Two contemporaries, both prominent Romantics, composed poems which significantly featured dreams. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats wrote “Kubla Khan” and “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” respectively, and in these poems, women were at the heart of these dreams. These women were portrayed as dark forces and sometimes manipulative and controlling.
        Both poets clearly indicated they were speaking of dreams in their poems. Coleridge stated through his subtitle that “Kubla Khan” was a “vision in a dream.” Keats, through his character of the Knight, said, “I dream’d-- Ah! woe betide!/ The latest dream I ever dream’d,” telling the reader the events of stanza 10 and 11 were seen in a dream.
        Female figures were seen in these dreams. “Kubla Khan” showed two women and made subtle references to female sexuality and genitalia, and “La Belle...” referred to one woman, the titular woman without mercy. Both poems portrayed women as sinister or otherworldly creatures. One line in “Kubla Khan” mentions a “woman wailing for her demon-lover!” Setting the superficial interpretation of the occult reference aside, one can further interpret the woman as being in league with dark magic. She might be a demon herself, after all. Keats’ Dame, in the dream, was said to be “[f]ull beautiful, a fairy’s child” “and her eyes were wild.” One could stop at the label of “fairy’s child” but looking in the Oxford English Dictionary, one gets more hints from a myriad of definitions for ‘wild.’ The particularly interesting and pertinent definitions were: savage, cruel, or “not submitting to moral control.” Any of these definitions paint a picture of a dark, perhaps evil, person. The idea is even more highlighted if one used “desolate.” An old aphorism says “the eyes are the window to the soul.” If the Dame has wild, that is to say, desolate and empty eyes, one could say the Dame was soulless.
        Further indications that the women spoken of in both poems were evil come to light in other sections of the poems. In “Kubla Khan” the other woman explicitly painted was of the “Abyssinian maid” who played a musical instrument. Consulting the dictionary again, its definition of Abyssinian refers us to the land we now call Ethiopia; therefore the maid was quite likely black-skinned. In the era when Coleridge wrote this poem, Ethiopian women were exotic, mysterious, and even dangerous. They held heathen beliefs and as far as any Britishman knew, they might practice dark rituals. This references back to the Dame, who seemed to practice dark magic, which makes men “death pale” and “withered” and changes the landscape.
        The Abyssinian maid of “Kubla Khan” shared another thing in common with the Dame, in the fact that they both had the power to enslave men. The narrator of “Kubla Khan” said after hearing the maid playing on her dulcimer, “that with music loud and strong,/ I would build that dome in air.” The Dame also used music on the Knight, since he said , “[f]or sidelong would she bend, and sing/ A fairy’s song.” The song had the effect of bewitching the Knight, so that he “nothing else saw all day long” except for her. In various paintings inspired by this poem, artists have chosen to render the Knight in a state of stupefaction. The final proof is in the dream the Knight had, in which he was told that the Dame had him “in thrall.”
        The main difference between the portrayal of these women in both dreams is that the women in “Kubla Khan” did not lead to death and decay. The narrator’s sentiments leaned towards feelings of joy. The Abyssinian maid’s song gave him “deep delight.” It made him eager to please her and build “[t]hat sunny dome! those caves of ice!” As for
the woman whose cries sounded out in the air, the narrator described the scene as “holy and enchanted.” The place where she cried at was described as a “deep romantic chasm,” near where a cedar forest crossed a green hill. The description of a living, green landscape lends itself to an ideal location where happy lovers would unite. The union of lovers in “La Belle...” had the opposite sentiments. After being with the Dame, the Knight became ill, “[s]o haggard and so woe-begone” as the questioner described. The Knight’s dream apparently showed the woman’s previous victims, “pale kings, and princes too.” Even plant and animal life fled from the woman’s powers because “the sedge has wither’d from the lake,/ And no birds sing.”
        The circumstances of both dreams were different as well. In Coleridge’s poetic dream, the women were in a land of plenty. The narrator described a land “[w]here blossomed many an incense-bearing tree” and “gardens bright with sinuous rills grew, along with “chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail.” The effect of the dream in “La Belle...” was that of famine and starvation. The pale men in the Knight’s dream had “starv’d lips” which were “gaped wide” as if to swallow the dreamer. Outside of the dream, the poem indicates famine through the lack of grass life and birds, and the sudden illness that struck the Knight, withering him away.
        The final commonality between the poems is that the dreams in both poems served as warnings. The entire dream which the narrator of “Kubla Khan” relayed ended with the idea that if others were to hear or see what he had, they “all should cry, Beware! Beware!” They should protect themselves from the narrator “[f]or he on honey-dew hath fed,/ And drunk the milk of Paradise.” The Knight’s dream was a warning to him. Within the dream, the pale figures told him, albeit too late, that the Dame had him in her “thrall.”
        Through the poems “Kubla Khan” and “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” Coleridge and Keats present almost similar pictures of sinister women with powers that were to be feared. The effects of these dreams and the women involved had different consequences on the dreamers. In light of these consequences, it wouldn’t be quite correct to say the narrator and the Knight had dreams; a better term would be ‘nightmares.’

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