Kubla Khan- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Poetry- Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan

Coleridge’s supposedly “opium induced” masterpiece, Kubla Khan, seems to have resonated with me in a way that epitomises the aspects I love about Romantic poetry. Its highly embellished descriptions and narrative-style encounters with the sublime position this poem as one of high creativity and genuine entertainment. The following copy of the poem is taken from www.thepoetryfoundation.org :

Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

   Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round;

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

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!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was forced:

Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:

And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

It flung up momently the sacred river.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;

And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!

   The shadow of the dome of pleasure

   Floated midway on the waves;

   Where was heard the mingled measure

   From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

 A damsel with a dulcimer

   In a vision once I saw:

 It was an Abyssinian maid

And on her dulcimer she played,

   Singing of Mount Abora.

   Could I revive within me

   Her symphony and song,                                                                                   

  To such a deep delight ’twould win me,

    That with music loud and long,

    I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,

  And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

  His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

  Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread

  For he on honey-dew hath fed,

  And drunk the milk of Paradise.

After-Thoughts:

Perhaps what I find most striking about this poem is the consistent oscillation between the idyllic setting of the ‘pleasure-dome’ paired with the more sinister descriptions of the ‘lifeless ocean’ and ‘romantic chasm’. Coleridge’s use of adjectives often make the exact interpretations of the setting elusive and it is this sense of fragmentation and chaos he creates that I find so interesting. The ‘deep romantic chasm’ is described as something ‘savage’, ‘holy’, and ‘enchanted’ simultaneously; the almost contradictory amalgamation in Coleridge’s lexical choices manages to entice and haunt readers and it seems as though he is attempting to use his speaker in order to reflect the sublime situations he has encountered in his reverie.  

The mere structure also becomes crucial in this poem, allowing Coleridge to manipulate the reader’s pace and create distinctions in tone through the use of long and short lines and rigidity of meter:

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;

And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The first three lines here read seamlessly into one another and then seem to be overcome by the more abrupt line structures which allow Kubla Khan to reach its climax (where Kubla Khan himself is described). Coleridge seems to deviate from the iambic tetrameter initially used in the poem but this is reignited when he talks of the ‘damsel with a dulcimer’. This allows the structure to reach a sense of balance and harmony again after the long-syllabled lines and as readers, we are injected with a strange sense of relief and accomplishment.