‘Kubla Khan: a Vision in a Dream’

‘Kubla Khan: a Vision in a Dream’, a poem by S. T. Coleridge, published 1816.

In 1797, while living near the Wordsworths in Somerset, Coleridge took opium and fell asleep when reading a passage in Purchas his Pilgrimage (see Purchas), relating to the Khan Kubla and the palace that he commanded to be built. He claimed that on awaking he was conscious of having composed in his sleep two or three hundred lines on this theme, and eagerly set down the lines that form this fragment. He was then interrupted by ‘a person… from Porlock’, and, on returning to his task an hour later, found that almost the entire remainder of the poem had slipped from his memory. The poem consists of a series of visionary images, suggesting themes of eternity and change. Alph, the sacred river, flung up in a tremendous fountain, connects Khan's ‘stately pleasure-dome’, great caverns, and the ‘sunless sea’. Within the gardens of the pleasure-dome is growth and sunlight and colour. There are hints of death and war, the vision of a damsel with a dulcimer, and of the frenzy of the poet who has drunk ‘the milk of Paradise’. Lowes, in The Road to Xanadu (1927), traces the varied sources of Coleridge's imagery.