"
These three lines make a deeper impression than any others in
the poem, and form its main theme.
Nor is the feeling of the supernatural unrecognised. Spirits are
near with prophetic promptings. From a deep chasm the sacred
river throws up a mighty fountain, and for a short space
wanders through wood and dale, only to plunge again into its
measureless caverns, and sink in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
"And mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war."
Thus when Coleridge's imagination was set free, the mode of
feeling declared itself which had persisted down the ages to the
present. The primitive experience is there in its essentials,
enriched by the aesthetic and intellectual gains of the
intervening centuries. Doubtless there is a living idea, or rather
a group of living ideas, behind the phenomena of subterranean
waters.
Wordsworth has described a more personal experience which
chimes in with all that has been said.
"Through a rift
Not distant from the shore on which we stood,
A fixed, abysmal, gloomy, breathing place--
Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams
Innumerable, roaring with one voice!
Heard over earth and sea, and, in that hour,
For so it seemed, felt by the starry heavens."
If the modern poet could be thus affected, how much more the
primitive man who looked down on water falling into chasms,
or rushing through their depths.
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