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Updated: May 9, 2025
There were endless devices of colored lamps and lanterns, figures of crosses, crowns, the Seal of Solomon, and the most strange effects produced on foliage and in the water by red and green and purple fires. It was a night of enchantment, and the hotel and its grounds on the dark background of the night were like the stately pleasure-house in "Kubla Khan." But the season was drawing to an end.
It was ruled by an emperor, the Kubla Khan, or Great Khan, who lighted his bedroom with a bright jewel half a foot long, set upon golden pillars, and decorated his walls with wrought gold and hundreds of precious stones. The rivers of the land were crossed by marble bridges, and the houses were roofed and paved with gold.
"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree." Coleridge. I am the owner of great estates. Many of them lie in the West; but the greater part are in Spain. You may see my western possessions any evening at sunset when their spires and battlements flash against the horizon.
At the same time romance once more showed its perennial face, suggesting that the future does not belong to naturalism entirely. Donn Byrne in Messer Marco Polo played in a bright Gaelic way with the story of Marco Polo and his quest for Golden Bells, the daughter of Kubla Khan.
As to the wild dream-poem Kubla Khan, it is hardly more than a psychological curiosity, and only that perhaps in respect of the completeness of its metrical form.
The stories of Dante's "certain men of business," who interrupted his drawing of Beatrice, and of Coleridge's visitors who broke in upon the writing of Kubla Khan, are notorious. Tennyson, in The Poet's Mind, warns all intruders away from the singer's inspired hour. He tells them,
"But, if the world is round," said Columbus, "it is not hell that lies beyond that stormy sea. Over there must lie the eastern strand of Asia, the Cathay of Marco Polo, the land of the Kubla Khan, and Cipango, the great island beyond it." "Nonsense!" said the neighbors; "the world isn't round can't you see it is flat?
Petticoat, out of his new wealth, had, like Kubla Khan in Xanadu, a stately pleasure dome decreed, and in this new architectural triumph, where water lilies and swans floated on the surface of a deep black pool, Warble restlessly tossed in a welter of golden cushions, changing her position every ten seconds. A giant lumbered in. "Porgie!"
His declaration was, of course, not equivalent to saying, "I have endeavored to feel what the world thinks I ought to feel," but even so, one suspects that the philosophical part of Coleridge was uppermost at the time of this utterance, and that his obligatory feelings did not flower in a Christabel or a Kubla Khan.
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.
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