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Updated: May 9, 2025
For the second part, by giving to the fairy atmosphere of the first a local habitation and a name, robbed it of its most precious quality; what it gave in exchange was something the public could get better from Scott. Kubla Khan went unfinished because the call of a friend broke the thread of the reverie in which it was composed.
Many translate, into languages fit for the multitude, messages which they receive from human voices: some listen, like Kubla Khan, far down in caverns or hanging over subterranean rivers, for secret whispers that mingle and confuse themselves with the general uproar of torrents, but which can be detected and kept apart by the obstinate prophetic ear, which spells into words and ominous sentences the distracted syllables of aerial voices.
I know all this will sound ridiculous, especially that quotation from Kubla Khan coming after the close of the preceding sentence; but it is only so much the more like the jumble of thoughts that made a chaos of my mind as I went home. And then for that terrible pool, and subterranean passage, and all that what had it all to do with this broad daylight, and these dying autumn leaves?
It is this fable of the underground course of Alpheus that Coleridge alludes to in his poem of Kubla 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."
In all literature there has been no finer passage written on the wounds caused by broken friendship than the lines in Christabel relating to the estrangement of Roland and Sir Leoline. After reading this poem and Kubla Khan, an unfinished dream fragment of fifty-four lines, we feel that the closing lines of Kubla Khan are peculiarly applicable to Coleridge:
She had imagined a picturesque house, a sort of "Kubla Khan" palace in the desert; and she had expected that perhaps Ourïeda and her father, the Agha, would come ceremoniously out through a vast arched doorway to welcome her. But here there was not even the arched entrance of her fancy, only two small doors set as far as possible from one another in the blank façade.
It's not the size or splendor that prevent the telling, but rather the sublime simplicity of it all. I know no language today simple enough to utter it. Far behind words it lies, as difficult of full recovery as the dreams of deep sleep, as the ecstasy of the religious, elusive as the mystery of Kubla Khan or the Patmos visions of St. John.
Be on the look-out for him, children; for the songs he sings will be full of wonder, like Kubla Khan, and the melodies will be those of fairyland. Did he not hear them himself on the Old King's Mountain, when he attended the Midsummer fête of the fairies? I wonder if the girls and boys who read these stories, have heard of the charming and romantic town of Eisenach?
The current synthesizes, harmonizes, moves onward like music, and we are aware that it is all a dream. Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," composed in a deep opium slumber, moves like that, one train of images melting into another like the interwoven figures of a dance led by the "damsel with a dulcimer." There is no "conscious purpose" whatever, and no "meaning" in the ordinary interpretation of that word.
Emerson, I think, first clearly stated it. His terms were the literature of "power" and the literature of "knowledge." In nearly all great literature the two qualities are to be found in company, but one usually predominates over the other. An example of the exclusively inspiring kind is Coleridge's *Kubla Khan*. I cannot recall any first-class example of the purely informing kind.
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