- The Poem
- Notes on Context
- Notes on Form
- Notes on Content
- Commentary and Quotations
Charles Lamb heard Samuel Taylor Coleridge recite “Kubla Khan,” and believed it was meant for “parlour publication” (i.e., live recitation) rather than preservation in print:
“...what he calls a vision, Kubla Khan--which said vision he repeats so enchantingly that it irradiates and brings heaven and Elysian bowers into my parlour.”Jorge Luis Borges wrote of the parallels between the historical figure of Kubla Khan building a dream palace and Samuel Taylor Coleridge writing this poem, in his essay, “The Dream of Coleridge”:
--from an 1816 letter to William Wordsworth, in The Letters of Charles Lamb (Macmillan, 1888)
“The first dream added a palace to reality; the second, which occurred five centuries later, a poem (or the beginning of a poem) suggested by the palace. The similarity of the dreams hints of a plan.... In 1691 Father Gerbillon of the Society of Jesus confirmed that ruins were all that was left of the palace of Kubla Khan; we know that scarcely fifty lines of the poem were salvaged. These facts give rise to the conjecture that this series of dreams and labors has not yet ended. The first dreamer was given the vision of the palace, and he built it; the second, who did not know of the other’s dream, was given the poem about the palace. If the plan does not fail, some reader of ‘Kubla Khan’ will dream, on a night centuries removed from us, of marble or of music. This man will not know that two others also dreamed. Perhaps the series of dreams has no end, or perhaps the last one who dreams will have the key....”
--from “The Dream of Coleridge” in Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952 by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Ruth Simms (University of Texas Press, 1964, reprint forthcoming November 2007)
