Kubla Kahn

The idea of reading is so strange. The idea that when you sit down with 100 pages of paper in your hand you will know nothing of that content but after reading 100 pages you will have another story in you database. When does the transformation happen? The one where you go from reading to living? When you go from simply in taking the content to suddenly smelling the aromas, feeling what they feel, living their emotions, basically escaping your mind. That's what I felt with this poem, "Kubla Kahn" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one minute I was so bored I was falling asleep and next moment I was pouring my voice into it. I went from not understanding one part, to grasping the concept in my hands within 1 second or was it 10; that's the thing behind this concept about escaping. You don't realize when it happens just that it is suddenly there. When I try to go to sleep at night I never can but then I focus my mind and suddenly I wake up in the morning; how does that escape become created? When I play my music all I see is notes at first, the challenge ahead but then somewhere between my second hour of practicing suddenly it is a melody, a whole story, a pattern within my head. Or like when you first meet someone new all you have to go on is their body language and look but after talking to them for awhile you suddenly see so much deeper. 

My poem is about a drug paradise. His 'dome of pleasure' when he is high. I didn't get it at first, all the things he described to me were ugly and weird, "like why would that be beautiful?" but then my mom asked me to describe to her something beautiful and I couldn't at least not in a way that made it beautiful in words. "A garden bright with sinuous rills," was supposed to be beautiful but without the words beautiful and amazing I couldn't see it as beautiful. Now I can understand, when I recite the poem to myself I see lush gardens, a happy river, I imagine mineral caverns, and beautiful greens of all shades in the forest. I see the authors wish to create this place in every ones mind, it was all a dream both literally and figuratively. In my mind the author created this so that everyone who read it could have a shiny hope of perfection. When the author writes "Beware, Beware" I feel like he is telling everyone the troubles of perfection. How it is amazing but it is so easy to get used to it and to take advantage of it. That perfection is perfect because it isn't real, because in our dreams it can be everything but in life nothing is truly perfect.

When I recite my poem I talk with a lot of varied tones, throughout the first paragraph my tone is soft and gentle in an attempt to convey the beauty of the paradise the poem describes, in the second paragraph I start softly and grow louder, bolder, and faster to convey the urgency yet laziness yet everything unrealness in the poem. Then in the the second half of the second paragraph  I go lazy, calm, and serene trying to convey to the tone of a "lifeless ocean." In the fourth paragraph I become more alive, more there, I am not in my paradise anymore but want to create it, at the end I talk with a condescending air trying to convey the power of drugs, the danger but also the exhilaration.