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Powered by LitCharts content and AI. "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 envisions the landscape surrounding ...
Jan 29, 2018 · Dreaming of Xanadu: A Guide to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan”. Samuel Taylor Coleridge said that he wrote “Kubla Khan” in the fall of 1797, but it was not published until he read it to George Gordon, Lord Byron in 1816, when Byron insisted that it go into print immediately. It is a powerful, legendary and mysterious poem ...
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Opening Section. In the opening lines of “Kubla Khan,” Coleridge introduces us to the exotic and splendid landscape of Xanadu, the pleasure dome decreed by the great Mongol ruler, Kubla Khan. The poem begins: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan. A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran. Through caverns measureless to man.
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;
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The speaker describes the “stately pleasure-dome” built in Xanadu according to the decree of Kubla Khan, in the place where Alph, the sacred river, ran “through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea.” Walls and towers were raised around “twice five miles of fertile ground,” filled with beautiful gardens and forests. A “deep romantic ch...
The chant-like, musical incantations of “Kubla Khan” result from Coleridge’s masterful use of iambic tetrameter and alternating rhyme schemes. The first stanza is written in tetrameter with a rhyme scheme of ABAABCCDEDE, alternating between staggered rhymes and couplets. The second stanza expands into tetrameter and follows roughly the same rhyming...
Along with “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Kubla Khan” is one of Coleridge’s most famous and enduring poems. The story of its composition is also one of the most famous in the history of English poetry. As the poet explains in the short preface to this poem, he had fallen asleep after taking “an anodyne” prescribed “in consequence of a slight d...
‘Kubla Khan’: summary. A brief summary of the poem first, then: the speaker tells us that in Xanadu (also known as Shangdu, the summer capital of Kublai Khan’s Yuan empire), the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan (1215-94) ordered a majestic pleasure-dome to be built, near the sacred river of Alph (a fictional river invented by Coleridge for the poem, and suggesting the idea of beginnings – Alph ...
Feb 17, 2021 · The preface of Kubla Khan gives a demonstration of this just in its account of the actual words that elicited the poem: the sentences from the book Coleridge was reading when he nodded off, Samuel Purchas’s 1613 book of explorers’ tales, Purchas His Pilgrimage. The passage from Purchas (which Coleridge quotes from memory) elicits the poem ...
