hat they read the previous night about Coleridge. Handing out a lyric sheet, ask students to work in groups of three to find sensory examples in this song as it is being played. They can underline and identify these in the manner that you did on the overhead for the Who song. (Give students no more than five minutes following the song’s end to do this.)
- Ask each group to share at least two different images with the class, noting the example phrase as well as which sense is represented. You could have an overhead of the song up and note each group’s examples on it.
- Ask students to comment on this song: What could it possibly mean? Why would a rock and roll band seek inspiration from such a dead, bald, white guy as Coleridge?
- Turn students’ attention to Coleridge’s famous work “Kubla Khan”. (You might note for fun that not only was Rush inspired by this poem, but so were the creators of South Park, who used an allusion to it in South Park: The Movie.) In McDougal, Littell Literature: English Literature, the editors provide an introduction to the poem that talks about the legend of this poem--how Coleridge, under the influence of opium as he was reading a travelogue about China, fell into a dream recreating images of the Mongolian emperor Kubla Khan. Upon awakening, Coleridge attempted to write down the dream in poetic form, only to be interrupted by a businessman from a nearby town. Later, he was unable to recreate the rest of the dream, instead leaving only a “fragment” of “a vision in a dream” (454).
- Before reading this poem aloud, ask student to give examples of other poets, musicians, and artists whose works were influenced by substances (for example, Kurt Cobain’s drug use influences the song “Lithium”, “Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds” was supposedly influenced by the Beatles’ use of LSD, etc.)
- Ask for a student volunteer to read the poem out loud. Without comment, ask students to re-read the poem to themselves at least three more times, then do the following for the next class period:
- note specific examples and identify sensory imagery;
- note sound devices Coleridge uses in this poem, including alliteration, assonance, and onomatopoeia;
- write down any questions and comments about the poem.
- Ask students to reply to the following prompt:
What is your idea of a pleasure dome? What would it be built of and what would it be filled with?
- While students respond to the prompt, play the song “Welcome to the Pleasure Dome” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood.
- Encourage students to share their responses.
- Ask students to describe Coleridge’s idea of “Kubla Khan” and the pleasure-dome terms of imagery and sound devices (from their homework).
- Invite students to share the questions and comments about the poem that they were asked to note. Discuss these.
- How should we intetpret a poem like this? How does the notion of the interpretive screen work with this poem? How does the imagery affect our interpretation? Does one screen’s image become another’s symbol? The students’ task is to use at least one screen to offer an interpretation of “Kubla Khan”, constructing a NILA-formatted paper and a presentation with visual aids explaining how one particular screen would influence the interpretation (although students are free to offer multiple screens for interpretation, they must first use the screen they have been assigned).
To do so, students will count off in a 1-2-3-4 manner. The numbers correspond with the following screens:
Historical/experiential (Coleridge’s personal history, as well as world history, Chinese history, and events surrounding the Romantic era-students could begin by looking at the Coleridge timeline.
Psychological - perhaps from a Freudian/dream perspective-students may want to start with http://www.rcc.ryerson.ca/schools/rta/brdO38/usr/sparrow/index/html
Literary (Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, and Merriam Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature are good starting places, as is http://www.uottawa.ca/~phoenix/homepg1.html
Spiritual/religious (Kathleen Raine’s 