a Mongolian
conqueror who successfully ruled Mongolia, and became the first Mongol to rule the
entirety of China. Unlike his predecessors, Kublai ruled through an administrative
apparatus that embraced the local culture and traditions of the conquered population
while also providing them with religious freedom. In addition to creating a government
founded on humanity and magnanimity, he unified the people of Mongolia and China
under the Yuan Dynasty. He improved infrastructure by building roads for effective
transportation, expanded waterways for agriculture, and established and utilized paper
currency as the primary means of trade. In 1256, he established the city of Shandu, also
known as the ‘city of 108 temples’, which became the summer capital for Kublai Khan
36 qtd. in Perspectives: Romantic, Victorian, and Modem Literature,113.37 Refer to The Road to Xanadu, pg. 344 for a full description by Bruce o f the area surrounding the fountains o f Nile.
34
and his successors. He is revered as a kind and civil leader in Mongol and Chinese
history.
Unfortunately, Coleridge’s Kubla Khan lacks the qualities mentioned above as he
is reduced to an essentialized Orient by the poet. The poet demonizes and eroticizes the
Orient, wnether Kuoia or the setting, through the deliberate use of exouc language,
fictionalized imagery, and intentional extravagance. He also sets up binaries between
East and West—Kubla Khan and the Abyssinian Maid, that further cements stereotypes
of the Orient in the poem. By promoting a powerful sense of otherness, Coleridge
distances the Orient from familiarity and reality of the true East. In my analysis of Kubla
Khan, I showcase how exactly Coleridge fabricates the Orient, and in doing so,
participates in Orientalism.
In his Preface, Coleridge makes the disclaimer that Kubla Khan; Or, A Vision in a
Dream: A Fragment was received in a dream after the poet had ‘retired to a lonely farm
house’, and taking a ‘anodyne’, had fallen asleep. The Preface reads:
The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the
external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could
not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines.. On awakening 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. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on
35
business from Porlock and detained by him above an hour, 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 purport of the vision, yet,
with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had
passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone had
been cast38
The Preface, I believe, is an orchestrated cognitive mechanism by Coleridge to deter the
reader from questioning the accuracy of the content—the Orient. By strategically placing
the Preface in the intro to the poem, Coleridge deflects blame from himself and places it
on the ‘ Vision in a Dream’. Leask agrees, as he further adds: ‘Coleridge’s 1816 Preface
to Kubla Khan, by focusing readerly attention on the agency of the drugged imagination
as a syncretizing power, erases the geopolitical distinction between the poem's
constituent topoi. Kubla Khan and the Abyssinian Maid, Xanadu and Mount Abora are
condensed by a kind of drug-induced poetical dreamwork into an ‘essentialised’ Orient’
(3). But, what if we remove the Preface? The ‘essentialised’ Orient remains Oriental—
making it more obvious that Coleridge’s attempt to mislead the reader via the Preface is
deliberate, and misrepresenting the Orient in Kubla Khan intentional.
If, even for a moment, we believe Coleridge’s claim that the poem has its origin
in a dream—manifested through a ‘vague and dim recollection of the general purport’,
38 ‘Kubla Khan’, The Norton Anthology o f English Literature (New York) 446-47.
36
the poem s highly developed structure proves otherwise. Coleridge concludes in his
Preface that ‘with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the
rest had passed away’; yet, the audience is presented with a fifty-four-line masterpiece.
William Hazlitt, a literary critic and contemporary of Coleridge, echoed the sentiment as
he affirmed that Kubla Khan ‘only shews that Mr. Coleridge can write better nonsense
verses than any man in England. . .it is not so much a poem but a musical composition’. 39
The complex achievements of the poem are reaffirmed by J.R. de J. Jackson who writes
that a 'regular iambic framework is used to set off variants, and the entire poem is
marked by alliteration and elaborate assonance that reaches back in subtlety to Milton’.40
Thus, comparing Kubla Khan to a pragmatic ‘musical composition’ and/or profoundly
complicated work of Milton eliminates doubt that the poem is not a dream composition,
but a highly self-conscious creation.
For the necessity of creating an exotic locale in Kubla, Coleridge deploys imagery
that reinforces the stereotypes of the Orient. He typifies the Orient and the Oriental in his
poem by deliberately stressing qualities that exude "Sensuality, promise, terror, sublimity,
idyllic pleasure, intense energy’ 41 For example, Coleridge begins by establishing the
splendor and majesty of Kubla Khan right from the beginning: ‘In Xanadu did Kubla
Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree’ (1-2). Coleridge reinforces the image of the
‘pleasure-dome’ multiple times—in line thirty-one: ‘The shadow of the dome of
39 qtd. in Lessk, ‘Kubla Khan and Orientalism’, 1. ̂Ibidem. 1.
41 Said, Orientalism, 118.
37
pleasure’, and thirty-six: ‘A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!’. In doing so, he
quickly captures the imagination of his reader by making the ‘dome’ more luxurious and
memorable versus simply stating ‘A stately dome decree’. Coleridge further creates an
atmosphere of beauty and sacredness to add to the generic assumptions of the Orient. The
area surrounding the ‘pleasure-dome; is localized with rich and exotic images of
‘blossomed many an incense-bearing tree’, ‘forests, ancient as the hills’, and a ‘sacred
river’ (3,9-10). He continues to describe the river as ‘sacred’ on multiple occasions
throughout the poem, and Xanadu as ‘holy and enchanted’.
Coleridge also makes use of supernatural agencies to skillfully promote sinister
qualities of the Orient. Caverns through which the ‘sacred river runs are described as
‘measureless to man / Down a sunless sea (4-5) and gardens are infused with ‘sinuous
rills’, further eroticizing the landscape (8). The savage an a untamed nature of the Orient
is highlighted in the second stanza as the location is now described as ‘A savage place! as
holy and enchanted’ (14). Mystical elements are introduced to describe an Oriental
woman longing for her lover: ‘As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted / By woman
wailing for her demon-lover!’ (15-16), thus making a reprehensible loss bewitching.
Coleridge continues to challenge the restrictions of realism by injecting life into earth as
the ‘earth in fast thick pants were breathing’ (18), while also connecting Kubla to Eastern
generalizations of war through the evocation of the spiritual realm: ‘Kubla heard from far
/ Ancestral voices prophesying war’ (29-30). Hence, the Orient in Coleridge’s Kubla
38
Khan is reduced to the general categories mentioned by Said of ‘Oriental despotism,
Oriental splendor, cruelty, sensuality’, because in the eyes of an Orientalist, An Oriental
lives in the Orient, he lives a life of Oriental ease, in a state of Oriental despotism and
sensuality, imbued with a feeling of Oriental fatalism’—just like Kubla (4,102).
I would like to take a moment here to reinforce Said’s claims that the Orient was a
‘European invention’; Coleridge takes part in that ‘invention’ by creating nonexistent
places in his poem to give the audience a false sense of the Orient. For example,
Coleridge sets his poem in ‘Xanadu’—‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-
dome decree’, but such a place does not exist (1-2). In Marco Polo’s The Travels o f
Marco Polo, the Venetian, Kubla’s city is called ‘Shandu’ ‘Departing from the city last
mentioned, and proceeding three days’ journey in a north-easterly caused direction, you
arrive at a city named Shandu’ (126). In Purchas his Pilgrimage, Purchas calls the city
‘Xamdu’— ‘In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Palace’, Fulford confirms the
fabrication as he states ‘Thus Coleridge’s Xanadu is never a real place discovered
through books but a place the Western poet imagines after reading and then dreaming’
(231). Interestingly, ‘Xamdu’ does not fit the poem’s iambic tetrameter while ‘Xanadu’
does, confirming that the change i > premeditated.
Furthermore, Coleridge continues to exoticize the locale by inventing the name of
the ‘sacred river’ ‘Alph’— ‘Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns
measureless to man’ (3-4). Considering Coleridge’s fascination with the Arabian Nights,
39
the ‘Alf in A lf Layla wa-Layla may have been the inspiration for the name ‘Alph’.
Similarly, ‘Mount Abora’ is contrived as well in the lines— ‘It was an Abyssinian Maid,
/And on her dulcimer she played, / Singing of Mount Abora’ (39-41). Leask verifies that
no such mountain exists: ‘Much ink has been spilt by critics cm the significance of
‘Mount Abora’, a name which doesn’t correspond to any known site in Abyssinia or
elsewhere’ (15). In the Crewe manuscript, ‘Mount Abora’ is referred to as ‘Mount
Amara’, which is a real mountain in the Amhara Region of Ethiopia. The mountain is
perhaps a variation of John Milton’s false paradise of Mount Amara in Paradise Lost—
‘Nor where Abassin Kings thir issue Guard, / Mount Amara, though this by some
suppos’d / True Paradise under the Ethiop Line’.42 It may be postulated that since Miltor
already used ‘Mount Amara’ in his text to refer to the East, Coleridge wanted break away
from the known and create an unknown mythical oriental landscape to enthrall his
audience, hence ‘Mount Abora’. Coleridge’s creation should not be ignored as a necessity
of imagination or poetical creation because these fabrications contributed to Europe’s
Oriental worldview of the East that served as the foundation for colonization.
Coleridge also imposes an artificial binary opposition between the first thirty-six
lines of the poem and the eighteen line ‘coaa’, between Kubla Khan and the Abyssii an
Maid. As seen in the analysis above, Kubla and Xanadu are infused with exotic, erotic,
and supernatural qualities, but there is sudden shift in the coda when the ‘Abyssinian
42 Paradise Lost, Book IV, lines 280-282.
40
maid’ appears. The flow of the lines become light and airy as the tone turns no r“ive and
the setting paradise like:
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. (37-41)
Coleridge sets up the ‘Abyssinian maid’ in opposition with the Oriental woman who is
‘wailing for her demon-lover!’ First and foremost the ‘woman wailing’ is unidentifiable
outside of her crying and collective Oriental identity, whereas the woman in the coda is
inundated with admirable attributes as she is called a ‘damsel’ and a ‘Abyssinian ma*d’.
Uirke the wailing woman who conjures haunting sensations, the ‘Abyssinian maid’
sings and plays offering the narrator ‘deep delight’ (44). Ironically, the Abyssinian maid
is also an Oriental woman, but why does Coleridge depict her antithetical to the ‘woman
wailing’? In Hiob Ludolfs Historia Aethiopica (1681), Ludolf depicted the Abyssinian
Church as ‘a pure primitive Christianity uncontaminated by Roman Catholic doctrine’
and Bruce echoed the sentiments in his extensive study of Abyssinia— Travels to
Discover the Source o f the Nile 43 Considering Coleridge read Bruce’s Travels and was
43 qtd. in Leask, ‘Kubla Khan and Orientalism’ 14.
41
influenced by it, the reference of Abyssinia being a pure, primitive form of Christianity is
reinforced in his characterization of the ‘Abyssinian maid’.
42
Chapter Three: Orientalizing the Orient in Shelley's Ozymandias
‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings.’
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away. (10-14)
On December 27,1817, a day after Boxing Day, Shelley entertained at his house
in Marlowe, London based poet-financier Horace Smith who he had met the previous
year through Leigh Hunt. Hunt, editor of The Examiner, liked to organize sonnet
competitions between his acquaintances on popular topics with fifteen-minute time
allotments for completion.44 Discussing recent discoveries in the East in the wake of
Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt and Diodorus Siculus’ epitaph to Ozymandias, Shelley and
Smith engaged in a similar light-hearted friendly competition to produce a sonnet on
‘Ozymandias, King of Kings’ While Shelley named his sonnet Ozymandias, Smith gave
his sonnet an elaborate title On a Stupendous Leg o f Granite, Discovered Standing by
Itse lf in the Deserts ofEgypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below.
The competition between the two writers was inspired by the colossal head of
Ramses n , ‘Ozy mandias’ in Greek, excavated in 1816 from the West Bank at Thebes by
Giovanni Belzoni. According to Jalal Uddin Khan, ‘on the recommendation of Swiss
44 Hunt set up a similar competition between Shelley, John Keats, and himself on the topic of ‘The N ile.’
43
Orientalist, J. L. Burckhardt, the Orientalist Belzoni was sent by the British consul to
Egypt.. .Belzoni managed to remove with great skill the colossal bust of Ramses,
commonly called ‘the Young Mem non, which took 17 days and 130 men to tow the
more-than-7-ton bust to the river with the help of ropes, levers and rollers’ (74-75).
Similar to the hardships encountered during the excavation, Ozymandias’ journey to
England was just as daunting. The sculpture suffered many delays, first due to the failure
to find an appropriate vessel to accommodate the seven-ton colossus, and then because of
quarantine issues in Malta. The boat canying Ozymandias docked in England in March
1818, and the pharaoh was finally exhibited in late 1818.45 Keats, an avid British
Museum attendee, did not see the head unt. early 1819, claiming ‘I had not seen it
before’.46
In his effort to capitalize on the public’s excitement for the upcoming Ramses II
exhibition, Hunt published the two sonnets in The Examiner in short succession of each
other Shelley’s poem, signed ‘GLIRASTES’, was publ hed on 1 i January 18118,
roughly two weeks after it was written. Smith’s poem soon followed on 1 February 1818
in the same publication with a note stating ‘The subject which suggested the beautiful
Sonnet, in a late number, signed ‘Glirastes,’ produced also the enclosed from another
45 For a full description o f the sculpture's journey to England, please read John Rodenbeck’s ‘Travelers from an Antique Land: Shelley's Inspiration for ‘Ozymandias.’”, pp. 125-26.46 qtd, in John Rodenbeck, ‘Travelers from an Antique Land: Shelley's Inspiration for ‘Ozymandias.”’, Alif: Journal o f Comparative Poetics 24 (2004) 126.
44
pen, which, if you deem it worthy insertion, is at your service. -H.S.’.47 The poems are
reprinted here as they appeared in The Examiner for comparison:
OZYMANDIAS.48
I met a Traveller from an antique land,Who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:And on the pedestal these words appear:“My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings.”Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,The lone and level sands stretch far away.
OZYMANDIAS49
In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desart knows—“I am great OZYMANDIAS,” saith the stone,
“The King of Kings; this mighty City shows “The wonders of my hand.’’-The City’s gone,—
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose The site of this forgotten Babylon.We wonder,- and some Hunter may express Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
47 qtd. in K. Everest and G. Matthews, The Poems o f Shelley, Volume Two, 1817-1819. (London and New York 2014) 307.48 Percy B. Shelley, The Examiner (January 11,1818) 24.49 Horace Smith, The Examiner (February 1,1818) 73. Both poems, as showcased here, will be used as a point of reference throughout this chapter.
45
What powerful but unrecorded race Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
Ironically, both poems were titled ‘OZYMANDIAS’ in The Examiner until Smith
changed his title to ‘On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in
the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below’ in his collection of poems
called Amarynthus, Nympholept (1821). Shelley’s Ozymandias was republished under the
title ‘Sonnet. Ozymandias’ in the collection of poems called Rosalind and Helen, A
Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems (1819) by Charles and lames Oilier. After her
husband’s sudden death in a boating accident, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley struggled to
sort through a multitude of the poet’s unfinished and fragmentary work to publish
posthumously. With the assistance of Percy’s dear friend Hunt, Mary edited, and
ultimately published in 1824 Posthumous Poems o f Percy Bysshe Shelley, which also
included Ozymandias. In the Preface to the Posthumous Poems, Mary expressed grief that
‘The ungrateful world did not feel his loss, and the gap it made seemed to close as
quickly over his memory as the murderous sea above his living frame. Hereafter men will
lament that his transcendant powers of intellect were extinguished before they had
bestowed on them their choicest treasures’ 50 Shelley’s tragic death brought his work into
the focus of the public’s attention, garnering him posthumous fame and appreciation.
50 Mary W. Shelley, ‘Preface.’ Posthumous Poem o f Percy Bysshe Shelley. (London 1824) Iv.
46
After being published in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury in 1861, Ozymandias became
frequently anthologized.
Contrary to popular belief, it is of extreme importance to reiterate that Shelley
never saw the sculpture of Ozymandias a person. By the time Ramses II had arrived in
England in Spring 1818, Shelley’s poem had already been published, and the poet,
accompanied by Mary and her sister Claire, had permanently left for Italy to escape
creditors. Further, Shelley never travelled to Egypt, or a matter of fact to any Eastern
country, to see the statue. Rodenbeck confirms this:
At no time before he wrote the sonnet, could Shelley possibly have seen the
sculptured head comparable to the one his fictional traveler describes unless he
had actually gone to Egypt. In common with all the other English Romantic poets,
either major and minor, Shelley never set foot in the Land of the Pharaohs.. .Nor
is there any record, indeed, of his ever even contemplating such a visit. (122)
Therefore, Shelley was not inspired by any physical experience with ‘Ozymandias’ when
writing his poem. His knowledge about the pharaoh was limited, like his contemporaries,
to the rendition of the East in travel literature. This, obviously, makes the depiction of the
great pharaoh in Ozymandias Active and erroneous, as the details were not grounded in
any concrete experience or knowledge of Ramses H
Rodenbeck drives the point home as he stresses that Shelley had no idea what
Ozymandias looked like, and even if he did know, he ‘found the information irrelevant
47
when he wrote his poem’ (126). The critic’s affirmation validates my claim that the
misrepresentation of the Orient in Shelley’s poem was premeditated as the poet
intentionally promoted stereotypes of the East to meet the demands of the marketplace.
Unfortunately, during Shelley’s lifetime, his poem failed to intrigue both his
contemporaries and the audience; only after his death did the relatively unknown poem,
and poet, acquire fame. This chapter will be divided similar to the previous chapter, but
sans the reception due to the lack of response to the poem when it was published, or even
republished. The section that follows will examine texts, specifically travel literature, in
the context of Shelley’s life to demonstrate how the unstable narratives influenced him in
writing his poem. This will be followed by an analysis of Ozymandias to identify and
expose misrepresentations of the Orient. Where appropriate, I will bring in Smith’s poem
to draw out the inconsistencies between the two poems written at the same time and
informed by similar sources.
Ozymandias and its Muses
It s imperative to reinforce my earlier claim that travel literature from its
conception secured ethnocentric perspectives of the Orient by perpetuating stereotypes
that were inhumanely flawed. Rodenbeck agrees as he asserts that travel literature ‘alone
has historically had far greater cultural impact than the experience of mere travel’ (121).
The consequences of the said fabrication were poems like Shelley’s Ozymandias that
embraced and fomented inaccuracies of the Orient. The inspiration for Shelley’s poem
48
can be found in the dubious literature of travel since the poet had no first-hand experience
other than his readings. In this section, I examine the relevance of these sources in
Shelley's poem while contextualizing them to better understand their significance in the
poet’s life.
In her copious journals that religiously tracked every aspect of her husband’s life,
Mary reveals Shelley’s reading during 1817 to be the following: ‘His readings this year
were chiefly Greek. Besides the Hymns of Homer and the Iliad, he read the Dramas of
Aeschylus and Sophocles, the Symposium of Plato, and Arrian’s Historica Indica’, and
Diodorus Siculus’ Bibliotheca Historica. Diodorus, a likely contemporary of Julius
Caesar, was a Greek historian and traveler known for writing a massive forty-volume
work attempting to cover universal history, which included the history of Egypt. In their
respective poems, Shelley and Smith used the historian as a source when writing their
sonnets. In his description of the Ramesseum, a memorial temple built to commemorate
Ram esses H, Diodorus remarks:
At the Entrance stand Three Statues, each of one intire Stone, the Workmanship
of Memnon of Sienitas. One of these made in a sitting posture, is the greatest in all
Egypt, the measure of his Foot exceeding Seven Cubits; the one standing on the
right, and the other on the left, being his Daughter and Mother. This Piece is not
only commendable for its greatness, but admirable for its Cut and Workmanship,
and the Excellency of the Stone; in so great a Work there’s not to be discern’d the
49
least Flaw, or any other Blemish. Upon it there is this Inscription—I am
Osimanduas King of Kings; if any would know how great I am, and where I lye,
let him excel me in any of my Works.51
In examining the above description, it may be concluded that Diodorus never visited the
Ramesseum, or the colossus himself. Neither the head given to the British Museum, or
the fragments of the statue left behind in Egypt by Belzoni had the inscription mentioned
above. Considering that hieroglyphics were not understood until 1822 when the Rosetta
Stone was deciphered, Diodorus, or whoever reporting the description of Ramses II to
him, would have not been able to read the Egyptian hieroglyphics. Unfortunately, we are
unable to verify Diodorus’ description since ‘No other ancient or classical histo: an—
Herodotus, Strabo, Pausanias, Thucydides, Xenophon, Arrian, Tacitus, or Pliny—
mentions Ozymandias or his statue’.52 This makes what Parr calls the ‘ultimate source’
for the two poems unstable, untrustworthy, and replete with errors.
It is without question that both Shelley and Smith borrowed from Diodorus’
translated inscription when conceiving the following lines in their poems: Shelley—“‘My
name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings.’ / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! ’
(10-11), Smith— ‘“I am great OZYMANDIAS,’ saith the stone, / ‘The King of Kings;
this mighty City shows / ‘The wonders of my hand.’” (4-6). But, being literary figures of
their caliber, it is surprising that both Shelley and Smith participated in hearsay by
51 Diodorus Siculus, Bib. hist. 1.4.2 [Booth] 24-25.52 Johnstone Parr, ‘Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias. ” Keats-Shelley Journal 6 (1957) 32.
50
quoting another quoted, or rather fabricated, text. The two poets likely knew that it was
impossible to translate hieroglyphics, yet they evaded questioning Diodorus’ boisterous
epitaph. Noteworthy, too, is the fact that both poets paraphrased the inscription Diodorus
mentioned using quotations—thus deceiving the audience in to believing that the
nscription was the original.
As Diodorus manufactured the inscription for the effectiveness of his
description—Shelley followed suit by recreating the historian’s setting to fit the
framework of his poem. Diodorus produced his description of the pharaon in late first
century BC, roughly a thousand years after the Ramesseum was built. The statue of
Ozymandias as described by the historian was sitting’ in one piece surrounded by two
other statues as he concluded ‘At the Entrance stand Three Statues, each of one *ntire
Stone... One of these made in a sitting posture, is the greatest in all Egypt... so great a
Work there’s not to be discern’d the least Flaw, or any other Blemish’. Shelley failed to
maintain the integrity of Diodorus’ text as he created his own Oriental locale; the statue
in his poem is annihilated and ‘standpng]’ alone as—‘Two vast and trunkless legs of
stone / Stand in the desart. Near tbem, on the sand, f Half sunk, a shattered visage f'es’
and ‘No thing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that Colossal Wreck’ (2-4, 12-13).
Diodorus’ departure from historical facts and Shelley’s departure from Bibliotheca
Historica proves the unreliable nature of both the authors and their work. The poem’s
decampment does suggest that even though informed by a semi-historical/travel text like
51
Diodorus’ Bibliotheca, the poem was more so a product of the Doet’s imagination. D.W.
Thompson echoes my sentiments when describing Shelley’s Ozymandias: ‘The face in
the sonnet is not that of an Egyptian king, but that of Shelley’s tyrant, a Godwinian
monarch whose character has been ruined by court life’
A source Shelley certainly read and borrowed from was C. E. Volney’s .Les
Ruines, ou Meditation sur les Revolutions des Empires (1791), a massively popular work
that attributed to shaping Shelly’s perspectives of the Orient. In Orientalism, Said
exposes Volney as an Orientalist, referring to him as an 'orthodox Orientalist authority’
who apparently ‘saw himself as a scientist, whose job it was to always record the ‘etat’ of
something he saw’ (39). Volney’s writing about the Orient was very impersonal and
hostile, which transferred over to the work of the literary crowd that exploited it, such as
in Shelley’s Ozymandias, Queen Mab, Alastor, and The Revolt o f Islam. According to
Thomas Medwin, cousin and biographer of Shelley, the poet was introduced to Volney’s
Ruines after his expulsion from Oxford in 1811. The poet’s good friend Thomas Jefferson
Hogg witnessed first-hand Shelley’s first wife, Harriet, reading aloud to her husband Les
Ruines, which he claims was one of her ‘text books’.54 The importance of Volney’s text
in the Shelley household was again emphasized by Mary’s use of the text in her work
Frankenstein, published the same year as Ozymandias. The Creature’s curriculum
included ‘Volney’s Ruins o f Empires’ from which he gained highly flawed imperial
53 qtd. in H.M. Richmond, ‘Ozymandias and the Travelers.1 Keats-Shelley Journal 11 (1962) 67.54 qtd. in Ralph A Nablow, ‘Shelley, ‘Ozymandias,’ and Volney’s Les Ruines. ’ Notes & Queries 36 (June 1989) 172.
52
knowledge of the Orient and the Occident as he notes ‘I heard of the slothful Asiatics; of
the stupendous set i us and mental activity of the Grecians’.55
During his exploration of Egypt and Syria, Volney took a detour to visit the ruins
of Palmyra. In the first two chapters of Les Ruines, Volney tried to capture the splendor
of the ruins that once were the cultural centers of the ancient world. A passage that likely
inspired Shelley’s ruins in Ozymandias is reprinted here:
I was suddenly struck with a scene of the most stupendous ruins; a countless
multitude of superb columns, stretching in avenues beyond the reach of sight. The
solitude of the place, the tranquility of the hour, the majesty of the scene,
impressed on my mind a religious pensiveness. The aspect of a great city
d.serted, the record of times past, compared with its present state, all elevated my
mind to high contemplations. (I, 3&5)56
Ralph A. Nablow, who first called attention to the similarities between the description of
the ruins and Shelley’s Ozymandias, notes that Volney’s ‘meditation, like that of Shelley,
centres on the vanity of world glory, the vicissitudes of empire, the ephemerality of the
works of man’.57 Shelley embraced and structured his poem around the same principles—
transience of power, pride, and ambi on made apparent in the c .integration of
Ozymandias’ colossus. Volney’s rumination about ‘ephemerality’ of Oriental empires
55 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frantcens^in: Or, The Modem Prometheus. Vol. 2. (London 1823) 9.56 C.F. Volney, The Ruins, or, Meditation on the Revolutions o f Empires: and the Law o f Nature. Project Gutenberg (New York 1890).57 Nablow, ‘Shelley, ‘Ozymandias,’ and Volney’s Les Ruines', 173.
53
should be treated with considerable skepticism since he did approach the subject as an
Orientalist. For instance, a few lines above the passage mentioned, Volney describes the
same Omental locale consumed by ‘robbery and devastation, tyranny and wretchedness’,
representations that were again promoted by Shelley’s Ozymandias,58
Edward Said points out that Volney’s text also served as inspiration for Napoleon
in his conquest of Egypt. In his attempt to strip the Orient to its essentials, Napoleon
enlisted the help of dozens of scientists and ‘savants’, among whom was Dominique
Vivant, Baron Denon—an artist, writer, diplomat, archaeologist, and Orientalist. In
addition to being a contributor to the multi-volume Description de VEgypte, Denon also
publ.^hed his own account in a three-volume work titled Voyages dans la basse et la
haute Egypte, pendant les Campagnes de Bonaparte (1802), translated into English by
Arthur Aiken the following year by the ntle Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt, During
the Campaigns o f General Bonaparte in that Country (1803). Denon’s enormously
successful work surpassed the popularity of Description de I'Egypte and became a ‘major
cultural event’ with multiple editions published simultaneously in Paris and London.59
Due to the popularity of the Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt, Shelley read and
used Denon as a source in Ozymandias. There is a striking resemblance between
58 C.F. Volney. The Ruins, or, M editatkv on the Revolutions o f Empires: and the Law o f Nature. (New York 1890).59 John Rodenbeck, ‘Travelers from an Antique Land’, 134.
54
Shelley’s Ozymandias and the following description of Ozymandias in Travels in Upper
and Lower Egypt:
Our attention was arrested in the plain by two large statues in a sitting posture,
between which... was the famous Osymandyas, the largest of all these colossal
figures. Osymandyas had prided himself so much on the execution of this bold
design, that he had caused an inscription to be engraven on the pedestal of the
statue, in which he defied the power of man to destroy this monument as well as
that of his tomb, the pompous description of which now appears only a fantastic
di eam. The two statues still left standing, are doubtless those of the mother and
this prince.. .that of the king himself has disappeared, the hand of time and the
teeth of envy appear to have united zealously in its destruction, and nothing of it
remains but a shapeless rock of granite.60
In comparing the above passage to Ozymandias, Shelley’s reads like an abridged version
of Denon’s description. Both works move between the past and present as they outline
Ozymandias’ fleeting power, ambition, and architecture. Parr brings up an intriguing
point that ‘Denon is the only traveler who actually states that the inscription was ‘on the
pedestal’” which in return is echoed in the following lines of Ozymandias ‘And on the
pedestal these words appear: / ‘My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings.’” (9-10).
Vivant Denon. Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt. Vol. 2. Translated by Arthur Akin, (Cambridge 2015) 92-93.
55
This serves as a solid confirmation that Shelley used Denon’s Orientalist text to derive
stereotypes lingering in his poem.
Ironically, Shelley found his source in a deceptively misleading text since the
ruins Denon described were unrelated to Ramses II or the Ramesseum. Ozymandias’
head was not removed by Belzoni until 1816, which means that the statue, as claimed by
Denon, had not ‘disappeared’ and was still stanuing when he visited the area. Also,
Ozymandias was surrounded by statues of his mother and daughter whereas the two
statues Denon mentions is ‘of the mother and prince’. Because Denon was unable to
i wCntify the ruins he stood in, he likely remembered Diodorus’ descncnon of the
Ramesseum and the placement of Ozymandias between two statues. He assumed the
statue o f ‘Osymandyas’ no longer existed, but the remaining statues of the ‘mother and
prince’ proved that at one time the statue of the pharaoh was there. The assumption wa?
false. Thus, Denon, and Shelley’s, lack of accuracy in their work solidifies my earlier
claim that their misrepresentations of the Orient were intentional
Analyzing Representations in Ozymandias
Pamses II—Ramesses the Great, was the third ruler of the 19th Dynasty of Egypt,
and the second longest reigning pharaoh in Egyptian history. In his successful reign that
lasted a little over sixty-six years, Egypt flourished extensively as Ramses improved
infrastructure, strengthened borders, and commissioned comprehensive building projects
all over Egypt. His most notable work included the Ramesseum in Thebes, temples at
55
Abu Simbel, the great hypostyle hall at Kamak, the capital city Pi-Ramesses, and many
more. Apart from his extensive building, he was a reputed solr er known for leading
many expeditions to restore annexed territories by Nubians and Hittites. His prowess as a
soldier, accomplishments as a builder, and dedication to secure resources for his people
as a leader earned him absolute loyalty from his people. Due to his numerous
contributions, Ramses was dubbed by Egyptians as ‘ Userma ’atre ’setepenre’ or ‘Keeper
of Harmony and Balance’.
In contrast, Ozymandias in Shelley’s poem is void of all humanity as he is
reduced to a tyrant facing the wrath of time. Said makes a crucial point that I have
reinforced eariier, ‘men make their own nistory, that what they can know is what they
have made, and extend it to geography—such locales, regions, geographical sectors as
Orient1 ana ‘Occident’ are man-made’ (5). In Ozymandias, Shelley imposes a similar
man made history on Ramses II as he strips the pharaoh of his accomplishments, and in
doing so, displaces him. like the efforts made by his contemporary Coleridge in Kubla
Khan, Shelley too uses forged language and imagery to create Oriental ‘locales, regions,
geographical sectors’. My analysis of Ozymandias aims to illustrate how Shelley
misrepresents the Orient by first penetrating it, and then re-imagining it for the
convenience of his work that initially informed Western consciousness. I also utilize
Smith’s poem in places to draw out discrepancies between Ozymandias and On a
Stupendous Leg o f Granite.
57
Similar to Coleridge’s Preface to Kubla Khan, Shelley too attempts to avoid
accountability for the accuracy of the Orient in Ozymandias. He frames the sonnet as a
stoiy told to the poet-speaker by a ‘Traveller from an antique land’, which in turn is told
by the ‘sculptor’ who ‘well those passions read’ of Ozymandias when creating his
colossus (1,6). Rodenbeck echoes this as he states that ‘the poem has nothing to do with
the poet/speaker’s personal physical experience is announced by the first line, which tells
us explicitly that the person who had the fictive experience that the poem uses as its
central metaphor was not the poet-speaker at all, but ‘a traveler”’ (121). This is apparent
in the sudden shift in the first line from ‘I’ to ‘Traveller’ in ‘1 met a Traveller from an
antique land’, thus showing a sense of urgency in Shelley to deflect responsibility and
blame (1). Using the interlocking stories as an apparatus, the poet is successfully able to
create a distance between the Orient and the Occident while rendering the powers of
Ozymandias useless with the passage of time.
During his trip to Egypt with the American Museum of Natural Histoiy, Eugene
Waith found himself standing in the ruins of the Ramesseum in front of the fragmented
statue of Ozymandias. Unable to contain delight, he asked the guide ‘You mean that
this was the inspiration for Shelley’s poem - ‘I met a traveller from an antique land...’?’.
As the guide answered ‘Yes’ to Waith’s inquiiy and asked him to recite the poem, the
scholar found himself perplexed as he states ‘What I was looking at as I read bore little
resemblance to the scene Shelley evoked’ (154). According to Parr, ‘Since the statue lay
58
precisely thus in Shelley’s day, it becomes obvious that Shelley’s description is not in
conformity with the facts’ (33). But, why? Shelley misrepresents the Orient by making
sweeping generalizations about it because, as an Orientalist, he simply could.
Shelley’s deliberate attempt to part ways from ‘facts’ begins in his fabrication of a
desolate Oriental setting in the second line of the poem where the ‘Traveller’ describe?
‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desart’ (2-3). By beginning his
description of Ozymandias’ sculpture in a dilapidated state, Shelley aggressively
dehumanizes the pharaoh in his effort to re-create him. Ironically, his description deviates
from Smith's On a Stupendous Leg oj Granite even though the sonnets peruse similar
sources and share the theme of ephemerality of power. Smith’s poem is more ‘in
conformity with the facts’ as he describes only one leg standing in the ‘Desart’: ‘In
Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone, / Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws / The only
shadow that the Desart knows’ (1-3). While referring to a description of Ozymandias by
British authority on Egyptian antiquities Richard Henry Hamilton. Parr attests ‘rather
than ‘Two vast and trunkless legs’ there were no legs at all. What were once legs had
become shapeless mass of stone with exception of a part of foot lying among the debris’
(33).61 Waith echoes P?jt as he too confirms ‘there were no trunkless legs’ when he
visited the sculpture (154).
Richard Henry Hamilton was the President o f the British African Association during Shelley’s time. According to Parr, Hamilton travelled to Thebes to study Ramesses II around 1809.
59
The poet continues to reconstruct, or rather deconstruct, OzymanCzas as an
unregenerate savage in the following lines:
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those pas: ons read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. (4-8).
Particular attention should be paid to Shelley’s use of negative diction and imagery to
describe the pharaoh: 'trown’, ‘wrinkled lip’, ‘sneer of cold command’, ‘hand that
mocked’, and ‘heart that fed’. Quite strategically, the poet alienates Ozymandias from his
own identity of 'Userma ’atre 'setepenre ’ by equipping him with tyrannical attributes to
reinforce stereotypes of the governing ‘other’. In fact, there is no ‘frown, / And wrinkled
lip, and sneer of cold command’ on the face of the head excavated by Belzoni. Belzoni
ddsci .bed the head as ‘smiling upon me, at thought of being taken away to England’.62
Similar to Waith. I too was fortunate enough to visit the Egyptian gallery at the British
Museum during my visit to London a few years back.631 was intrigued to find myself
standing in front of the head of Ozymandias, but confounded when I discovered no
wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command’. Rather, there was a quaint smile on the
pharaoh’s mouth that aroused a sense of peace and serenity in me as I stood there for
62 qtd. in John Rodenbeck, ‘Travelers from an Antique Land’, 116.63 The head o f Ozymandias, or ‘The Younger Memnon’, is available for view through the online collection on the British Museum’s website.
60
some time examining him. The difference exists due to Shelley’s lack of concern for the
accuracy of Ozymandias' sculpture which, I believe, is a calculated methodology by the
poet to distill what Said calls ‘essential ideas about the Orient—its sensuality, its
tendency to despotism, its aberrant mentality, its habits of inaccuracy, its backwardness—
into a separate and un-challenged coherence’.64
It has already been determined in the previous section that Shelley and Smith
borrowed from Diodorus’ translated inscription ‘I am Osimanduas King of Kings: if any
would know how great I am, and where I lye, let him excel me in any of my Works.’ In
juxtaposing Shelley’s inscription v th Smith’s, it is obvious that Shelley departs from the
historical context supplied by Diodorus by contriving a richly suggestive inscription that
evokes habitual fascination and repugnance for the Orient. The two inscriptions are
reprinted side-by-side for comparison:
Shellev s Ozymandias.________________________ Sm ith's On a Stupendous L e s o f Granite.
“My name is OZYM ANDIAS, King o f K ings.’
Look on my works, ye M ighty, and despair!
(10- 11)
“I am great OZYM ANDIAS,” saith the stone,
“The King o f K ings; this m ighty City shows
“The wonders o f my hand.” (4-6)
The inscription’s opening ‘I am Osimanduas King of Kings’ is echoed in both poems but,
particular attention should be paid to the rest of the lines in both works. Changes are
made by both poets, but Shelley’s inscription borders sheer manipulation. While Smith’s
lines somewhat convey a similar message of human glory as in its original source (which
64 Said, Orientalism, 205.
61
both Shelley and Smith read together), Shelley’s lines make a complete shift. Shelley
transforms the declaration of accomplishments made by a successful ruler into a
tyrannical boast of power by a despot who calls for ‘despair! ’ for those who ‘Look on
[his] works’ (11). The proclamation made by Shelley’s Ozymandias is contradictory to
the historicity of Ramses II who built monuments on a grand scale to ensure his legacy
would be remembered. Thus, the amendments made by Shelley are framed to elicit a
strong response from his audience by maintaining an essential aspect of the Orient of
Oriental despotism.
In the last few lines of the sonnet, Shelley derives home the outcome of tyranny
hrough the evocation of a barren and bleak landscape: ‘Nothing beside remains. Round
the decay / Of the Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch
far away’ (12-14). Rodenbeck makes a valid point that ‘This setting is vital to the poem,
since its theme or meaning requires that it evoke for us a place in which, apart from the
portra.t statue of the tyrant, all other physical evidence of an empire shall have
disappeared without a trace’ (129). The imagery of a 'Colossal Wreck, boundless and
bare’, and ‘lone and level sands stretch far away’ does arouse an ‘affect’ of desolation the
reader is supposed to feel, but it is also manufactured. Waith notes that ‘what is perhaps
most striking, the ‘colossal wreck’ is not alone in the desert, surrounded by ‘lone and
level sands,’ but in the midst of the substantial remains of a large temple’ (22). Shelley
62
disregards these facts. In depopulating the landscape, Shelley appropriates the Orient to
sustain stereotypes of the distant degenerate ‘other’ in h s poem.
63
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