Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge -Summary (CC-IX)

Kubla Khan

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

(Summary)

👉 About Kubla Khan

Kubla Khan is an explorer who explores the land of Xanadu in “Kubla Khan”. He decrees that a "stately pleasure dome" to be built, demonstrating his authority over others and the natural (and perhaps supernatural) world.

Kubla Khan is meant to be a figure that evokes opposing moods in the reader. He is amazing and admirable in his exploration and creation of unearthly marvels, but he is also someone to "beware" in the latter half of the poem, for his wonderful qualities come from the same source--his almost (or truly?) supernatural connection to the natural world.

👉 Summary

"Kubla Khan" is considered to be one of the greatest poems by the English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who said he wrote the strange and hallucinatory poem shortly after waking up from an opium-influenced dream in 1797. In the first part of the poem, the speaker envisages the landscape surrounding the Mongol ruler and Chinese emperor Kubla Khan’s summer palace, called "Xanadu," describing it as a place of beauty, pleasure, and violence. The speaker suggests that these qualities are all deeply intertwined. The poem is one of Coleridge's most famous, and has been interpreted in many different ways. Overall, though, it's possible to think of it as speaking to the creative ambitions of poetry itself—as well as to its limitations.

The unnamed speaker of the poem tells of how a person named Kublai Khan traveled to the land of Xanadu. In Xanadu, Kubla found a desirable pleasure-dome that was “a miracle of rare device” because the dome was made of caves of ice and located in a sunny area. The speaker describes the contrasting composition of Xanadu. While there are gardens blossoming with incense-bearing trees and “sunny spots of greenery,” across the “deep romantic chasm” in Xanadu there are “caverns measureless to man” and a fountain from which “huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail.” Amid this hostile atmosphere of Nature, Kubla also hears “ancestral voices prophesying war.” However, Kubla finds relief from this tumultuous atmosphere through his discovery of the miraculous sunny pleasure-dome made of ice.

In the final stanza, the speaker announces a desire to build a "pleasure palace" of the speaker's own through song. In this stanza of the poem, the speaker longs to revive a song about Mount Abora that he once heard a woman play on a dulcimer. The speaker believes that the song would transport him to a dream world in which he could “build that dome in air” and in which he can drink “the milk of Paradise.”

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👉 Kubla Khan - Supernatural elements