An Introduction to 'Kubla Khan' at the British Library

For you Romantics: Dr. Seamus Perry has written an introduction to Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" for the British Library's invaluable Discovering Literature. "[H]e didn’t take [opium] to provoke a dream vision, but that (so he claims) is what happened, ‘in a sort of Reverie’." More:

The pleasure dome
What did he see? The short answer is, to begin with, an extraordinary piece of architecture, ‘A stately pleasure-dome’ (l. 2), which was built in the Mongolian summer capital by one of the great Emperors of ancient Tartary, Kubla, the grandson of Genghis Khan; but Coleridge’s interest does not seem especially drawn by the cruel despotism that would probably have been his reader’s first association. Coleridge’s Khan is a kind of artist, summoning into being with a God-like command not only the beauty of the pleasure-dome but the ordered loveliness of its cultivated gardens, full of sweet smells and tinkling streams, all sheltered from the outside world by robust ‘walls and towers’ (l. 7).

The natural history of Xanadu
The second verse then turns to picture that outside world, which it places in stark antithesis to the pleasures of the garden: ‘But oh!’ Outside, nature is exuberant, tumultuous, violent, ‘savage’, full of erotic feeling (‘woman wailing for her demon-lover’), and punctuated chiefly by exclamation marks (l. 12; l. 14; l. 16). The energy of the scene is superbly conveyed through breathless, on-running sentences, and the verse comes to a close with a vivid sense of that energy’s potential for destruction: ‘And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far / Ancestral voices prophesying war!’ (ll. 29-30). We learn no more about the character of this strange family curse, if that is what it is; but the mention is enough to cast some doubt on the survival of the pleasure-dome, a magnificent creation which now feels perhaps somewhat over-shadowed by the unruly splendour of the sublime scenery that surrounds it.

See more (including digitizations of original manuscripts, and zillions of other articles) at the British Library.