Kubla Khan

Summary

Kubla Khan: or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment is one of the most famous unfinished poems in English. Coleridge published it in 1816, at Lord Byron's urging, with Christabel, and he prefaced it with a prose note explaining its origin. In the summer of 1797, he says, he was living in a lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Linton on the Exmoor coast. Unwell, he had taken an anodyne, a dose of opium, and fell asleep while reading a sentence in Samuel Purchas's travel book about the palace Kubla Khan commanded to be built. He claims that in a sleep of about three hours he composed two to three hundred lines without effort, and that on waking he began writing them down, but was called away by a person on business from Porlock; when he returned an hour later, the rest had vanished. The poem itself has three movements. First, Kubla Khan decrees a stately pleasure-dome in Xanadu, where the sacred river Alph runs through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea, amid gardens and ancient forests. Second, the poem turns to a deep romantic chasm, savage and holy, from which a mighty fountain bursts, flinging up the river, which meanders five miles and sinks in tumult to a lifeless ocean; amid the tumult Kubla hears ancestral voices prophesying war. Third, the speaker remembers a vision of an Abyssinian maid playing a dulcimer and singing of Mount Abora. If he could revive her song, he says, he would build that dome in air, and all who heard would cry Beware! of the inspired poet with flashing eyes and floating hair, who has fed on honey-dew and drunk the milk of Paradise. The poem is often read as a poem about poetic inspiration and its loss.

Top Lessons

• Inspiration and loss

  The preface and the last stanza both concern a vision that cannot be fully recovered. The poem is about the gap between imagination and making.

• Pleasure and danger

  The pleasure-dome stands beside a savage chasm and voices prophesying war. Paradise and threat lie side by side.

• The poet as prophet

  The ending pictures the poet as a figure of awe and fear. Christians may ask what true inspiration is.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Coleridge's prose preface attributes the poem to a dream after taking an anodyne (opium) for illness. It is a key text in the history of opium, dreams and creativity, though scholars doubt that the story is literally accurate. Coleridge's later addiction gives the preface added weight.

• Preface (1816)

  Coleridge describes taking an anodyne for a slight indisposition, falling asleep over Purchas, and composing in sleep.

• Lines 42-54

  The longing to revive the visionary song and the trance-like image of the inspired poet.