Kubla Khan

For the emperor, see Kublai Khan.

Draft of "Kubla Khan"

"Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment" is a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which takes its title from the Mongol and Chinese emperor Kublai Khan of the Yuan Dynasty. Coleridge claimed he wrote the poem in the autumn of 1797 at a farmhouse near Exmoor, England, but it might have been composed on one of a number of other visits to the farm. It also might have been revised a number of times before it was first published in 1816.

History and themes

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.

Coleridge claimed that the poem was inspired by an opium-induced dream (implicit in the poem's subtitle A Vision in a Dream), but that the composition was interrupted by a person from Porlock. On returning to his room, Coleridge found that 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 has been cast. A note on a manuscript by Coleridge explicitly states that he had taken opium at the time to combat dysentery. Some have speculated that the vivid imagery of the poem stems from a waking hallucination, most likely opium-induced.Though Coleridge did use opium the effects of the type he was using did NOT include hallucination. Additionally, a quotation from William Bartram is believed to have been a source of the poem. There is widespread speculation on the poem's meaning, some suggesting the author is merely portraying his vision while others insist on a theme or purpose.

Inspiration for this poem also comes from Marco Polo's description of Shangdu and Kublai Khan from his book Il Milione, which was included in Samuel Purchas' Pilgrimage, Vol. XI, 231.

When he declared himself emperor, the historical Khan claimed he had the Mandate of Heaven, a traditional Chinese concept of rule by divine permission, and therefore gained absolute control over an entire nation. Between warring and distributing the wealth his grandfather Genghis Khan had won, Khan spent his summers in Xandu (better known now as Shangdu, or Xanadu) and had his subjects build him a home suitable for a son of God.

This story is described in the first two lines of the poem, "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure-dome decree" (1-2). The end of the third paragraph gives us another close-up view of Kubla. At his home, Kubla had, on hand, some ten thousand horses, which he used as a means of displaying his power. Only he and those to whom he gave explicit permission (for committing miscellaneous acts of valor) were allowed to drink their milk. Hence the closing image of "the milk of Paradise". (54)

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

External links

• Full text of the poem (scroll down)
• Explicated for an undergraduate class
• "Kubla Khan" and the Embodied Mind, a detailed analysis of the poem