Kubla-Klan and Ozymandias

1. In "Kubla-Klan", I think that the author is warning against letting your imagination run away with you. When the poem first starts off, with a beautiful paradise with imagery to make the reader think that the poem is going to be about a wonderful dream place. But the poem quickly takes a turn to the total opposite spectrum by the end of the poem. The author then talks about this place in the total opposite spectrum. He says this place is "savage" and has "caves of ice". By the end of the poem the author is telling the reader to beware by saying "and close your eyes with holy dread, for he on honeydew hath fed, and drunk the milk of paradise." To me this is saying that the author is warning the reader to watch out for what you imagine could be a paradise because in reality it might not be as great as you thought it would be. I believe Coleridge wrote this to show people that what they think is better is not always best, and that things aren't always as they appear.

2. As I read Ozymandias, I heard three speakers within the poem. The three speakers are the narrator, the traveler, and Ozymandias. The narrator tells what a traveler once said to him about a broken statue he saw in the desert. From this we hear the third speaker, Ozymandias, he says "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings, Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" This statement I believe is important to the overall meaning of the poem. This quote that Ozymandias says suggests that this man was once a great leader and had eventually fallen in his rein of power. The fact that the statue is now broken when the traveler describes it in this poem, could suggest that the leader had fallen or been taken over by someone else. I think this poem is trying to explain to the reader that things can be taken away in a moment so never take a single thing for granted.