Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
 
The following fragment is published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity, and as far as the Author’s own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits.
 
In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm house 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 Pilgrimes:’ ‘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 senses, 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 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 had been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter:
 

     Then all the charm
     Is broken — all that phantom-world so fair
     Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,
     And each mis-shape the other. Stay awhile,
     Poor youth! who scarcely dar’st lift up thine eyes —

     The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon

     The visions will return! And lo! he stays,

     And soon the fragments dim of lovely forms

     Come trembling back, unite, and now once more

     The pool becomes a mirror.
 
Yet from the still surviving recollections in his mind, the Author has frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as it were, given to him. but the to-morrow is yet to come.
 

As a contrast to this vision, I have annexed a fragment of a very different character, describing with equal fidelity the dream of pain and disease.
 
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. 5
   
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, 10
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 15
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 20
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 25
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! 30
   
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, 35
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, 40
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, 45
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! 50
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.  
 
 
Kubla Khan; or, a Vision in a Dream — Coleridge wrote this poem in October, 1797, but he did not publish it until 1816, for reasons explained below. I am providing the poem here as well as the preface to the poem that explains Coleridge’s story of its composition.
 
a poet of great and deserved celebrity — This poet was George Gordon, Lord Byron, who visited Coleridge on 10 April, 1816. Coleridge recited “Kubla Khan” and Byron persuaded Coleridge to allow Byron’s publisher John Murray to publish it and another fragmentary poem, “Christabel,” along with a completed poem called “The Pains of Sleep.” The volume appeared the next month. Coleridge does not name Byron here because he was concerned that doing so might hurt Byron’s reputation. He need not have worried: “Kubla Khan” and “Christabel” — fragments though they may be — are now generally considered two of Coleridge’s three greatest poems. (“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is the other.)
 
anodyne —pain reliever; in this case, the specific substance was opium (two grains of it, according to Coleridge, which was a relatively small dose). Opium was legal at the time. Unfortunately, Coleridge ultimately became addicted to it, which caused him problems for the rest of his life and probably was at least partly responsible for his death at age of sixty-one.
 
‘Purchas Pilgrimes.’ — Purchas, his Pilgrimes, or Relations of the World and Religions Observed in All Ages and Places Discovered, from the Creation to the Present is a 17th century book by an Anglican vicar named Samuel Purchas. Although he personally never traveled far, he would talk to sailors and record their descriptions of the places they had been. The sentence that Coleridge admits he remembers imperfectly actually reads, “In Xandu did Cublai Can build a stately Pallace, encompassing sixteen miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleasant Springs, delightfull streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure, which may be moved from place to place.”
 
a person on business from Porlock — Porlock is a small village on the English coast, near where Coleridge was staying in October of 1797. The identify of the man who interrupted Coleridge has remained a mystery for two two centuries. Indeed, it has become something of a cliché and frequent literary joke, a personification of the mundane world’s tendency to interfere with artistic production. Some people do not believe he existed; they think Coleridge is just making an excuse here for his inability to complete the poem. We are unlikely ever to know for sure.
 
Then — Coleridge inserts a short verse here. It describes a vision being lost and then regained. This is not part of “Kubla Khan.”
 
a fragment of a very different character — This refers to “The Pains of Sleep,” which followed “Kubla Khan” in the volume.
 
In — This is where “Kubla Khan” itself begins.
 
Kubla Khan — The historical Kubla (or Kublai) (1215-1294, ruled 1260-1294) Khan was a Mongol emperor of China. He was the grandson of Genghis Khan (born Temujin, lived 1162-1227), who had established his empire through conquest, including the slaughter of entire cities: supposedly 1.2 million people in one city alone and possibly 15 million people in what is now Iran. On the other hand, he practiced religious tolerance, and his empire eventually proved to be an improvement on the collection of warring smaller empires it replaced. Kubla Khan was quite different from his grandfather. He was highly cultured and presided over a golden age of civilization. His reign was relatively peaceful, and it saw a tremendous flowering of the arts and sciences. He was the emperor in power when Marco Polo, the Venetian merchant, traveled to China to open a trade-route. Polo spent twenty-four years there, and if his acccount is truthful, he spent years at the Khan’s court. In his account, the Khan is an intelligent, curious, and philosophical ruler but melancholy because he worries about what will happen to his empire after he dies. It had grown as large as it could practically grow, and anyone who presides over a golden age knows it cannot last forever.
 
Alph — Coleridge invents the name of this river.
 
Abyssynian — Abyssinia is a name for the Kingdom of Ethiopia.
 
Mount Abora — Coleridge invents this name as well. In one draft of the poem, he calls it Mount Amara, which is an actual mountain in Ethiopia. He may have changed the name because he preferred the sound of Abora.