Kubla Khan

Kubla Khan is a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge which takes its title from the Mongol/Chinese emperor Kublai Khan, of the Yuan dynasty. Coleridge claimed that it was written in the autumn of 1797 at a farmhouse near Exmoor, but it may have been composed on one of a number of other visits to the farm. It may also have been revised a number of times before it was first published in 1816.

The Poem

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

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A stately pleasure-dome decree:

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Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

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Through caverns measureless to man

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Down to a sunless sea.

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So twice five miles of fertile ground

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With walls and towers were girdled round:

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And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

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Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

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And here were forests ancient as the hills,

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Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

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But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

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Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

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A savage place! as holy and enchanted

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As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted

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By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

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And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

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As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

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A mighty fountain momently was forced:

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Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

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Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

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Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:

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And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

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It flung up momently the sacred river.

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Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

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Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

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Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

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And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:

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And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

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Ancestral voices prophesying war!

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The shadow of the dome of pleasure

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Floated midway on the waves;

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Where was heard the mingled measure

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From the fountain and the caves.

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It was a miracle of rare device,

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A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

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A damsel with a dulcimer

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In a vision once I saw:

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It was an Abyssinian maid,

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And on her dulcimer she played,

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Singing of Mount Abora.

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Could I revive within me

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Her symphony and song,

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To such a deep delight 'twould win me,

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That with music loud and long,

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I would build that dome in air,

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That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

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And all who heard should see them there,

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And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

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His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

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Weave a circle round him thrice,

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And close your eyes with holy dread,

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For he on honey-dew hath fed,

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And drunk the milk of Paradise.

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