I like Coleridge's style, and the rhythm of this piece. He has classic alternating end-rhyme, which lends a singsong-y feel to the poem, but if you chant this poem instead of singing it, you get a very different idea.
Chanted, this poem (well, at least the first half of the poem) sounds like the kind of deeply intoned verse you'd expect to hear from weird Satan-worshippers huddling around a fire. (For those who have read Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown, the spectacle in the woods is where I imagine this poem being chanted). It is amazing how Coleridge infuses his words with a mystical and terrifying quality.
I also wanted to address the idea given at the end of class - that the "caverns measureless to man" allude to the human mind. I hadn't really thought of that upon my first reading of the poem, because I had been imagining Hell as described in Virgil's Aeneid, where, underground, there are winding paths you can take that fork off to all the different areas of hell. Now that the human mind idea was put out there, I like it. The idea of the mind actually bring the whole poem together because now the end makes sense, where the poet talks about building the dome in the air (imagining Xanadu, or a place like it) and drinking the milk of paradise (drugs?) In fact, in light of what we discussed with Wordsworth, perhaps these lines refer to the writing of the poem - because didn't Coleridge believe the verse came to him when he was on drugs?
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