Kublai Khan



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By Samuel Taylor Coleridge
In Xanadu did Kublai 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 was 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 the 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 ‘midst these dancing rocks at once and ever, It flung up momently the sacred river! Five miles meandering with ever 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, Kublai 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 deep delight ‘twould win me That with music loud and long, I would build that dome within the 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 in holy dread: For he on honeydew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise!”

the preface
Of the Fragment of Kubla Khan

[147] The following fragment is here published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity, and, as far as the Author's own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits.

In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in "Purchas's Pilgrimage": "Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall." The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent [148] expressions, without any sensation of consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter! Yet from the still surviving recollections in his mind, the Author has frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as it were, given to him. Sameron [h]adion asô: but the to-morrow is yet to come.

As a contrast to this vison, I have annexed a fragment of a very different character, describing with equal fidelity the dream of pain and disease.