Kubla Khan

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For the emperor, see Kublai Khan.

Draft of "Kubla Khan"

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

The poem's opening lines are often quoted, and it introduces the name Xanadu (or Shangdu, the summer palace of Kublai Khan):

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.

Coleridge claimed that the poem was inspired by an opium-induced dream (implicit in the poem's subtitle A Vision in a Dream) but that the composition was interrupted by a person from Porlock. Some have speculated that the vivid imagery of the poem stems from a waking hallucination albeit, most likely, opium-induced. Additionally a quote from William Bartram^[1] is believed to have been a source of the poem. There is widespread speculation on the poem's meaning, some suggesting the author is merely portraying his vision while others insist on a theme or purpose. Others believe it is a poem stressing the beauty of creation.

However, it is important to remember that inspiration for this poem also comes from Marco Polo's description of Shangdu and Kublai Khan from his book Il Milione, which was included in Samuel Purchas' Pilgrimage, Vol. XI, 231.

When he declared himself emperor the historical Kublai claimed he had the Mandate of Heaven, a traditional Chinese concept of rule by divine permission, and therefore gained absolute control over an entire nation. Between warring and distributing the wealth his grandfather Genghis Khan had won, Kublai spent his summers in Xandu (better known now as Shangdu, or Xanadu) and had his subjects build him a home suitable for a son of God.

This story is described in the first two lines of the poem, “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure-dome decree” (1-2). The end of the third paragraph gives us another close-up view of Kubla. At his home Kublai had, on hand, some ten thousand horses, which he used as a means of displaying his power. Only he and those to whom he gave explicit permission (for committing miscellaneous acts of valour) were allowed to drink their milk. Hence the closing image of “the milk of Paradise.” (54)

For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

1 Borges and Kubla Khan
2 Kubla Khan in popular culture
3 Places named for Kubla Khan or Xanadu
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Borges and Kubla Khan

In his essay "Coleridge's Dream", the famous Argentine essayist and short story author Jorge Luis Borges notes that twenty years following the final revision of the poem, a fourteenth-century Persian work called Compendium of Chronicles by Rashid al-Din was published in English for the first time. This work included the detail that the inspiration for Kubla Khan's palace was given to him in a dream. Near the end of the essay Borges writes:

The first dream added a palace to reality; the second, which occurred five centuries later, a poem (or the beginning of a poem) suggested by the palace; the similarity of the dreams hints of a plan; the enormous length of time involved reveals a superhuman executor... It is legitimate to suspect that he has not yet achieved his goal... Such facts raise the possibility that this series of dreams and works has not yet ended. The first dreamer was given the vision of the palace, and he built it; the second, who did not know of the other's dream, was given the poem about the palace. If this plan does not fail, someone, on a night centuries removed from us, will dream the same dream, and not suspect that others have dreamed it, and he will give it a form of marble or music. Perhaps this series of dreams has no end, or perhaps the last will be the key... Perhaps an archetype not yet revealed to mankind, an eternal object, is gradually entering the world. (Source: Borges, Selected Non-Fictions)

It should be noted that although many of Borges' works play with the intermixing of historical fact and fictional referencial history, he was always scrupulously accurate and honest in his non-fictional writings (see the introduction to Selected Non-Fictions).

[edit] Kubla Khan in popular culture

In Orson Welles' famous film Citizen Kane, the main character's vast, Byzantine estate is called Xanadu — and was based on real-life newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst's resplendent home (Hearst Castle) at San Simeon, California. The Canadian progressive rock power trio, Rush, wrote and recorded a song called "Xanadu" based on Coleridge's work. The song appears on their 1977 album, A Farewell to Kings, and it offers a much more pessimistic take on the poem's paradisaical vision of immortality.

The American hard-rock band Van Halen's song "Pleasure Dome" from their 1991 album For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge was actually based on Rush's "Xanadu", and not on the Coleridge poem. The song "Welcome to the Pleasuredome", the epic title track to the 1984 album by the British dance band Frankie Goes to Hollywood is also inspired by Coleridge's poem and features the opening two lines spoken in recitation. The poem, and its non-fragmentary second part, also plays a central role in the plot of Douglas Adams' novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency as the ramblings of a ghost who accidentally created all life on Earth.

[edit] Places named for Kubla Khan or Xanadu

Kartchner Caverns State Park features a group of limestone caves located 50 miles southeast of Tucson, Arizona. The largest formation in the caves is named after Kubla Khan. The discoverers, who found the cave in the mid-1970's, felt there were parallels between the story in Coleridge's poem and the discovery of their own Xanadu.