Dreaming of Xanadu: A Guide to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan"

• The Poem
• Notes on Context
• Notes on Form
• Notes on Content
• Commentary and Quotations

“Kubla Khan” is famously incomplete, and thus cannot be said to be a strictly formal poem -- yet its use of rhythm and the echoes of end-rhymes is masterful, and these poetic devices have a great deal to do with its powerful hold on the reader’s imagination. Its meter is a chanting series of iambs, sometimes tetrameter (four feet in a line, da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM) and sometimes pentameter (five feet, da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM). Line-ending rhymes are everywhere, not in a simple pattern, but interlocking in a way that builds to the poem’s climax (and makes it great fun to read out loud). The rhyme scheme may be summarized as follows:

A B A A B C C D B D B
E F E E F G G H H I I J J K A A K L L
M N M N O O
P Q R R Q B S B S T O T T T O U U O

(Each line in this scheme represents one stanza. Please note that I have not followed the usual custom of beginning each new stanza with “A” for the rhyme-sound, because I want to make visible how Coleridge circled around to use earlier rhymes in some of the later stanzas -- for instance, the “A”s in the second stanza, and the “B”s in the fourth stanza.)