Kubla Khan, A Vision In A Dream, A Fragment

Kubla Khan was written in1798,and published in 1816 at the request of Lord Byron . Kubla Khan,apart from Ancient Marinar and Cristabel,is another master piece which made Coleridge famous in England .
It was published with the following notes :

The following fragment is here published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity (Lord Byron),and as far as the author’s opinions are concerned,rather as a psychological curiosity than on ground of any supported poetic merit .

In the preface to his collection of poems, Christabel, Kubla Khan, and the Pains of Sleep, published in 1816 Coleridge described how he wrote the poem :

In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in ‘Purchas’s Pilgrimes:’ ‘Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto: and thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.’
The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone had been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter:

Yet from the still surviving recollections in his mind, the Author has frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as it were, given to him. But the to-morrow is yet to come.

Analysis of Kubla Khan

Kubla Khan is the historical figure (1162-1227). He was the grandson of Chengiz Khan,the founder of the Chinese dynasty of the Mongols .He conquered many empires,embracing almost the whole Asia and part of Europe.

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.
So twice five miles of fertile ground

Xanadu and Kubla Khan invest the poem with a sense of remoteness which is the essence of romance and supernaturalism. Kubla Khan ordered a magnificent pleasure palace to be build in Xanadu on the bank of the river Alph. (Alph is an imaginary name . It recalls the Alphesus,a river of Arcadia in Greece. It is supposed to be a sacred river which fertilizers the lands through which t flows.) The river here flowed through deep and immeasurable caverns in the hill and ultimately fell into a dark , subterranean sea .

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

Therefore,a fertile tract of land ,ten square miles in area ,was enclosed with walls and towers . There were in this palace beautiful gardens, meandering streams,many trees laden with flowers ,very antique forests and bright spots overgrown with green mass of vegetation.

With walls and towers were girdled round;

The whole area of ten miles was enclosed by wall and watch towers .

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

There was a broad fissure that arouses the feelings of mystery and strangeness. This was a deep mysterious chasm which sloped down on s green hill across a wood of ceder trees . It was a savage and holy and enchanted place which was frequented by a woman who wandered about moaning in search of her demon lover who deserted her after love making ,in the dark wood . A wild place that arouses the feeling of fear and terror . The part of the night when the moon declines was considered the suitable time for magic and witchcraft in the middle ages .Coleridge,the high priest of supernaturalism,here creates an atmosphere of magic and enchanment so characteristic of the middle epoch.

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:

From the chasm a fountain gushed forth every moment producing a continuous roaring sound ,asif the earth herself were breathing heavily at short intervals .

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

Huge pieces of rocks were thrown up by the mass of the fountain water and they made a semi-circular movement when they fell on earth.

Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:

The grain yet not separated from chaff is called chaffy grain. As the thresher beats the corn with the flail ,many chaffy grains are thrown upwards and then they fall to the ground.
The image of the ‘rebounding hail’ and the chaffy grain beneath the thresher flail are homely and familiar and serve to make the mysterious phenomenon of the throwing off of rocks natural and realistic .

Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The lines are full of romantic allusiveness found in both Wordsworth and Keats . Kubla Khan’s imagination interpreted the roaring sound of the waters as the voice of his ancestors predicting war . But nothing is said about the type of the war,internal or external. The mysterious voices of Kubla’s ancestors intensify the supernaturalism.
Prof . Lowas says the the account of Kubla is Purchase’s Pilgrimage mentions the belief of the Tartars in survival of their ancestors in another world and customs of begining wars only after consulting the priests . May be here it is the psychological convincing because Kubla was himself a great warrior.