Today’s Poem: Kubla Khan

Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Albert Bierstadt, Storm in the Mountains, c. 1870 (Wikimedia Commons)

Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread — What are we to do with such lines? Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” has the voice of poetry itself. Just think of the musicality of the opening lines, the magisterial diction of the second stanza, the tone of the prophet in the third — all mingled with enchantment. “Kubla Khan” gives us a sense of powerful truths swirling just beyond our understanding, like angels or demons dancing in the air a few feet off the far cliff-edge of meaning. There are reasons “Kubla Khan” is consistently ranked among the greatest poems in the English language.

Not that the poem was thought so when it was first appeared. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) himself was uncertain about it, writing the poem in 1797 but not publishing it until 1816 (at Lord Byron’s insistence). His doubts seemed to have stemmed in part from the irregular meter, three to five beats per line, as though the text were a draft of something unfinished. Even more, however, it stemmed from a worry that the sections of the poem did not cohere.

In a sense, that’s fair enough. The poem does not hold to traditional poetic unity in the way other Coleridge work does: his long narrative poems “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Christabel,” for example, and “Frost at Midnight,” his hymn to fatherhood.

Mezzotint of Coleridge at age 42 (Wikimedia Commons)

The actual coherence of “Kubla Khan” lies somewhere else, somewhere in the depths of poetry itself. One way to appreciate the poem is not to be distracted by the framing device of incompleteness that Coleridge erected. That story is well known: The poem began in a drug-induced dream, he said, that promised a long set of verses. But the visit of “a person from Porlock” interrupted the composition, and the poem had fallen to fragments by the time Coleridge returned to it.

We should concentrate instead on the strange narrative movement in the poem. Coleridge opens with the stately pleasure dome, a human creation that encapsulates nature. But in the second stanza, the chasm in the dome blows up, casting rocks into the air and rerouting the sacred river, and promising war.

It was, before its destruction, a “miracle of rare device, / A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice.” But Coleridge, without explanation, shifts immediately to a woman he once heard playing a dulcimer, declaring that “Could I revive within me / Her symphony and song,” he too could “build that dome in air. / That sunny dome! those caves of ice!”

And yet, he realizes as well that just as tumult came to Kubla Khan’s dome, so something dangerous lurks in reality. There is a threat in the man who would, if he could, use his art to create a new human capsule of nature.

Are we right to fear him? Coleridge is, I think, entirely serious when he writes, “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.” He knows that the prophetic dreamer is a danger, even if that dreamer is Coleridge himself.

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Kubla Khan

Or a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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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