"Kubla Khan" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge -- Great Poems of the World, episode 15, with David Lehman and Mitch Sisskind

 

Kubla Khan

By Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.

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.

Comments

[Terence Winch]

"Kubla Khan," in my opinion, is the greatest poem ever written in the English language. No matter how often I've read it, it never loses its hypnotic power.

[Mark C. Minton]

It's interesting to consider how much of the power of this poem, aside from the poetic mechanics and splendid choice of wording, derives from its mysterious historical references to Mongol conquests and culture. As the poem reminds us, this was a society for which war was central, but it was highly unusual in culture with openness to the foreign, and by the time of Kubla, was itself mesmerized by the exotic artifacts of China, Europe and the Mideast. All these were taken in as fantastic innovations, and in the capital at Karakorum, where a French goldsmith and dozens of artisans from all over the world created a giant silver fountain for the Khan, with golden fruit, a mechanical angel blowing a sounding trumpet, and pipes spurting wine, mead, Rice wine, and fermented mare's milk. The Mongol Court, with a taste for the imaginative and hallucinatory effects of "Occidentalism" perhaps had the compliment returned by the "Orientalism" of Coleridge's imaginative stimulation.....