Kubla Khan

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Have you ever woken up from a particularly fascinating and vivid dream, then gotten distracted for a few minutes, and just when you’re about to tell somebody about it, it seems to have vanished into thin air — and you try to recall it, but all you get is a fallen leaf here and a bit of tissue paper there, nothing solid to grab hold of? Well, imagine that you wake up composing a poem or a song, and a Person from Porlock shows up at your door, and you have to attend to his business, and when you go back to your paper, you see the words you’ve written, but otherwise you come to a blank wall. That’s what Samuel Taylor Coleridge says happened to him, the morning when he woke up composing “Kubla Khan,” our poem this week. Poof, it was gone!

We can well see why. The poem is all about fantastic visions that move the artist’s mind and soul to creative action. But the thing about visions is that they simply won’t come at your beck and call. They are as fleeting as ghosts, and just as unreliable. And yet if you have ever experienced a burst of artistic inspiration, you’ll say that it seems to come unbidden from nowhere, and the thing you must do is work while it is there: a melody that suddenly comes to you, or lines that the blind poet Milton says come to him from the Muse that visits him nightly, and “inspires / Easy my unpremeditated verse.” You can’t force these moments, but you can be ready for them, to receive them when they come.

“The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan” (watercolor) Ebenezer Wake Cook. Public Domain.

So, if you’re looking for consistency and perfect polish in “Kubla Khan,” it isn’t there, but a lot of wild and spirit-moving sights and sounds are, which Coleridge describes in fascinating and other-worldly images. Think of it — a “pleasure dome” above a river, with gardens, crazily running streams, tall brooding trees, and the strangest thing of all, the “caves of ice”! How can you build such a thing? Coleridge doesn’t tell us how. He doesn’t know. Maybe there is no answer to the question. How did Mozart compose The Magic Flute? Mozart himself, I’ll wager, could hardly have said. But Coleridge does say one thing. If you are in the presence of great beauty, when art and nature seem to strive and yet to be as one, it opens up the soul, and then you may just gain the power to do wonders. That’s what he would do, he said, if he could just capture again the vision he had of an Abyssinian maid, singing of the mysterious Mount Abora — in Ethiopia, where legend had it that paradise itself lay, hidden from the eyes of men.

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 there 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.

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