Poem of the Day: ‘Kubla Khan’

This is the voice of poetry itself. The musicality of the opening lines, the magisterial diction of the second stanza, the prophet’s tone in the third stanza, the enchantment, the sense of spinning meaningful images just beyond us, like angels or demons dancing in the open air a few feet off the far cliff-edge of meaning’s terrain: There are reasons “Kubla Khan” is consistently ranked among the greatest poems in the English language. It roots draw on the deepest waters of poetry.

Not that the poem was thought so when it was first appeared, with critics at the time generally disliking it. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) himself was uncertain about it, writing the poem in 1797 but not publishing it until 1816 (at Lord Byron’s insistence). His doubts seemed to have stemmed in part from the irregular meter, three to five beats per line, as though the text were a draft of something unfinished. Even more, however, it stemmed from a worry that the sections of the poem did not cohere. 

In a sense, that’s fair enough. The poem does not hold to the traditional poetic unities in a way that would match, say, Coleridge’s long narrative poems “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Christabel,” or even “Frost at Midnight,” Coleridge’s hymn to fatherhood (and a Poem of the Day last fall).

The actual coherence of “Kubla Khan” lies somewhere else: a place worth exploring in honor of Coleridge’s October 21 birthday. One way to appreciate the poem is not to be distracted by the framing device of incompleteness that Coleridge erected around the poem. That story is well known: The poem began in a dream, he said, drug-induced, that promised a long set of verses, but the visit of “a person from Porlock” interrupted the composition, and the poem had fallen away to fragments by the time Coleridge returned to it.

We should concentrate instead on the strange movement of the poem. Coleridge opens with the stately pleasure dome, a human creation that encapsulates nature. But in the second stanza, the chasm in the dome blows up, casting rocks into the air and rerouting the sacred river — “And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far / Ancestral voices prophesying war!”

The “miracle of rare device, / A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice”: What are we to make of it? Coleridge, without introduction or explanation, points us to a woman he once heard playing a dulcimer — and declares that “Could I revive within me / Her symphony and song,” he too could “build that dome in air. / That sunny dome! those caves of ice!”

But just as tumult came to Kubla Khan’s dome, so something lurks in threat for the man who would, if he could, use his art to create a new human capsule of nature. “Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread, / For he on honey-dew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise.”