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Comparison of the Supernatural in Coleridge’s Kubla Khan and Christabel

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Comparison of the Supernatural in Coleridge’s Kubla Khan and Christabel
Coleridge’s achievement as a poet rests on a small number of poems which can be divided into two diverse groups:- the daemonic group which consists of the three poems The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and Kubla Khan and the conversational group which includes the poems like The Eolian Harp, Frost At Midnight, the irregular ode Dejection and To William Wordsworth. The later poems Limbo and Ne Plus Ultra mark a kind of return to the daemonic mode. The poems of the daemonic group bring out Coleridge’s preoccupation with the imaginative, the occult and the supernatural.
Though pre-eminently a poet of the supernatural, Coleridge differs from the school of Gothic Romance in his treatment of the supernatural. Gothic writers like Horace Walpole, William Beckford, Ann Radcliffe and Mathew Gregory Lewis used sensational and supernatural occurrences with an aim to evoke chilling terror by exploiting mystery and a variety of horrors. Coleridge also makes use of supernatural agencies and situations but his treatment aims to make the ‘supernatural appear natural’. His focus was on how to make the supernatural elements acceptable and believable to the readers- in his own words, how to bring about “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith.”
This paper is an attempt to compare the supernatural aspect in two of his poems - Kubla Khan and Christabel.

To begin with, the supernatural in both the poems is introduced differently; in other words, Coleridge has used different techniques to ‘initiate’ the element of supernatural. This can be analyzed as follows: in Christabel, the opening lines immediately hint at the supernatural by the introduction of three things: midnight, owl and cock. These things are commonplace ideas which have strong associations with the paranormal and as a result a sense of apprehension and dread is generated in the minds of the reader right at the beginning. The opening lines of Kubla Khan on the other hand present
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