“Kubla Khan” Introduction

• "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 the Mongol ruler and Chinese emperor Kubla Khan’s summer palace, called "Xanadu," describing it as a place of beauty, pleasure, and violence. The speaker suggests that these qualities are all deeply intertwined and, in the final stanza, announces a desire to build a "pleasure palace" of the speaker's own through song. The poem is one of Coleridge's most famous, and has been interpreted in many different ways. Overall, though, it's possible to think of it as speaking to the creative ambitions of poetry itself—as well as to its limitations.

• Read the full text of “Kubla Khan”

“Kubla Khan” Summary

• In a place called Xanadu, the Mongolian leader Kubla Khan ordered his servants to construct an impressive domed building for pleasure and recreation on the banks of the holy river Alph, which ran through a series of caves so vast that no one could measure them, and then down into an underground ocean. So they created a space with 10 miles of fertile earth surrounded by walls and towers. And in it there were gardens with sunny little streams and fragrant trees, as well as very old forests with sunny clearings in the middle.

  But, oh, how beautiful was that deep, impressive gorge that cut through the green hill, between the cedar trees! It was such a wild place! A place so sacred and bewitching that you might expect it to be haunted by a woman crying out for her satanic lover beneath the crescent moon. And out of this gorge, with its endlessly churning river, a geyser would sometimes erupt, as though the ground itself were breathing hard. This geyser would send shards of rock flying into the air like hail, or like grain scattered as it is being harvested. And as it flung up these rocks, the geyser would also briefly send the water of the holy river bursting up into the air. The holy river ran for five miles in a lazy, winding course through woods and fields, before it reached the incredibly deep caves and sank in a flurry into the much stiller ocean. And in the rushing waters of the caves, Kubla Khan heard the voices of his ancestors, predicting that war would come. The shadow of Kubla Khan's pleasure palace was reflected by the waves, and you could hear the sound of the geyser mingling with that of the water rushing through the caves. This was truly a miraculous place: Khan's pleasure palace was both sunny and had icy caves.

  In a vision, I once saw an Ethiopian woman play a stringed instrument and sing about a mountain in Ethiopia. If I could recreate within myself the sound of her instrument and her song, it would bring me so much joy that I would build Kubla Khan’s pleasure palace in the sky above me: that sun-filled dome, those caves full of ice! And everyone who heard the song would look up and see what I had built, and they would cry out: “Be careful! Look at his wild eyes and crazy hair! Make a circle around him three times and refuse to look at him: he has eaten the food of the gods and drunk the milk of Heaven!”

“Kubla Khan” Themes

• 

  Pleasure and Violence

  “Kubla Khan” begins by announcing that it is a poem about “pleasure.” It proposes to describe the Mongol leader’s summer palace, along with all its luxurious—and, for the speaker, exotic—pleasures. However, the poem soon takes a curious turn. Instead of describing sumptuous decorations or brilliant jewels, it focuses mainly on the river that runs through the grounds of the palace. What’s more, instead of describing that river in pleasant terms, it often focuses on the river’s violent energy. Through these descriptions, “Kubla Khan” suggests that pleasure and beauty are neither simple nor uncomplicated. Rather, the poem shows that pleasure and beauty come from the conflict between opposing forces—and that they always contain some degree of violence and ugliness.

  The grounds of Kubla Khan’s “pleasure-dome” are not quite as pleasant as one might expect. True, they encompass “twice five miles of fertile ground” and “gardens bright with sinuous rills.” But the speaker moves quickly beyond these pleasant places, devoting only six rather formulaic lines to describing them. Instead, the focus of the poem—and the speaker’s energy—lies in the poem’s middle stanza, where the speaker describes what happens to those “sinuous rills” (small streams) when they exit the pleasant gardens.

  They become a violent river, which has cut a deep gorge into the earth; its geysers throw up massive boulders. The speaker describes this place in unsettling terms: it is a “savage place,” “as holy and enchanted / As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted / by woman wailing for her demon lover!” In contrast to the bright, sunny gardens, the chasm is a haunted, uncivilized place.

  As the river continues its journey, the unsettling description intensifies. The river enters unfathomable caves, where its rushing sounds like “ancestral voices prophesying war.” From the bright gardens where it runs in little “rills,” the river quickly becomes a powerful and violent force—both “holy” and terrifying.

  Given these descriptions, one might think that Khan’s “pleasure” must lie in the bright gardens at the start of the river’s course. But Khan himself does not seem to take this view. It turns out that his palace is not in the “gardens bright” where the river is peaceful. Instead, in lines 31-34, the reader learns that the “shadow of the dome” of Khan’s palace hangs “midway” over the river, so that Khan can hear “the mingled measure / From the fountain and the caves.” That is, Khan does not want to hear only beauty or only violence: he wants both. And the pleasure he takes from his palace presumably comes from his appreciation of the fraught interaction between the two.

  In carefully describing the geography of the grounds of Khan’s pleasure dome (and not saying much about the dome itself), the speaker thus makes a subtle argument about pleasure itself. Pleasure, the poem claims, does not exclude violence. Rather, it comes from the tension between beauty and chaos; it demands—and includes—both.

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  Creativity and Reason

  Though the speaker describes the grounds of Kubla Khan’s palace in detail, the speaker also hints that these physical features are not entirely literal. Indeed, the poem’s dreamlike, hallucinatory tone seems to invite the reader to treat the speaker’s descriptions an allegory for creativity and the human mind. People may act like they're in control on the surface, the poem seems to say, but dig a bit deeper and human beings aren't all that reasonable. And the tension between these two parts of the mind—the rational and the irrational—is where creativity comes from.

  To understand how the poem can work as an extended metaphor, first note how the description of the palace and its grounds focuses on the “sacred river” named “Alph.” There is no real river called “Alph”; Coleridge invented it for the poem. But the name sounds a lot like the Greek name for the first letter of the alphabet, alpha. This is an important letter in Christian theology: in the Book of Revelation, God describes Himself as the “Alpha and the Omega”—the first and the last, the source of all things and their end. In this sense, the river's name hints that it is symbolically aligned with God’s creative power—which is both the model for and the source of human beings’ creativity.

  The speaker then describes the river's course in detail. Along the way, the speaker offers a few hints that the river is not just a symbol of human creativity: it also provides a map of the human mind, showing where that creativity actually comes from. The river begins close to Khan's "gardens," which is important because, at the time the poem was written, gardens often served as symbols of reason: they represent people's power to organize, dominate, and control nature. In this sense, the river begins with rationality—the reasonable parts of the human mind. The river ends, however, in icy caverns, "measureless to man," where "ancestral voices" prophecy "war." This seems like an image of the subconscious—which is violent, uncontrollable, and unknowable to the rational mind.

  Between the two elements erupts a "mighty fountain," which could serve as an image of the meeting point between the rational and the irrational parts of the human mind. The results of their meeting are spectacular—and strikingly human. In describing the fountain, the speaker personifies the river, making its bursts sound like "fast thick pants"—the heavy breaths of an exhausted or passionate person. Furthermore, the fountain throws shards of rock into the air, which the speaker describes as "dancing." The fountain doesn't just randomly throw rocks into the air, but rather produces artful, choreographed motion. Together, this all suggests that the speaker sees the mind as something that is divided, with its two halves in tension—and suggests that creativity emerges directly from this tension.

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  The Limits of Creativity

  “Kubla Khan” can be read as an extended metaphor or allegory about the powers of human creativity, with the river that runs through the grounds of Khan’s palace serving as a map of the human psyche and its creative powers. However, the speaker remains skeptical about his own capacity to realize that creative potential. Though the speaker wants to build a pleasure-dome of his own, he only fantasizes about doing so. Though “Kubla Khan” celebrates the power of human creativity, it also recognizes that such creativity is limited, fragile, and quickly lost.

  The speaker begins the description of Khan’s palace by noting that it is a protected space. The grounds of the palace are “girdled round” with “walls and towers.” If Khan’s palace and its grounds provide a map to human creativity, they also suggest that such creativity is precious and difficult to sustain. From the start, then, the poem hints that creativity is something fragile.

  After the speaker’s elaborate description of Khan’s palace, he returns to this initial implicit concern with the fragility of creativity. In a sudden break at the start of stanza 3, the speaker stops talking about Khan’s palace altogether, and discusses instead a song that he once heard from an “Abyssinian maid.” The speaker complains that he cannot “revive” the maid’s “symphony and song”; if he could, he “would build that dome in air.” In other words, the speaker would recreate Khan’s palace here and now, as a kind of floating city that hovers above the earth.

  These lines are marked by a deep sense of loss: the speaker knows that he is capable of constructing Khan’s palace, but he has lost the inspiration to do so. The speaker cannot recreate or rehear the “Abyssinian maid’s song,” which would inspire the “music loud and long” necessary to build the palace in the air. These lines contain the poem’s strongest hint that the reader should regard Khan’s palace as an extended metaphor or allegory, rather than a strictly physical place. The speaker’s wish makes it clear that the palace is not bound to a specific location or time period, but can rather be rebuilt anytime and anywhere, as long as sufficient inspiration exists.

  In this sense, the poem suggests that Khan’s palace is an image of the fullest achievement of human creativity. But paradoxically, it is just this achievement that eludes the speaker. Though the speaker has experienced the inspiration necessary to create the palace (as the very existence of this poem proves), his apparent despair also indicates that inspiration itself—though priceless—is fragile and fleeting.

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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Kubla Khan”

• Before Line 1, Lines 1-5

       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.

  The subtitle sets the stage, letting the reader know that this will be a dreamy poem filled with fragments of some sort of vision. The speaker then actually begins the poem by introducing a palace that a real-world Mongol king and Chinese emperor built in the middle ages—calling this a "stately," or majestic and impressive, "pleasure-dome." Instead of describing the palace in detail, however, the speaker starts talking about a “sacred river” named "Alph." This river runs through caverns so big people can't even measure their true depth.

  This river doesn't actually exist, but rather is a symbolically rich invention of Coleridge's. The name "Alph" is probably a shortening of the Greek letter alpha, which brings to mind theology: in the Bible's Book of Revelation, God announces, "I am the Alpha and the Omega," meaning the first and the last, the creator and the destroyer.

  By naming the river "Alph," the speaker associates the river with this creative power—suggesting that the river itself is a symbol for human creativity. That the river runs into vast, "measureless" caverns and a "sunless sea" suggests that the speaker is just as interested in the hidden, irrational parts of the human mind as its well-lit, rational areas: indeed, the “sunless sea” is potentially a symbol for the unconscious, for death, or for sleep.

  Fittingly for a poem written upon awakening from an opium-influenced dream, "Kubla Khan" doesn't follow a set formal pattern. It does, however, begin in very steady iambic tetrameter (four feet per line in an unstressed-stressed syllable pattern), only to be broken by line 5 (which is in iambic trimeter and begins with a trochee):

  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.

  The poem also begins with a relatively smooth rhyme scheme: ABAAB. But in the following lines, the meter and rhyme scheme of the poem will shift radically. Throughout the poem, then, the speaker seems to establish a formal pattern only to break it, shifting meters and rhymes schemes with what feels like an unplanned fluidity—not unlike the river being described.

  Underlying these formal shifts, however, is the speaker’s consistent and prolific use of alliteration (plus assonance and consonance). For example, each of the poem's first five lines contains a strong alliteration at the end of the line: "Kubla Khan," "dome-decree," "river, ran" "measureless to man," and "sunless sea." This heavy alliteration gives the poem a highly literary, "poetic" feel—which in turn emphasizes that this is all a dream, a vision, and not an even-handed, objective description of a real place. In other words, the poem sure does sound nice—which readers will see in the end is part of the point: ultimately, the speaker wants to build a "pleasure-dome" of his own through "music loud and long"—i.e., some sort of art, perhaps even poetry itself.

  A note on context: in describing this palace, the speaker alludes to a 1613 travelogue by Samuel Purchas called Purchas his Pilgrimage. Purchas writes: “In Xandu did Cublai Can build a stately Pallace, encompassing sixteen miles of plaine ground with a wall…” According to Coleridge’s preface to the poem, he was reading Purchas’s book and taking a form of opium when he slipped into a dream; upon waking several hours later, he wrote “Kubla Khan.”

  From its opening, then, the poem signals its debt to western accounts of an eastern culture: instead of supplying an objective account of Mongolian culture, it draws on western fantasies and projections, portraying that culture as exotic and different. This sense of difference is important to the speaker: it allows him to imagine human creativity outside the boundaries of his own culture—at a moment in intellectual history, the European enlightenment, when intellectuals prized reason and rationality and tended to dismiss the mind’s irrational powers and capacities.

• Lines 6-11

  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.

  

  

• Lines 12-16

  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!

  

  

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• Lines 17-22

  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:

  

  

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• Lines 23-28

  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;

  

  

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• Lines 29-30

  And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
  Ancestral voices prophesying war!

  

  

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• Lines 31-36

     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!

  

  

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• Lines 37-41

     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.

  

  

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• Lines 42-47

     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!

  

  

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• Lines 48-50

  And all who heard should see them there,
  And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
  His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

  

  

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• Lines 51-54

  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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“Kubla Khan” Symbols

• 

  The River Alph

  The “Alph” is not a real river: Coleridge invented it for the poem. His invention is particularly notable because the first two lines of the poem quote almost directly from Samuel Parchas’s 1613 account of Kublai Khan’s summer palace. The entrance of the Alph into the poem is a radical break from Parchas, an announcement to the reader that the poem has left this historical account and entered the speaker’s fantasy.

  The name that the speaker uses for this invented river is potentially symbolically rich. For one thing, it is a contraction of the word “alpha,” the first letter of the Greek alphabet. “Alpha” is important to Christian theology. In the Book of Revelations, for example, God declares “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” meaning both the beginning of things and the end, the creator and the destroyer. The name of the river associates it with this creative power, and thus becomes a symbol for creativity itself.

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• 

  Gardens

  Gardens are a rich and complicated symbol in the history of Western literature. Often they can symbolize both paradise and temptation, as in the Garden of Eden. In the 18th century, however, when this poem was written, gardens were highly controlled and cultivated places, featuring intricate patterns and careful pruning. In this period, gardens most often symbolized wealth and power, the capacity to bend the landscape to one’s will (or, better, to pay other people to do so!). Perhaps, then, the gardens here reflect the extent of Kubla Khan's power—his ability to dominate the natural world surrounding the palace.

  Gardens also could symbolize rationality: in contrast to the chaos and disorder of the natural world, gardens—with their calculated layout—bore the stamp of human intelligence, the ability to order and organize nature in order to make it more beautiful and less threatening. In this sense, the reader may take the “gardens” in line 8 as a symbol for reason and rationality.

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  Sunless Sea

  The speaker spends much of "Kubla Khan" describing the course of the fictional river "Alph," which terminates in a vast underground sea. It is possible to read this as a literal description of a literal river, but the poem’s dreamy, hallucinatory tone—and the fact that the river is itself a fantasy, the poet's invention—encourages the reader to treat the "sunless sea" as a symbol.

  What it symbolizes will depend in large measure on the way the reader understands the river itself. If the course of the river represents the various parts of the human mind—running from organized reason to violent irrationality—then the 'sunless sea" might represent unconsciousness, sleep, or even death. Indeed, in the classical tradition, there are four rivers in Hell; the reader might imagine the "sunless sea" as the final meeting point of those rivers, the center of Hell itself. However, if the reader interprets the river as an extended metaphor for pleasure, then the sunless sea might symbolize satisfaction, satiation, and the end of desire.

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  Deep Romantic Chasm

  In contrast to the "gardens" that appear in line 8, the "deep romantic chasm" that the river enters at the start of stanza 2 is not a human-made space, carefully organized and planned. It thus does not reflect or represent human rationality. Instead, it serves in the poem as a sort of gateway into a different space—one where nature itself rules and organizes the world according to its own principles. The "deep romantic chasm" should thus be understood in opposition to the "gardens": where they might symbolize reason and rationality, the "deep romantic chasm" symbolizes the entrance to a different part of the mind, one that is less controlled, more violent and irrational. It is a transitional space between the two, a channel that connects them.

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  Fountain

  The "fountain" that appears in line 19 is a bit hard to visualize: the river seems to turn into a kind of geyser, its violent energy forcing a jet of water and rock out of the chasm. If the reader takes the river itself to represent the human mind, then the fountain that bursts forth seems like a dramatic expression of that mind. Indeed, the speaker personifies the fountain, comparing it to a person’s rough "breathing" in line 19. The river seems fully human here, less a physical space than a symbolic representation of the body as it struggles to make sense of all the complex thoughts coursing through it. In this sense, the fountain might be a symbol for the expression/eruption of that struggle—representing a passionate burst of creative language, maybe even poetry.

  Similarly, in line 23, summarizing his description of the fountain, the speaker describes the rocks it flings into the air as "dancing." The metaphor personifies the rock—and does so in a specific, suggestive way. The fountain produces a movement that strongly resembles human art, the choreography of bodies in space. In this sense, the speaker strongly suggests that the reader should understand the fountain as a force of creativity.

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• 

  Ancestral Voices

  The “ancestral voices” that Kubla Khan hears in the “tumult” of the river are a complex symbol. Literally speaking, they refer to the history of the Mongols, a history marked by conquest and bloodshed. But since the culture and history of the Mongols is not the poem’s main concern, their symbolic character is what is most important here.

  As a symbol, these voices can be understood on several levels. On the one hand, they represent the violence of the river’s rushing course through its gorge. But since the river itself can be interpreted as an image of the human mind, these voices can thus also symbolize the violent urges that course through people's psyches.

  The speaker locates these violent urges in the past: they are “ancestral.” But he also notes that they predict the future: they are “prophesying.” In this sense, the speaker implies that violence cannot be escaped: even if these voices are “ancestral,” they know full well what to expect in the future. Violence, the speaker subtly suggests, is just part of being human.

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  Honey-Dew

  When the speaker mentions honey-dew in the second-to-last line of “Kubla Khan,” he invokes a symbol with an important history. In the Book of Exodus, when the Israelites are wandering in the desert, they are fed by God with “manna,” which falls from Heaven, keeping them from starving. According to some Biblical interpreters, the food that they ate was honey-dew, a sugary substance secreted by some insects as they feast on leaves. In other words, the speaker is claiming that he has eaten food directly from God. The “honey dew” thus serves as a symbol for holy inspiration and nourishment.

  In this sense, it is closely linked to the “deep romantic chasm” the speaker mentions in line 12—a place the speaker describes as “holy.” The “honey-dew” too is holy, and a symbol of the speaker’s close connection with the ultimate creative power: God Himself. This symbol is reinforced in the next line, where the speaker claims to have drunk the “milk of paradise”—presumably a beverage available only in Heaven and another testament to the speaker’s intimacy with God’s creative capacity.

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“Kubla Khan” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

• Enjambment

  “Kubla Khan” uses quite a bit of enjambment throughout, but it does not seem to follow any set pattern or scheme. For instance, the first five lines contain three enjambments, in lines 1, 3, and 4. But the rest of the stanza switches into a heavy string of end-stops. The poems opens at speed, with its lines racing down the page; then it slows, becoming ponderous and heavy.

  The switch happens at a key point in the stanza: after line 5, the stanza’s rhyme scheme shifts (and after line 7, the poem switches its meter as well). In this case, internal divisions in the poem's form line up with a switch in the way the poem uses enjambment. And the break between these two sections is reinforced by the end-stop at the end of line 5.

  The poem often separates its various formal sections with end-stops. For instance, each stanza finishes with a clear end-stop; there is no enjambment across stanzas. And when the second stanza shifts from iambic pentameter to iambic tetrameter in lines 30-31, the speaker separates the two sections with an end-stop. In some places, then, enjambment and end-stop mark the poem’s separate sections, clarifying the poem’s internal structure.

  Alongside these structural uses of enjambment and end-stop, one notes the pleasure with which the poem deploys enjambment: the speaker uses enjambment for surprise, to mislead the reader and then transform their experience of the poem.

  For instance, in line 15, the speaker describes the “deep romantic chasm” as “haunted.” Falling at the end of the line, the reader is encouraged to pause briefly over the word “haunted—and imagine the kind of creatures that usually are said to haunt: ghosts and ghouls. But line 16 contradicts these expectations: the “deep romantic chasm” is not “haunted” by a ghost, but by a “woman wailing for her demon-lover.” Instead of being associated with death, the “chasm” is associated with erotic love.

  The likely effect of the enjambment is to suggest a blurring together of sex and death, to merge the erotic with mortality. The use of enjambment in this way—to surprise the reader—is relatively unprecedented in English poetry (though one does find it in Milton, for example) and one of the key innovations of the Romantic poets.

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• End-Stopped Line

  

  
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• Caesura

  

  

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• Alliteration

  

  

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• Assonance

  

  

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• Consonance

  

  

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• Chiasmus

  

  

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• Simile

  

  

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• Metaphor

  

  

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• Parallelism

  

  

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• Antithesis

  

  

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• Allusion

  

  

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• Personification

  

  

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• Epizeuxis

  

  

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• Extended Metaphor

  

  

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"Kubla Khan" Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Xanadu
• Kubla Khan
• Pleasure-dome
• Alph
• Girdled
• Sinuous
• Rills
• Incense-bearing
• Chasm
• Athwart
• Cedarn
• E'er
• Pants
• Half-Intermitted
• Chaffy
• Flail
• Momently
• Mazy
• Dale
• ’mid
• Ancestral
• Prophesying
• Measure
• Device
• Damsel
• Dulcimer
• Abyssinian
• Maid
• Abora
• 'Twould
• Flashing
• Thrice
• Dread
• Honey-Dew and Milk of Paradise

• A mistranslation of “Shangdu,” the city where the Mongol ruler and Emperor of China, Kublai Khan had his summer palace: thus, Xanadu is a place dedicated to pleasure, a retreat from the pressures of politics and everyday life.

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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Kubla Khan”

• Form

  “Kubla Khan” doesn't have a set form—nor does it follow a traditional form like the sonnet or the ballad. On a basic level, there are three stanzas. The first has 11 lines, the second has 25, and the third has 18.

  The poem meanders, wandering between different rhyme schemes and meters over the course of its 54 lines. Indeed, the poem uses three separate meters—iambic tetrameter, iambic pentameter, and in line 5, iambic trimeter. There isn't always a clear reason why the speaker switches between these meters. Similarly, the poem will establish an intricate rhyme pattern, only to switch immediately to a new one.

  In most poems, formal elements like meter and rhyme serve established rules, to create a sense of order and regularity. In “Kubla Khan” they do just the opposite: they underline how disorderly the poem is, how changeable, and how irregular. Because the poem flirts with order only to abandon it, the reader has a sense that the poem is always on the verge of establishing a definite rhythm and rhyme scheme—but it pulls away, toward some fresh, new poetic pleasure. (The major exception will be the poem’s final stanza, where the speaker sticks to one meter exclusively, iambic tetrameter—though the rhyme scheme continues to be irregular throughout.)

  As a result, the poem’s unusual and irregular form closely mimics the poem's subject. It certainly feels like a vision made up of fragments. One might interpret the poem’s form as an image of the wandering, sometimes violent, river it describes. Or one might take it as an image of Kubla Khan’s pleasure palace, with its dense mix of both beauty and violence. The poem doesn't insist on one interpretation or another. In its formal strangeness, the poem encourages the reader to develop their own interpretation of its structure.

• Meter

  “Kubla Kahn” bounces between several different meters over the course of its 54-lines: iambic tetrameter, iambic pentameter, and iambic trimeter. Although it introduces meters and then returns to them later, there is no set pattern for when it does so. It does not follow the rules of an established literary form in its alternations in the meter, which reflects the dreamy, hallucinatory nature of the poem. Its meters seem to reflect the speaker’s changing whims and inclinations—and they model the tension, contradiction, and unplanned character of the natural spaces the poem describes.

  The poem begins with four lines in iambic tetrameter (four poetic feet with a da DUM rhythm, for a total of 8 syllables per line). One can hear this rhythm in the poem’s opening line:

  In Xan- | adu |did Kubl- | a Khan

  Then in line 6, the poem switches for a single line to iambic trimeter (three poetic feet with a da DUM rhythm), but with a trochee in the first foot:

  Down to | a sun- | less sea

  Lines 6 and 7 are back in iambic tetrameter—though line 7 is a bit rough, with an anapest (da da DUM) in its third foot:

  With walls | and tow- | ers were gird- | led round

  Then the poem switches into iambic pentameter (five poetic feet, with a da DUM rhythm), a rhythm one can hear clearly in line 10:

  And here were forests ancient as the hills

  In the poem’s first 11 lines, the speaker uses three separate meters, all of them iambic.

  All of this is to show that, though the rhythm of the lines remains fairly content, their lengths shift unpredictably. As a result, the poem feels uncontrolled, rushing forward and then slowing down—much like the river it describes.

  The second stanza begins in iambic pentameter, continuing the meter that the first stanza ended on. These lines contain a number of feminine endings, as in line 14:

  A savage place! as holy and enchanted

  (Note that in places, depending on how you pronounce words like “chasm” the lines arguably expand to twelve syllables).

  Iambic pentameter is a prestigious meter in English poetry, favored for dignified, serious subjects: as a result these lines might feel much more dignified and serious than the first stanza. They have a kind of grandeur, where the earlier parts of the poem felt comparatively playful and loose. These iambic lines continue until line 31, when the meter switches back to iambic tetrameter, until line 34. The final two lines of the stanza are in iambic pentameter.

  After all the metrical variation in the poem, stanza 3 is remarkably consistent: the whole stanza is in iambic tetrameter, with relatively few metrical substitutions. The poem thus formally marks the distinctness of that stanza, its difference from the rest of the poem. It becomes a separate rhythmic space, more regular and more controlled than the rest of the poem. It suggests that the reader regard this section as separate conceptually from the rest of the poem—and indeed, this is the point at which the speaker begins moving beyond describing Kubla Khan's "pleasure-dome" to imagining one of his own.

• Rhyme Scheme

  Though the poem makes prominent use of rhyme, it does not have the regularity and order that usually accompanies a rhyme scheme. For most readers, it will not feel like the poem has a rhyme scheme at all. Instead, like the wandering river it describes, the poem meanders and curves, bending back on itself and then rushing forward unpredictably.

  Its rhyme scheme shifts both within and across its three stanzas. For example, the first stanza can be divided into two sections. In lines 1-5, the poem rhymes:

  ABAAB

  This initial section finishes with the end-stop in line 5, signaling the completion of the poem's first description of the river Alph. The next 6 lines then switch to an uneven new rhyme scheme, signaling a new focus for the poem's descriptions (that is, the gardens surrounding the palace):

  CCDBDB

  This is an unusual and original rhyme scheme: it does not correspond to any of the established schemes in English poetry. The speaker then repeats the first stanza’s pattern in the opening of the second stanza (using new rhyme sounds). Perhaps this repetition reflects the speaker's attention returning to the river Alph, now describing the chasm through which it flows. Lines 12-16 are again rhymed:

  ABAAB

  However, the following lines switch into rhymed couplets, with slant rhymes in lines 19-20 (forced/burst) and line 23-24 (ever/river):

  CCDDEEFF

  Then, the speaker switches the rhyme scheme once again! Lines 25-30 rhyme:

  GHHGII

  The stanza finally closes with another rhyme scheme, this time:

  JKJKLL

  (Note that "pleasure" and "measure"—the J rhymes here—are also slant rhymes with "ever" and "river"—the F rhymes—from earlier in the stanza; as such, it'd be possible to map the scheme as FKFKLL.) The rhyme scheme of the poem’s first two stanzas is thus exceptionally complex and irregular. It follows no established rule and seems to shift according to the speaker’s whims.

  In the poem’s final stanza, the rhyme scheme shifts once again. In lines 37-41, many of the lines are unrhymed altogether. After the clear end-stop of line 41, the speaker sets forth with a brand new rhyme scheme throughout the end of the poem. These lines are rhymed:

  ABABCDCCCDEED

  This is, once again, a highly unusual rhyme scheme: it corresponds to no set form in English poetry. This new rhyme scheme—with its repetition of the C sound three times in a row—might seem somewhat manic. In any case, it represents new, uncharted territory—just as the speaker begins his discussion of building his own pleasure dome.

“Kubla Khan” Speaker

• Readers don't get much direct information about the poem’s speaker. The reader never learns, for instance, the speaker’s profession, age, or class. Line 50 reveals that the speaker is a man through the use of the pronoun "his," but otherwise the speaker is pretty detached from the narrative of the poem as he describes, with gusto, the wonder of Kubla Khan's "pleasure-dome."

  In the final stanza, however, the speaker starts imagining having such a palace for himself—and the reader gets the image of a rather manic, imposing figure with "flashing eyes" and "floating hair." The speaker thinks that people looking on should "beware" of him in such a state, in which he has "drunk the milk of Paradise." Maybe he's drunk on power in imagining himself with his own palace; or, if one takes the poem to be an extended metaphor about poetry itself, perhaps he's in a frantic, creative mood.

  To that end, the speaker seems interested in Kubla Khan and his palace because they serve as reflections of his own creative ambitions. In line 46, the speaker announces, "I would build that dome in air" using "music loud and long." The speaker is thus implied to be a creative person testing the limits of his artistic powers; he thinks he could build a palace through language alone.

  One could take the speaker to be Coleridge himself—which, to be clear, is not directly stated in the poem and certainly not the only way to interpret it! But Coleridge allegedly did claim to have written the poem after reading about Kubla Khan and Xanadu, taking opium, and then having a fitful sleep. The final lines do seem to feel as though they could be pulled from the mind of someone rousing from a drug-induced dreams (and the "milk of Paradise" could easily be the speaker's literary way saying he's high on opium).

  There are some other clues in the poem about the speaker’s identity. For instance, the speaker makes several allusions to books, like Samuel Purchas’s 1613 travelogue Purchas, his Pilgrmes, an important source for "Kubla Khan" (and, according to legend, the very book Coleridge was reading when he slipped into the opium dream that inspired the poem). The speaker is thus probably an educated person, well read in the travel writing of the day.

  The speaker’s interest in and use of travel narratives like Samuel Purchas's reveals something else about him as well: the speaker doesn't belong to Kubla Khan’s culture. Instead, the speaker is an outsider, someone from the West, who regards Kubla Khan’s palace as an exotic place. In this sense, the poem is not a careful, accurate portrayal of a foreign culture; instead, it says more about the speaker’s own desires—and the speaker’s own stereotypical images of foreign peoples.

“Kubla Khan” Setting

• “Kubla Khan” is set on the grounds of the Mongol leader and Chinese emperor Kubla Khan’s summer palace—or, at least, it is set in the speaker’s dreamy, hallucinatory vision of that palace. The palace itself is a grand-sun-filled place surrounded by lush gardens.

  The poem also spends a lot of time focusing on the Alph river that flows nearby. This river isn't of the serene, lazy variety, at least not all of the time; instead it's big and forceful, "seething" through immense caverns and erupting in a "mighty fountain" before making its way to a comparatively "lifeless ocean." In other words, it splashes violently through the canyons, churning up rocks as it goes.

  The speaker calls the caverns through which the river flows "deep" and "romantic"—in the awe-inducing sense of the word. These caverns are huge—so big, in fact, that the speaker calls them "measureless to man." They also seem at once wild, holy, and magical. The speaker even imagines that they're haunted, and in doing so conjures the image of a woman crying out in the moonlight for a demonic lover. Altogether, this place seems rather unsettling and spooky.

  The setting for the poem is thus only partially literal, however: it's just as much a reflection of the speaker’s own desires and struggles. This impression is reinforced in the poem’s final stanza, where the speaker moves from describing Khan’s palace to detailing a desire to build a palace of the speaker's own “in air.” This can be understood as building the castle through language and storytelling, even poetry. As such, the speaker wants to recreate Khan’s palace as a testament to his own creative powers. The final stanza suggests that the reader should treat the more literal description of the palace and its grounds as being part of the speaker's reflections on creativity, desire, and the power of art—rather than as a literal description of a physical place.

Literary and Historical Context of “Kubla Khan”

• Literary Context

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the leading figures of literary Romanticism, an artistic movement that began in Europe in the late 18th century and was influential through the mid 19th century. In English poetry, the Romantics were a small, close-knit group. (In fact Coleridge wrote "Kubla Khan" while living with fellow Romantic poet William Wordsworth in a cottage in rural England!) The Romantics resisted the rationalism of the European Enlightenment in favor of poetry that elevated the imagination, praised the sublime power of the natural world, and valorized historical periods like the middle ages, which were not quite so enamored of modern "reason."

  The reader can see all of these dynamics at work in "Kubla Khan." In a sense, the poem is about the creative imagination, with all its incredible powers and limitations. And the poem explores the imagination by focusing on nature itself. Nature isn't depicted as a space that follows strict laws, but rather as a space of beauty, power, and violence.

  The poem also notably turns for inspiration to a culture beyond Europe, located in the distant past. Coleridge relied for his information about Kubla Khan on several narratives by early travelers to the Far East, like Marco Polo and Samuel Purchas. Indeed, according to legend, Coleridge was reading Purchas’s 1613 book Purchas, his Pilgrimes, or Relations of the World and Religions Observed in All Ages and Places Discovered when he slipped into the opium dream that inspired the poem. Purchas’s text contains language that closely parallels Coleridge’s: “In Xandu did Cublai Can build a stately Pallace, encompassing sixteen miles of plaine ground with a wall…” Coleridge’s poem is thus a deeply personal fantasy and a reflection of his culture’s limited knowledge of Mongolian life.

  In addition to this general literary context, "Kubla Khan" has a specific story attached to its writing. According to Coleridge himself, writing in a preface often printed with the poem, Coleridge was reading Purchas's book when he slipped into an opium dream. Upon waking, Coleridge wrote the first 54 lines of the poem—intending to write several hundred more. However, he was interrupted by a "person from Porlock"—a neighboring village—who had come on business and kept Coleridge occupied for an hour. Once the business was finally finished, Coleridge found he could no longer complete the poem. Hence, Coleridge's acknowledgment in the poem's subtitle that it's a "fragment." Some scholars have called into question the veracity of this story—suggesting, for instance, that the poem's third stanza, was written later.

  Historical Context

  "Kubla Khan" has two relevant historical contexts: the moment in English history, at the end of the 18th century, when it was written, and the historical moment in the 13th century it describes, when Kublai Khan was the great Khan of the Mongols and Emperor of China. These two historical moments are quite different from each other: they are separated by five hundred years and a continent. However, the separation between them is part of the point for the speaker: because Kublai Khan’s culture is so far removed from his own, it allows him to imagine life beyond the limitations of European culture.

  At the time Coleridge wrote "Kubla Khan," European culture was undergoing serious transformations. Although the leading thinkers of the previous century had prized reason and science, figures across Europe were calling for a return to the powers of the imagination. And politically, the French monarchy had been overthrown in 1789, leading to a brief period of revolutionary radicalism that came to a close in 1799, just after the poem was written. As a result of these intellectual and political transformations, many of the values and institutions that people had cherished—and assumed were untouchable—like hereditary monarchy were coming into question.

  By contrast, Kublai Khan was a leader of the Mongol Empire from 1260 until his death in 1294. He was nominally in charge of the Mongols themselves, although in that capacity he didn’t wield much power. His real power came from his position as Emperor of China, the first Emperor of the Yuan Dynasty—a position he assumed in 1279 when the Mongols conquered the Song Dynasty. He lived long before the 18th century with its political and intellectual clashes.

More “Kubla Khan” Resources

• External Resources

  • Kubla Khan Read Aloud — Actor Benedict Cumberbatch reads "Kubla Khan" aloud.

  • The Romantics — An introduction to British Romantic poetry, from the British Library.

  • Coleridge's Life — A detailed biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from the Poetry Foundation.

  • The Inspiration for "Kubla Khan" — A brief article on Coleridge's main source for "Kubla Khan," with images of the original text.

  • Kubla Khan's Preface — The full text of Coleridge's poem along with its preface.

• LitCharts on Other Poems by Samuel Coleridge

  • Constancy to an Ideal Object

  • Dejection: An Ode

  • Frost at Midnight

  • The Eolian Harp

  • The Pains of Sleep

  • This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison