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Updated: May 9, 2025
There lies Coleridge, bound in green, Sleepily still wond'ring what He meant Kubla Khan to mean, In that early Wordsworth, Mat. Arnold knows a faithful prop, Still to subject-matter leans, Murmurs of the loved hill-top, Fyfield tree and Cumnor scenes. The poem closes with a high tribute to Shelley, "more than all the others mine."
The whole poem came to Coleridge one morning when he had fallen asleep over Purchas, and upon awakening he began to write hastily, 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. He was interrupted after fifty-four lines were written, and he never finished the poem.
Barbauld said that The Ancient Mariner was "improbable"; and to this charge it must plead guilty at once. Kubla Khan, which I should rank as almost the best of the four, is very brief, and is nothing but a dream, and a fragment of a dream. Love is very short too, and is flawed by some of the aforesaid namby-pambiness, from which none of the Lake school escaped when they tried passion.
But in Wordsworth there is none of Shelley's magnetism. $What remains of permanent value in Coleridge's poetry such work as "Christabel", the "Ancient Mariner", or "Kubla Khan" is a product of pure artistic fancy, tempered by the author's mysticism. Keats, true and sacred poet as he was, loved Nature with a somewhat sensuous devotion.
Coleridge, indeed, published two of his finest poems, Christabel and Kubla Khan, in 1816, but they were written long before, Christabel, partly in 1797 and partly in 1801, and Kubla Khan in 1798.
It is to England we must go if we seek for silence, that gentle, pervasive silence which wraps us in a mantle of content. It was in Porlock that Coleridge wrote "Kubla Khan," transported, Heaven knows whither, by virtue of the hushed repose that consecrates the sleepiest hamlet in Great Britain. It was at Stoke Pogis that Gray composed his "Elegy." He could never have written
Can't we, Tom?"... No journey ever taken since has equalled in ecstasy that leisurely trip of thirteen miles in the narrow-gauge railroad that wound through hot fields of nodding corn tassels and between delicious, acrid-smelling woods to Claremore. No silent palace "sleeping in the sun," no edifice decreed by Kubla Khan could have worn more glamour than the house of Cousin Robert Breck.
It faced him, the reckoning, over the shoulder of much interposing experience which also faced him; and one would float to it doubtless duly through these caverns of Kubla Khan. It was really behind everything; it hadn't merged in what he had done; his final appreciation of what he had done his appreciation on the spot would provide it with its main sharpness.
If Turk and Mongol had been capable of dynastic evolution and co-ordinate policy they might have shared most of the Eastern Hemisphere between them. We have seen the high-water mark of the Ottoman Empire; Marco Polo has told us of Kubla Khan's Chinese Empire, and the Moguls did much for India in their prime.
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.
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