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"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.
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.
I will tell you what it is, but first you must hear the history of a young Persian girl who once lived in that pleasure-dome. A stranger or a more bitterly heart-rending tragedy was never enacted on this earth." Just at this moment the coolies announced that the train was coming. So soon? We hurriedly packed up our luggage, as the tram steamed in.
To avoid the more traveled thoroughfare, while the evening was still early, it had been arranged that she should at first take a less direct but less frequented road. This was a famous pleasure-drive from San Francisco, a graveled and sanded stretch of eight miles to the sea and an ultimate "cocktail," in a "stately pleasure-dome decreed" among the surf and rocks of the Pacific shore.
He knew himself to be a thing to be pointed at; yet he longed for the sound of human voices, for the touch of human hands, for the living sweetness of his child's face. The sirens of the invisible night no longer whispered to him. He was utterly alone. He had entered his kingdom. Viewed from afar it had seemed a vast pleasure-dome of infinite enchantment.
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."
His Scottish castle delighted him not, nor the grand old place in the Midlands. Ashbourne, which was the pleasure-dome he had built for himself, contained all he cared about. Too heavy and too lazy to hunt, he was able to jog about his farm, and supervise the work that was going on, to the smallest detail.
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. The child had inherited a love of beautiful sound, and, though she understood nothing of the meaning, the music charmed her, and she nestled close to her father, with wide eyes. "Say some more, Daddy."
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."
There Touraine jostles Constantinople; and the climax is reached by Mr Schwab, who has decreed for himself a lofty pleasure-dome, which is said to resemble Chambord, and which takes its place in a long line of villas, without so much as a turnip-field to give it an air of seclusion or security. In this vainglorious craving for discomfort there is a kind of naïveté which is not without its pathos.
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