Kubla Khan -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

(Poem #30) Kubla Khan (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. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

published in 1816, with the following

Author's Preface:

"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 [opium, most likely] 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
Purcha'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 awakening 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 purpot 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!"

If I had to name my single favourite poem, there's a good chance that
this would be the one (and before you ask, yes, I will indeed mention
the other contenders when I get around to sending them). 'Kubla Khan' is
sheer magic, in its language, its images, its utter *poetry* (there's no
other word for it).

And yet... what is it that makes the poem wonderful? Admitted, the first
five lines and the last two are sublimely perfect, but the poem as a
whole? To tell the truth, I don't know. I cannot (for myself) dissect
the magic of 'Kubla Khan; I'm content to be entranced every time I read
it.

If you're interested in an extremely detailed analysis of this poem (and
of other works by Coleridge), do read John Spencer Hill's 'Coleridge
Companion', available online at
[broken link] http://aix1.uottawa.ca/~phoenix/ccomp.htm

And for those of you without fast net access, here are a few (long but
interesting) extracts from the book:

<extracts>

... Kubla Khan is a fascinating and exasperating poem. Almost everyone
has read it, almost everyone has been charmed by its magic, almost
everyone thinks he knows what it is about -- and almost everyone, it
seems, has felt impelled to write about it. It must surely be true that
no poem of comparable length in English or any other language has been
the subject of so much critical commentary. Its fifty-four lines have
spawned thousands of pages of discussion and analysis. Kubla Khan is the
sole or a major subject in five book-length studies; close to 150
articles and book-chapters (doubtless I have missed some others) have
been devoted exclusively to it; and brief notes and incidental
comments on it are without number. Despite this deluge, however, there
is no critical unanimity and very little agreement on a number of
important issues connected with the poem: its date of composition, its
"meaning", its sources in Coleridge's reading and observation of nature,
its structural integrity (i.e. fragment versus complete poem), and its
relationship to the Preface by which Coleridge introduced it on its
first publication in 1816...

... In a moment of rash optimism a notable scholar once began an essay
by declaring that "We now know almost everything about Coleridge's Kubla
Khan except what the poem is about". The truth of the matter, however,
is that we know almost nothing conclusive  about Kubla Khan, including
what it is about.This flower plucked in Paradise (or on Parnassus) and
handed down to us by Coleridge is, indeed, a miracle of rare device; but
like all miracles it is largely elusive...

... By far the most intriguing question about this most intriguing of
poems is "What does it mean?" -- if, indeed, it has or was ever intended
to have any particular meaning. For the overwhelming majority of
Coleridge's contemporaries, Kubla Khan seemed (as Lamb foresaw) to be no
better than nonsense, and they dismissed it contemptuously.   "The poem
itself is below criticism", declared the anonymous reviewer in the
Monthly Review (Jan 1817); and Thomas Moore, writing in the Edinburgh
Review (Sep 1816), tartly asserted that "the thing now before us, is
utterly destitute of value" and he defied "any man to point out a
passage of poetical merit" in it...

... While derisive asperity of this sort is the common fare of most of
the early reviews, there are, nevertheless, contemporary readers whose
response is both sympathetic and positive -- even though they value the
poem for its rich and bewitching suggestiveness rather than for any
discernible "meaning" that it might possess. Charles Lamb, for example,
speaks fondly of hearing Coleridge recite Kubla Khan "so enchantingly
that it irradiates & brings  heaven & Elysian bowers into my parlour
while he sings or says it"; and Leigh Hunt turns hopefully to analogies
in music and painting in an effort to describe the poem's haunting but
indefinable effect:

"Kubla Khan is a voice and a vision, an everlasting tune in our mouths,
a dream fit for Cambuscan and all his poets, a dance of pictures such as
Giotto or Cimabue, revived and re-inspired, would have made for a Storie
of Old Tartarie, a piece of the invisible world made visible by a sun at
midnight and sliding before our eyes."...

... Throughout the nineteenth century and during the first quarter of
the twentieth century Kubla Khan was considered, almost universally, to
be a poem in which sound overwhelms sense. With a few exceptions (such
as Lamb and Leigh Hunt), Romantic critics -- accustomed to poetry of
statement and antipathetic to any notion of ars gratia artis --
summarily dismissed Kubla Khan as a meaningless farrago of sonorous
phrases beneath the notice of serious criticism. It only demonstrated,
according to William Hazlitt, that "Mr Coleridge can write better
nonsense verses than any man in England" -- and then he added,
proleptically, "It is not a poem, but a musical composition"...

... For Victorian and Early Modern readers, on the other hand, Kubla
Khan was a poem not below but beyond the reach of criticism, and they
adopted (without the irony) Hazlitt's perception that it must properly
be appreciated as verbalised music. "When it has been said", wrote
Swinburne of Kubla Khan, "that such melodies were never heard, such
dreams never dreamed, such speech never spoken, the chief thing remains
unsaid, and unspeakable. There is a charm upon [this poem] which can
only be felt in silent submission of wonder". Even John Livingston Lowes
-- culpable, if ever anyone has been, of murdering to dissect --
insisted on the elusive magic of Coleridge's dream vision: "For Kubla
Khan is as near enchantment, I suppose, as we are like to come in this
dull world."   While one may track or attempt to track individual images
to their sources, Kubla Khan as a whole remains utterly inexplicable --
a "dissolving phantasmagoria" of highly charged images whose streaming
pageant is, in the final analysis, "as aimless as it is magnificent".
The earth has bubbles as the water has, and this is of them...

... Generally speaking, however, the most popular view by far is that
Kubla Khan is concerned with the poetic process itself.   "What is Kubla
Khan about?   This is, or ought to be, an established fact of
criticism:   Kubla Khan is a poem about poetry"...

... The dream of Xanadu itself is an inspired vision...  the artist's
purpose is to capture such visions in words, but in attempting to do so
he encounters two serious difficulties:   first, language is an
inadequate medium that permits only an approximation of the visions it
is used to record, and, second, the visions themselves, by the time the
poet comes to set them down, have faded into the light of common day and
must be reconstructed from memory.   Between the conception and the
execution falls the shadow.... the vision of Kubla's Xanadu is replaced
by that of a damsel singing of Mount Abora -- an experience more
auditory than visual and therefore less susceptible of description by
mere words...

</extracts>

Of course, if you want to know what the poem *really* means, and also
who the 'person on business from Porlock' *really* was, you have only to
read Douglas Adams' (truly amazing) book, 'Dirk Gently's Holistic
Detective Agency' :-)

Oh, and (before I forget), the rock music connection: Rush (and if you
haven't heard Rush you haven't lived) did a terrific song called
'Xanadu', based on this poem. I like the live version on the album
'Exit... Stage Left' best. Well worth a listen.

Another rock music connection (I'm really spoiling you here): Frankie
Goes To Hollywood used this poem as the basis for their debut album,
'Welcome To The Pleasuredome'.

And finally, no less a personage than Martin DeMello (Hi Martin!) asked
me what the rock connection was for my previous poem. I had thought it
too obvious to mention, but evidently you can't be too careful these
days... anyway, the poem's structure is based on the hoedown, a
traditional song pattern and the basis for half the rock-and-roll
numbers ever written; the final verse

"You put your bombers in, you put your conscience out,
You take the human being and you twist it all about"

is, of course, a direct take on an r-and-r standard.

thomas.