After The Tempest, The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan are now the happiest hunting-ground for the symbolist. Mr. Wilson Knight's interpretation of both poems, but particularly of the latter, in The Starlit Dome (1941), is, to say the least, extraordinary; still more so than the similar one of Mr. Robert Graves in The Meaning of Dreams (1924), though not so entangled with inaccurate biography and irrelevant psychoanalysis. “We may imagine a sexual union,” says Mr. Knight, between life, the masculine, and death, the feminine. Then our “romantic chasm” and “cedarn cover,” the savage and enchanted yet holy place with its “half intermitted burst” may be, in spite of our former reading, vaguely related to the functioning of man's creative organs and their physical setting and, too, to all principles of manly and adventurous action; while the caverns that engulf the sacred river will be correspondingly feminine with a dark passivity and infinite peace. The pleasure-dome we may fancy as the pleasure of a sexual union in which birth and death are the great contesting partners, with human existence as the life-stream, the blood-stream, of a mighty coition [p. 95].
The Holy Place as a Subject for the Study of the Geography of Religion