Oh Xanadu!

I watched a film from a few years back today - Sanctum.  The characters of the story were all avid spelunkers and were discovering new veins to a cave only partially explored.  Although they were all fairly rugged characters all but one of them died in the cave.  Near the end of the movie, the last two characters were facing their darkest moments in the cave.  Viewers didn't know whether or not the two would make it out alive.  As they moved along the cave wall in the dark, they quoted the poem Xanadu by Coleridge to give them comfort.  The poem speaks of a paradise, of a place of unparalleled beauty.

The phone I had before the smart phones came out allowed pictures to be placed as a background or beside phone numbers.  I placed one of the most marvelous underwater pictures I have ever seen in my phone and called it Xanadu.  It was my paradise.  I had the phone for one year.  I am two phones removed from that one now, and the picture was not available to me on my new phones.  But under X in my phone directory I still have Xanadu listed because I forever cherish the one year I got to see paradise daily.

Tonight is dedicated to the most amazing, most beautiful place I could humanly imagine.  It has no parallel.  I can identify with the last two lines because for one year I delighted in the taste of honey dew and drank in the milk of paradise.

Xanadu
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.





  So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.





But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!




The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

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