Inner Opiates

Having read and discussed De Quincy's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, we see the effects of opium on someone of a high intelligence and how the processes in his brain became both enlightened and twisted while on the drug. De Quincy talks about his experience of everything becoming vast and infinite, expanding forever outward and making him feel insignificant. I think that this is an interesting effect of the drug considering that in the footnotes of Coleridge's Kubla Khan, Coleridge was under the influence of an anodyne described as opium and fell asleep after reading a few short lines about "The Khan Kubla" and awoke to write an entire poem based around these few lines. The footnote goes on to say how he was detained during the writing of this poem and when he returned back to his desk, had forgotten most of what he was picturing so vividly only an hour before. What is interesting when looking at some of the lines in what came to be his poem Kubla Khan are some of the identical descriptions to De Quincy's Confessions. He writes about "ancestral voices" and a "deep romantic chasm" not unlike what De Quincy experienced in his dream states. It is perhaps the line: "The shadow of the dome of pleasure" that best describes what De Quincy and Coleridge experienced, as they both found an immense pleasure in their "trips" but not without some sort of balanced out darkness, whether it be in Coleridge's case, a visual chasm, or De Quincy's, an emotional panic and overwhelming sensation of horror.