But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover
1) Then, just like that, we get pulled back into the wild, slightly scary natural world. The speaker takes us back to the river Alph, which is beginning to seem almost like a character in this poem.
2) Xanadu is located in a valley surrounded by hills. The river cascades down the side of one of these hills, cutting a "deep chasm," or canyon, through it.
3) The chasm cuts a path "athwart a cedarn cover" which means that the entire hillside is covered in cedar trees. This river is violent and uncontrollable, completely unlike those poky little rills we heard about it line eight.
4) The speaker seems to be pulled toward this river like a magnet. He could have imagined himself sitting in those gardens, having someone feed him grapes.
5) But it's the "romantic" chasm that appeals to him, and gives the poem its life.
6) Can you feel how excited the speaker is when he talks about the river?
7) One way Coleridge tips us off to his excitement is with all of those exclamation points. They are all over the place in the first few lines of this section.
8) Look at just two examples: "a cedarn cover!" (line 13), "a savage place!" (line 14). The exclamation points really make those images pop out at you, don't they?
9) And how about that woman, the demon lover, and that waning moon?
10) The speaker is using them to let us know just how romantic and spooky the chasm really is.
11) Our speaker wants us to imagine a woman, maybe even the ghost of a woman, since she haunts this place.
12) Maybe she has been cursed, or has had a spell cast on her, and she has fallen in love with an evil spirit.
13) If this woman wanted to scream about her terrible fate, to let out all her sadness and her anger and her longing, where would she go? She'd go to a place just like this: a lonely, wild canyon, where no one could hear her but the "waning moon" (that just means the moon is getting smaller).
14) These images are really intense, and it gives us a little glimpse of a whole new story.
15) The speaker isn't saying that any of these things are there in the poem; he's saying that this is the kind of place where they would beat home.
16) He's coloring the mood of the landscape, not introducing new characters, so don't let the details throw you off too much.
17) Remember that we're hearing a description of a dream or a vision.
18) Have you ever been at that moment where you're about to fall asleep and something flashes across your mind? One minute it's there, and its really intense, maybe as intense as this woman and her demon. Then the next minute it's gone, just like the woman in this poem.