Kubla Khan Or, a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment (1798)

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     In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
     A stately pleasure dome decree:
     Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
     Through caverns measureless to man
5          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;
10     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
15     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:
20     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.
25     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
30     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.
35     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,
40          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,
45     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!
50     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.

Editor´s Comments

According to Coleridge, Kubla Khan just appeared to him in a dream. It came out of nowhere, and then when he was distracted for a moment, the memory of it vanished as quickly as it came, and all he had left is the few lines he'd written down when he first awoke. His poem is the record of a unique experience, but when we find that other people have had similar experiences, and recorded them in similar ways, then we call that a "convention." In the Middle Ages this convention, which was very widely used, was called the dream vision. Coleridge begins his dream vision when he takes medicine that contains opium; in the Middle Ages, someone about to have a dream vision would most likely fall asleep under a tree, at noontime.

The most interesting thing about dream visions is that, just for a moment, they take the dreamer out of the realm of ordinary life. But then the experience has to be described, and all the poet has to describe them with is the language of his or her own time. So dream visions are about an extraordinary reality, but they are also very much of their own time and place. In a medieval poem, we might see images borrowed from the traditions of religious allegory, or perhaps from Celtic fantasy: a pure white stag and a group of beautiful ladies galloping out of fairyland. Coleridge's images are just as striking, but they too are conventions. The landscape of his poem is the landscape of the eighteenth-century sublime, and the romantic paintings of the next century: great deep chasms, caves of ice, shafts of sunlight across inky shadows. The characters come from those exotic places that so fascinated the age: Abyssinia, China. Primitivism had been fashionable for some time when Coleridge wrote. The idea of the "noble savage" probably defines what people might have been feeling when they valued something that seemed strange and dangerous to them at the same time. In Kubla Khan, the "deep romantic chasm" is described as "savage," but in the same breath it's also described as "holy" and "enchanted." Poets can have strange visions, but if they want to write poems about those visions, they have to use the language that's current in their own time and place.

Text History

In a prefatory note to "Kubla Khan," Coleridge gave the following background: "In the summer of the year 1797, the author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas's Pilgrimage: 'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.' The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external sense, during which time he has the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!"

Click here to see Ash Farm, near Porlock, mentioned by Coleridge in this note as the place where "Kubla Khan" was written.

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Imagining the Self as Other

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