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 a poem clearly meant to be spoken. So many early readers and critics found it literally incomprehensible that it became a commonly accepted idea that this poem is “composed of sound rather than sense.” Its sound is beautiful -- as will be evident to anyone who reads it aloud.

The poem is certainly not devoid of meaning, however. It begins as a dream stimulated by Coleridge’s reading of Samuel Purchas’ 17th century travel book, Purchas his Pilgrimage, or Relations of the World and the Religions observed in all Ages and Places discovered, from the Creation unto the Present (London, 1617). The first stanza describes the summer palace built by Kublai Khan, the grandson of the Mongol warrior Genghis Khan and founder of the Yuan dynasty of Chinese emperors in the 13th century, at Xanadu (or Shangdu):

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree

Xanadu, north of Beijing in inner Mongolia, was visited by Marco Polo in 1275 and after his account of his travels to the court of Kubla Khan, the word “Xanadu” became synonymous with foreign opulence and splendor.

Compounding the mythical quality of the place Coleridge is describing, the poem’s next lines name Xanadu as the place

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man

This is likely a reference to the description of the River Alpheus in Description of Greece by the 2nd century geographer Pausanias (Thomas Taylor’s 1794 translation was in Coleridge’s library). According to Pausanias, the river rises up to the surface, then descends into the earth again and comes up elsewhere in fountains -- clearly the source of the images in the second stanza of the poem:

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.

But where the lines of the first stanza are measured and tranquil (in both sound and sense), this second stanza is agitated and extreme, like the movement of the rocks and the sacred river, marked with the urgency of exclamation points both at the beginning of the stanza and at its end:

And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The fantastical description becomes even more so in the third stanza:

It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

And then the fourth stanza makes a sudden turn, introducing the narrator’s “I” and turning from the description of the palace at Xanadu to something else the narrator has seen:

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.

Some critics have suggested that Mount Abora is Coleridge’s name for Mount Amara, the mountain described by John Milton in Paradise Lost at the source of the Nile in Ethiopia (Abyssinia) -- an African paradise of nature here set next to Kubla Khan’s created paradise at Xanadu.

To this point “Kubla Khan” is all magnificent description and allusion, but as soon the poet actually manifests himself in the poem in the word “I” in the last stanza, he quickly turns from describing the objects in his vision to describing his own poetic endeavor:

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!

This must be the place where Coleridge’s writing was interrupted; when he returned to write these lines, the poem turned out to be about itself, about the impossibility of embodying his fantastical vision. The poem becomes the pleasure-dome, the poet is identified with Kubla Khan -- both are creators of Xanadu, and Coleridge is apeaking of both poet and khan in the poem’s last lines:

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.