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A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
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“A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Source
Kubla Khan
Date
1816
Meaning

Meaning of “A savage place! as holy and enchanted As…”

The poem fuses beauty, holiness and menace so that the landscape feels simultaneously sacred, supernatural and dangerous.

Source context

Where does it come from?

“Kubla Khan,” published with Christabel in 1816 and represented in Project Gutenberg #11101. These are lyric-narrative lines describing the “deep romantic chasm”; the supernatural imagery is poetic invention.

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It is eternity now.
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“It is eternity now.”

Richard Jefferies · The Story of My Heart · 1883
Meaning & context

Jefferies collapses ordinary chronological distinctions into an intensely experienced present, describing the current moment as participation in eternity rather than a point merely passing toward the future.

Source details

The Story of My Heart (1883), Chapter III, Project Gutenberg #2317. The inherited Chapter I note is corrected: ‘It is eternity now’ occurs in Jefferies’s tumulus meditation after he writes that, recognising his inner consciousness / psyche, he cannot understand time. It is speculative spiritual autobiography and metaphysical-poetic reflection, not a scientific theory of time, physics or consciousness.

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A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.
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“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.”

John Keats · Endymion · 1818
Meaning & context

Keats opens the poem by claiming that beauty can continue to give delight beyond the instant in which it is first encountered.

Source details

Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818), Book I, line 1, Project Gutenberg #24280, reproducing the Taylor and Hessey 1818 text. “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever” opens the poem’s mythic Romantic meditation on beauty; the statement remains a poetic proposition rather than empirical evidence that every aesthetic experience produces permanent happiness.

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Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.
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“Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson · Nature · 1836
Meaning & context

The same surroundings can feel different according to the observer’s inner state, linking perception of nature with emotion and perspective.

Source details

Nature (first published 1836), Chapter I, “Nature,” in James Munroe and Company’s 1849 new-edition witness represented by Project Gutenberg #29433. A scan of the same 1849 J. Munroe edition places “Nature always wears the colors of the spirit” on printed page 9. Emerson is arguing that inward condition colors the experience of landscape; this is nineteenth-century Transcendentalist philosophy, not modern cognitive science, environmental psychology or a clinical claim.

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In Wildness is the preservation of the World.
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“In Wildness is the preservation of the World.”

Henry David Thoreau · Walking · 1862
Meaning & context

Wild nature is presented not as useless space but as a preserving force for imagination, freedom, and human flourishing.

Source details

Essay “Walking”; Thoreau links uncultivated nature with renewal and human vitality.

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I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love.
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“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love.”

Walt Whitman · Song of Myself · 1855
Meaning & context

Death becomes continuity with nature rather than simple disappearance, connecting mortality with renewal, earth, and the lives that follow.

Source details

Leaves of Grass (1855), untitled first-edition poem later known as “Song of Myself,” printed page 56 (Wikisource scan page 62). The line belongs to the poem’s final movement, later numbered section 52; the 1855 record remains tied to the unnumbered first edition rather than inheriting later section structure.

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Annihilating all that’s made To a green thought in a green shade.
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“Annihilating all that’s made To a green thought in a green shade.”

Andrew Marvell · The Garden · 1681
Meaning & context

Marvell imagines the contemplative mind withdrawing from ordinary objects and social striving into an intensely concentrated vision of green nature.

Source details

“The Garden,” posthumously published in Miscellaneous Poems (1681), represented through the public-domain Project Gutenberg text in The Quiet Life. The lines belong to a lyric meditation on solitude, mind, nature and Edenic imagery.