Coleridge opens his poem with a prose note, ostensibly describing the circumstances of its composition. Critics are divided over how much of it, if any, is true.
The poem was published in 1816. Coleridge tells us it was composed in 1797, though that’s questionable.
Kubla Khan; |
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Of the Fragment of Kubla Khan |
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The following fragment is here 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. |
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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° 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 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 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 awaking 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 purpose 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: |
Purchas’s Pilgrimage, a 17th-c travel book anodyne = pain-reliever (opium) | |
| Then all the charm | ||
| Is broken—all that phantom-world so fair | ||
| Vanishes, and a thousand circlets° spread, | little circles | |
| 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. Σάμερον ᾇδιον ᾄσω:° but the to-morrow is yet to come. |
Tomorrow I’ll sing more sweetly | |
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. |
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KUBLA KHAN. |
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| In Xanadu did Kubla Khan | ||
| A stately pleasure-dome decree:° | order, command | |
| Where Alph, the sacred river, ran | ||
| Through caverns measureless to man | ||
| 5 | Down to a sunless sea. | |
| So twice five miles of fertile ground | ||
| With walls and towers were girdled° round; | encircled | |
| And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills° | twisting streams | |
| Where blossom’d many an incense-bearing tree; | ||
| 10 | And here were forests ancient as the hills, | |
| And folding sunny spots of greenery. | ||
| But oh that deep romantic chasm which slanted | ||
| Down the green hill athwart° a cedarn cover! | across | |
| A savage place! as holy and inchanted | ||
| 15 | 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: | instantly | |
| 20 | Amid whose swift half-intermitted° Burst | interrupted |
| 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. | instantly | |
| 25 | Five miles meandering° with a mazy motion | twisting |
| Through wood and dale° the sacred river ran, | valley | |
| Then reached the caverns measureless to man, | ||
| And sank in tumult° to a lifeless ocean: | agitation | |
| And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far | ||
| 30 | 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. | ||
| 30 | It was a miracle of rare device,° | construction |
| A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice! | ||
| A damsel with a dulcimer° | harp-like instrument | |
| In a vision once I saw: | ||
| It was an Abyssinian° maid | East African | |
| 40 | And on her dulcimer she play’d, | |
| Singing of Mount Abora, | ||
| Could I revive within me | ||
| Her symphony and song, | ||
| To such a deep delight ’twould win me, | ||
| 45 | 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! | ||
| 50 | 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 drank the milk of Paradise. |