Kubla Khan

Samuel Talylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan

OR, A VISION IN A DREAM

A FRAGMENT

[Coleridge's published note on its composition]

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 psycological 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 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 continues 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 these images rose up before him as things,

with aparallel 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 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, 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 misshape the other. Stay awile,

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. Sameron adion aso [in greek letters]: but tomorrow

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.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round:

And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

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

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

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

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!

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,

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,

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,

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!

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.

Autumn 1797 or Spring 1798, published 1816

Adapted from The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Sixth edition, Volume 2, M H Abrams (General Editor), 1993

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