KUBLA KHAN

Also called “a vision of a dream”

Coleridge had fallen asleep and had a vision during his dream he starts writing as soon as he wakes up as
if he was in a trans  doesn’t rewrite it because it’s the only truthful version

It’s totally irrational

It remains a fragment because he was interrupted by a friend who came to visit him, and he couldn’t
remember his dream anymore  reality is an obstacle to truth  real truth comes from dreams

Full of indefinite and mythological things

PLOT

He starts by describing the landscape of this imaginary empire Kubla Kahn’s pleasure dome  Augustan
gardenordered and tamed, the sun shines on it

Behind the garden there’s a savage place holy and enchanted, like it had been haunted by a woman
wailing for her demon lover haunted, uncivilized

the sinuous rills (small streams), when they exit the garden, a violent river  “like rebounding hail”
explosion

Here is where the sacred river Alph is born  it falls into a deep and dark ocean beneath the ocean there
are the caverns and caves of our imagination, which are measureless to man ocean = reason, caverns =
imagination

the speaker’s descriptions are an allegory for creativity and the human mind  people may act like they're
in control on the surface, but if you dig a bit deeper, human beings aren't all that reasonable. And the
tension between these two parts of the mind—the rational and the irrational—is where creativity comes
from.

the speaker offers a few hints that the river is not just a symbol of human creativity  it also provides a map of the
human mind, showing where that creativity actually comes from.

 The river begins close to Khan's "gardens," which is important because, at the time the poem was written, gardens
often served as symbols of reason: they represent people's power to organize, dominate, and control nature. In this
sense, the river begins with rationality—the reasonable parts of the human mind.

The river ends, however, in icy caverns, "measureless to man," where Kubla Khan hears the voices of his ancestors
predicting "war." This seems like an image of the subconscious—which is violent, uncontrollable, and unknowable to
the rational mind.

Coleridge says that he saw an Abyssinian maid in a vision playing the dulcimer (instrument) singing of a mount named
Abora if he could recreate within himself the symphony he would rebuild the pleasure dome out of music, and
people would look up in the sky and see what he had built and say that he had drunk the “milk of gods” thanks to
his vision he has become a supernatural, sublime being, just like a god