Kubla+Khan

Coleridge's Kubla Khan



Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan can be considered a dream poem, i.e. a poem based on its author's dreams and the images seen during his sleep; or in Coleridge's case, the images he saw while under the influence of Opium. Consequently, following through the lines of this poem can become difficult and cause the reader to lose the connection between them; sometimes, there is no seeming transition from one idea to the next one, as the images evoked by them are not precisely organized in a coherent form. They seem to be the narration of what Kubla saw during his "dream". This is seen from the beginning lines of the poem: "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure-dome decree" (1-2). Then again at the end of the third stanza "And 'midst this tumult Kubla heard from afar,/Ancestral voices prophesying war!" (29-30). And finally, at the end of the final stanza the author says "For he on honeydew hath fed,/And drunk the milk of Paradise" (52-53), which is an indication that Kubla had been under the influence of something, this milk of paradise can be considered as a source of inspiration for the images that Kubla saw. However, there are two cases when the author switched the pronoun used to refer about the person who was seeing these images, as seen in the fifth stanza “A damsel with a dulcimer/In a vision once I saw” (37-38), this is also seen on the final stanza:

Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight 'twould win me, That with music loud and long, I would build that pleasure-dome. (43-46)  Here, first person is used, whether in a careless way, or in an intentional way, reader’s do not know. The sense this provides to the reader is that the speaker, or perhaps, the author, saw these images directly. It was not just the persona of the poem, it could have been the author as well. This being the first evidence of an incongruency on the author's side. Even more, there is a very oximoronic image in the fourth stanza "A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!" (35). This line presents an image of caves of ice in a dome of sunny pleasure, which is, all in itself, quite difficult to imagine. However, as a professor for a literary writing workshop once said in class "sometimes images are easier to understand under the effect of certain substances" (Undisclosed prof.). Likewise, authors "can have a higher inspiration under the effect of said substances" (same professor). So, even if these images seem so difficult to follow sometimes and the persona of the poem becomes confusing due to the shifts in the pronouns used throughout the poem, it may all just be the consequence of the inspiration from which the author wrote these lines.

Luis Fernando Salazar