D AV I D P E R K I N S

The Imaginative Vision of Kubla Khan:

On Coleridge’s Introductory Note

C oleridge’s introductory note to Kubla Khan weaves together two

myths with potent imaginative appeal. The myth of the lost poem tells
how an inspired work was mysteriously given to the poet and then dis-
pelled irrecoverably. The nonexistent lines haunt the imagination more
than any actual poem could. John Livingston Lowes used to tell his
classes, W. Jackson Bate remembers, “If there is any man in the history of
literature who should be hanged, drawn, and quartered, it is the man on
business from Porlock.” He has become, as Elizabeth Schneider remarks,
a byword for Philistine intrusion upon genius. Coleridge’s self-portrait in
the introductory note is another source of fascination, one that anticipates,
as Timothy Bahti observes, the image of the poet later propagated by the
symbolistes and L’art pour l’art.1 The note describes the poet as a solitary, a
dreamer, and a reader of curious lore, such as Purchas His Pilgrimage. He
is not portrayed as a habitual taker of drugs but rather the opposite: an
“anodyne” had been prescribed for an illness and had the profound effect
the note describes because, as the reader is supposed to infer, Coleridge
was not used to the drug. But the motif of being drugged is also part of
the symboliste myth of the poet. Only to a poet of this kind, withdrawn in
dreams and uncertain in his inspiration, could the person from Porlock
be a serious intrusion. That the man from Porlock comes “on business” is

From Coleridge, Keats, and the Imagination: Romanticism and Adam’s Dream, edited by J.
Robert Barth, S.J., and John L. Mahoney, pp. 97–108. © 1990 by the Curators of the
University of Missouri.

39
40 David Perkins

also typical of the symboliste ethos, in which ordinary life and “business”
were viewed as antithetical to poetry.
How the introductory note should be printed has not been much dis-
cussed, but editors have disagreed in practice. In popular anthologies it may
be omitted altogether. If it is, the poem may not be read with the assumption
that it is unfinished, particularly when, as is generally done, the editor also
deletes Coleridge’s 1834 subtitle, “Or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment.”2
Since in Romantic poetry “Vision,” “Dream,” and “Fragment” are practically
genres, a reader’s experience of the poem must be quite different when the
expectations evoked by these terms are not activated.
In many anthologies Coleridge’s introduction is printed as a footnote,
usually without the first paragraph and the conclusion (the note usually stops
at “without the after restoration of the latter,” deleting the self-quotation from
The Picture and the paragraphs that follow it). This editorial decision gives the
introductory note less importance and suppresses several of its themes: that
Coleridge is reluctant to publish the poem, that he offers it only as a “psycho-
logical curiosity,” and that he is dependent on involuntary inspiration. After
the poem was first “given” to him and then lost, he says in the penultimate
paragraph, he could not restore or finish it “for himself,” though he frequently
tried. When Coleridge’s lines from The Picture are not included, the theme of
lost inspiration loses one of its counterpointing developments.
Or editors may place the note before the poem as an introduction, as
Coleridge did. My purpose in this essay is to inquire what difference it makes.
The introductory note guides our reading of the poem from start to finish.
Without it, most readers would interpret the poem as asserting the power and
potential sublimity of the poet, who can be compared to the great Khan. With
the introductory note, this assertion is still present, but it is strongly undercut;
the poem becomes richer and more complex, and the theme of lost inspira-
tion is much more heavily weighted. Since many critics have stressed that the
introductory note apologizes for the poem and minimizes its significance,
there is no need to dwell further on these points. Instead, I shall emphasize
that the introductory note gives the poem a plot it would not otherwise have,
indicates genres to which the poem belongs, and presents images and themes
that interrelate with those in the poem.
In previous articles and books, the only critics who have discussed the
problems I take up are Irene H. Chayes, Kathleen M. Wheeler, and Jean-
Pierre Mileur.3 For Chayes, the introductory note is a “literary invention” that
“serves as an improvised argument” of the poem; it informs the reader that
“the unacknowledged point of view” in the first thirty-six lines of the poem
“is that of a man asleep, probably dreaming”; and it offers a “general struc-
tural parallel” to the poem, since in both the introductory note and the poem
 The Imaginative Vision of Kubla Khan 41

“poetic composition of one kind occurs in the past but in some way is imper-
fect, and poetic composition of another kind is planned for the future but
remains unachieved” (pp. 2–4). Wheeler agrees with Chayes that the intro-
ductory note is “a highly literary piece of composition” and that it has thematic
similarities to the last eighteen lines of the poem. She thinks that the speaker
of the introductory note is not to be taken as Coleridge but as a literal-minded
and naive persona whom Coleridge creates “as a model to the reader of how
not to respond to the poem” (p. 28). Once the reader recognizes himself in the
persona, Wheeler argues, he feels a revulsion and becomes more imaginative
and perceptive. Since Coleridge intended all this, his ironic representation
of himself in the persona as a “laughingstock” was “a gesture of incalculable
generosity” (p. 38). She arrives at this theory because she wants to make the
introductory note analogous to the glosses of the Ancient Mariner.4 Mileur
also believes that the introductory note is a “self-conscious fiction” with lit-
erary quality. It “constitutes an interpretation of the poem” and itself “cries
out for interpretation” (p. 26). He makes specific suggestions to which I am
indebted, but his interest is less in the relation of the introductory note to the
poem than in general issues this relation poses or illustrates—“immanence”
and “presence” versus “revision” and “belatedness.”
Complex parallels and contrasts link the introductory note and the poem.
There is a sharp difference in scene and tone. The introductory note is realistic,
everyday, faintly humorous, and prose, while the poem is romantic, exotic,
sublime, and verse. The action of the one is located in contemporary England,
between Porlock and Linton, while the other is in ancient China. But they
have a similar theme: the character and power (or weakness) of the poet. In
the introductory note the poet is a drugged dreamer; his momentary inspira-
tion is dismissed as a psychological anomaly. He takes “pen, ink, and paper”
to record his lines, and his poem dissolves when the ordinary world intrudes.
In the concluding lines of the poem, however, the poet is an awful figure of
supernatural inspiration. His poetry is voiced, spoken rather than written, and
imposes itself on the ordinary world, for in the conclusion of the poem the
man from Porlock is represented by the poet’s auditors (“all”), who are com-
pelled to hear the poet and see his vision. Nevertheless, both the poet of the
introductory note and the one of the concluding lines of the poem have lost
their inspiration; the difference between them is that the modest, rueful writer
of the introductory note scarcely hopes to recover it, while the speaker of the
poem imagines himself as possibly doing so and creates a sublime image of
himself as poet. We might be tempted to say that the introductory note and
the concluding paragraph ironize one another, so that in neither can the rep-
resentation of the poet’s character and relation to the world be read with naive
faith.5 But when brought into contact with Romantic conventions, whatever
42 David Perkins

is expressed in realistic conventions, as is the introductory note, always pre-

empts our sense of truth. Everything about the introductory note—its tone,
its description of the poet, the world it portrays—emphasizes by contrast that
the poem is Romantic in the sense of unreal.
In his “lonely farm-house” the author of the introductory note may also
be compared with Kubla Khan behind his walls; since no other persons are
mentioned in the first thirty-six lines of the poem, the reader imagines Kubla
as alone. Though it is not unconscious and inspired,6 Kubla’s creativity is sim-
ilarly effortless; he decrees and the palace is built. Coleridge’s reference in the
introductory note to “images on the surface of the stream” has reminded some
readers of lines 31–32;7 in these lines the image or “shadow” of the dome of
pleasure would similarly be in fragments, since it would be broken by the
waves,8 as also is the image reflected on the stream in The Picture. The word
anodyne sounds a little like “Xanadu,” suggesting that Kubla’s palace is located
in opium-land.
This brings me to the very interesting quotation in the introductory
note from Coleridge’s The Picture. The introductory note implies that a stone
has been thrown into a stream. A youth, who is gazing into the stream, can
no longer see the images reflected in it, since they are dispersed by the waves
from the stone. The youth is a version of the poet in the introductory note.
If we read only the extract from The Picture that Coleridge quotes, we can-
not known what “lovely forms” are reflected in the stream. In the context of
the whole episode in The Picture, they are the forms of natural objects along
the bank and of a “stately virgin,” who has coyly obliterated the reflection of
herself, at which the youth was gazing, by dropping not a stone but blossoms
into the stream. Coleridge’s theme in this part of The Picture is the familiar
Romantic one of nympholepsy as expressing attraction to the transcendent
and ideal. Like the persons in the concluding paragraph of the poem, who
would close their eyes “with holy dread” at sight of the supernaturally inspired
poet, the youth hardly dares to look at the maiden directly (“scarcely dar’st
lift up thine eyes”). His vision of her is lost (“all that phantom-world so fair
/ Vanishes”), and just as Kubla hears “Ancestral voices prophesying war,” the
“fair” vision seen by the youth becomes one of strife, as each of the “thou-
sand circlets” created by the blossoms falling into the water “mis-shape[s]
the other.” But the extract from The Picture has a happier trajectory than the
introductory note. For in the extract there is a second person, the poet speaker,
who is watching or imagining this scene. He comforts the disconsolate youth
by reassuring him that the visions will be restored, and in the lines Coleridge
quotes they “Come trembling back,” and the pool is again “a mirror.” Reading
only the fragment quoted in the introductory note, we would not know that
this episode in The Picture actually ends with the loss of the vision. In the lines
 The Imaginative Vision of Kubla Khan 43

not quoted, the “shadow” of the maiden can no longer be seen after the stream
has again smoothed over. She has departed, and thereafter the youth seeks her
through the woods in vain, or gazes into “the vacant brook.”
Whether the story Coleridge tells in the introductory note is true has
been much debated but makes no difference to my argument. Most critics
now doubt that the poem was interrupted by the man from Porlock, that it
is a fragment, and that its composition was as involuntary as the introduc-
tory note suggests.9 (On the Crewe manuscript Coleridge noted that it was
“composed, in a sort of Reverie.”) However, the state of the argument leaves
one free to credit or question Coleridge’s story at any of these points, and the
main reason for denying that Kubla Khan is a fragment is the possibility of
interpreting it as a coherent whole. If Coleridge’s story is not true—or even
if it is—one naturally asks why he told it. The usual answer is that Coleridge
was embarrassed by the poem. He had “little confidence” in it (McFarland),
wished to defend himself against the charge of obscurity (Yarlott), and was
ashamed to publish another fragment (Schneider).10 He wrote the intro-
ductory note to deflect judgment, for we cannot form a critical opinion of
a fragment, or if we can, we cannot hold Coleridge responsible for a poem
composed in a dream. Beer, Bate, Brisman, Patterson, and others argue that
the meaning of the poem made Coleridge uneasy; hence in the introductory
note he both abdicated responsibility for the poem and tried to minimize its
significance.11 I shall come back to this point later, but for the moment I shall
assume that Coleridge wrote the introductory note for reasons quite different
from those that have been suggested. He wished to impose a “plot” upon the
poem and to invoke appropriate formal expectations.
Without the introductory note Kubla Khan would not have a plot but
would consist of two separate passages, the second referring in some lines
to the first but not continuing from it. Bate has argued that this structure
corresponds to a common one in the greater Romantic lyric, in which the
first part, the “odal hymn,” postulates a “challenge, ideal, or prototype that
the poet hopes to reach or transcend,” and the “second part, proceeding from
that challenge, consists of ” a concluding “credo,” a “personal expression of
hope or ambition.”12 Bate cites Keats’s Ode to Psyche and Shelley’s Ode to the
West Wind as examples. In these examples, however, the two parts are much
more closely interconnected than in Kubla Khan, and Coleridge was strongly
committed to the principle that a good poem is organically unified. He could
hardly have been pleased with the structure he had created. By writing the
introductory note he both explained the structure and converted the poem
into the dramatic enactment of a story.
The story told in the introductory note and enacted in the poem is that
Coleridge, having taken an “anodyne,” fell asleep while reading Purchas His
44 David Perkins

Pilgrimage. In his sleep he composed “from two to three hundred lines.” He

remembered them when he awoke, and wrote them down as far as line 30. At
this point a person called on business from Porlock and stayed above an hour.
When, thereafter, Coleridge tried to continue the poem, he found that “with
the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images,” he could no
longer remember it. He wrote down the “scattered lines and images,” which
make up lines 31–36 of the poem, and at some later time composed lines
37–54 as a conclusion. Since the introductory note does not explicitly say
that Coleridge appended the “scattered lines” to the ones already set down,
a reader could assume that the interruption to the poem, caused by the man
from Porlock, comes at line 36. I prefer to locate it at line 31 (“The shadow
of the dome of pleasure”) because at that point the continuity breaks and
because the poem again seems somewhat discontinuous at line 35 (“It was a
miracle of rare device”); thus, to repeat, lines 31–34 and 35–36 can plausibly
be viewed as the separate fragments Coleridge could still remember after the
visitor from Porlock had left. Wherever the reader locates the interruption,
he sees it taking place, but would not see it without the introductory note,
which tells him to look for it. Kubla Khan is a poem on the Romantic theme
of lost inspiration that represents the loss occurring.13
That the final lines (37–54) are not to be read as among those given
in the dream is a necessary inference from their content.14 For otherwise a
reader would have to assume that in the very moment when Coleridge was
envisioning the Abyssinian maid (“the images rose up before him as things,
with a parallel production of the corresponding expressions”) he spoke of
this vision in the past tense. Such deliberate confusions are expected in John
Ashbery but impossible to imagine in earlier poets. The poet would hardly say
“In a vision once I saw” while the vision was present to him. Neither would
he desire to revive the vision in the midst of it. Hence the reader must assume
that lines 37–54 were written at some time subsequent to the dream com-
position. The longer we suppose they came after the original experience, the
more moving their nostalgia and wish, as we imagine Coleridge still remem-
bering the vision and longing to “rebuild” it. Yet, though the final lines are
in the subjunctive mood, the grammatical markers of this (“could,” “would,”
“should”) disappear after line 49. The reader half forgets that the lines express
only a wish and glories in the sublime poet they describe as though he were
present. Thus, though in logic and grammar the poem does not conclude
positively, for the imagination it ends triumphantly, as though the dome were
rebuilt. In this respect the conclusion develops a possibility given in a differ-
ent tone in the introductory note through Coleridge’s self-quotation from
The Picture, which had promised that the “visions will return” and the “frag-
ments . . . unite.”
 The Imaginative Vision of Kubla Khan 45

The Abyssinian maid has been the focus of intensive commentary; while
nothing in the introductory note, so far as I can see, explains why Coleridge
referred to her in particular, the plot to this point makes it plausible that at
line 37 the speaker would appeal to some external source of inspiration. For
his poem has been interrupted, the vision it reports is lost, and he is unable
to revive the vision “for himself.” From his store of memory or imagination,
therefore, he invokes the Abyssinian maid as a muse. When in line 38 he says
that he once saw the Abyssinian maid in “a vision,” he refers to a different
vision from that reported in lines 1–36 and referred to in the introductory
note (“he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general pur-
port of the vision”) and in the subtitle, for though a reader might imagine that
the vision of the Abyssinian maid was included in the dream, the different
associations of Abyssinia and China, Kubla Khan and a singing maiden, sug-
gest otherwise. The formulation of line 38 suggests this also, for if “a vision”
referred to the vision just narrated of Kubla Khan’s pleasure grounds and
dome, it would more appropriately read “the vision,” and the word once would
not be present.15 To sum up: the introductory note says that the poet lost a
vision and the final lines express a wish to rebuild this vision, but in order to
rebuild the vision of Kubla’s pleasure dome, the poet must first revive a differ-
ent vision, seen on another occasion, of an Abyssinian maid.
Because of the introductory note, we read Kubla Khan as a dream-poem, a
genre that appealed strongly in the Romantic period. Among the well-known
dream-poems are The Prelude 5.70–140, The Pains of Sleep, Darkness, The Four
Zoas, and The Fall of Hyperion; if we conflate “dream” with “vision” we would
add many more, including The Triumph of Life and virtually all of Blake.
To say just what readers expected in poems in this genre would be a sub-
ject for a book, and I can touch only on some main headings. A dream-poem
might be “nonsense” (Lamb’s and Hazlitt’s term for Kubla Khan). But it might
be veiled revelation, especially when it was also a “vision.” Dreams and visions
escaped from realism, predesigned form, orderly sequence, and rational and
ethical responsibility and were thus invested with the mystery and wonder
also found in primitive myths, folk and fairy tales, and medieval romances.
Dreams might embody our secret emotions, and for some Romantic readers
dreams might emerge from a reality deeper than ordinary reality, or express
a mind within us that is more profound and aware than the conscious mind;
dreams might rise from our inmost being where we are one with the all. If,
as several commentators assume, Coleridge wished in the introductory note
to minimize the import of Kubla Khan, to describe it as a dream was not an
effective method.
Among the formal characteristics of dreams, and hence of dream-poems,
was their concreteness. Except when a character in the dream spoke, a dream
46 David Perkins

was made up of images, and a dream-poem lacked discursive language. The

images might be peculiarly vivid. This was prized, and the more so when the
images were glamorous or exotic. The poetic effusion of Perdita Robinson on
Kubla Khan suggests that she found no meaning in the images but was thrilled
by them and that they set off similar, supplementary images in her mind. The
sequence of dream imagery might be explained by laws of association; more-
over, in dreaming such functions of the mind as the external senses, the reason,
or the will might be suspended, making dreams more purely associational than
the activity of the mind when awake. Or, in another theory, the imagery of
dreams was not produced by association but expressed and varied with the
emotional state of the dreamer. According to G. H. von Schubert’s Symbolik
des Traumes (1814), the images of a dream are metaphorical and symbolic; they
achieve a rapidity, economy, and wealth of meaning impossible to words. A
few strangely ordered images in a dream can express what it would take hours
to say in verbal language.16 But the images of a dream are not experienced
as figurative by the dreamer. For as Coleridge explained in connection with
stage illusion, a dreamer does not compare the images presented in the dream
with others. Each is literal reality during the instant in which it is present.
Obviously the persistently concrete, exotic, immediate, unexplained imagery
of Kubla Khan would seem dreamlike to a Romantic reader.
In other dream-poems the speaker remembers a dream and reports it;
since it took place in the past, the dream, we assume, has been worked over
by the poet with the intention of creating a poem. In Kubla Khan, accord-
ing to the introductory note, the words of the poem were part of the dream
and were not changed subsequently. That composition was involuntary would
have meant to Coleridge that Kubla Khan could not be considered a poem in
the full sense and would have justified his description of it as a mere “psycho-
logical curiosity.” But for many Romantic readers Coleridge’s introductory
note would have suggested that Kubla Khan, as the work of the “poet hidden”
within us, in Schubert’s phrase, was a greater work than if the conscious mind
and will had helped to create it.
What Coleridge conveyed to the reader in calling the poem a “frag-
ment” is more doubtful. It was not, in any case, merely that the poem was
incomplete. Of course, Coleridge thus made, as I said, loss of inspiration more
emphatically the subject of the poem than it would otherwise have been, and
he altered the image of the poet, who became less sublime and more pathetic.
But at least in German Romanticism, with which Coleridge was familiar, a
“fragment” was a recognized literary from.17 It was valued because it acti-
vated the imagination; in fact, a fragment was more suggestive than the same
words would be within a larger work, where the context would necessarily
limit their implication. According to the theories of the Schlegel brothers, a
 The Imaginative Vision of Kubla Khan 47

fragment preserves the free, ironic stance of its author as a systematic work
would not. And for Romantic feeling in general, as McFarland has shown,
any existing particular must seem a fragment in relation to the infinite whole.
In McFarland’s Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin attention is also directed
to fragmentation within what we naively consider as wholes. For the Roman-
tic sense of things, as McFarland interprets it, poems, personalities, and lives
are inevitably “diasparactive” or torn apart.
The theme of fragmentation runs through Kubla Khan. There is the sub-
title, and the term fragment occurs again in the introductory note; the two to
three hundred lines of which the poem originally consisted may or may not
have been a fragment; after the person from Porlock has gone, Coleridge can
recall only “scattered lines or images”; he quotes (misquotes) a fragment from
Purchas His Pilgrimage and another from his own poem The Picture; in the lat-
ter quotation the images in the water are said to shatter into “fragments” and
then reunite; in the poem “huge fragments” of rocks are hurled up by a “foun-
tain”; the “shadow of the dome of pleasure” would be broken into fragments
by “the waves”; and structurally the poem falls into at least two separate frag-
ments. A fragment, as these items suggest, is torn from something larger, and
it brings the larger context to mind. Just as the whole of Purchas His Pilgrim-
age is vaguely invoked by the extract from it, and the entire The Picture by the
quotation from it, the original “two to three hundred lines” of Kubla Khan are
shadowed forth by the lines we have, not as something we can read or even
guess at, but as something we are tempted to guess at. Moreover, a fragment,
as the “huge rocks” remind us, can be sublime in itself. Many of these refer-
ences are to actions and describe things becoming fragmented, fragments
being hurled forth, and fragments reuniting. Things become fragmented by
accident, as in the introductory note, or deliberately, as in The Picture, or by
the action of irresistible forces and pressures, as with the huge rocks. The two
latter suggestions, I suspect, are closer than the introductory note to the truth
concerning Coleridge’s fragment.
Lowes, who gives a source for almost every image in the poem, did
not seek one for the man from Porlock, for he did not consider this famous
person as a part of the poem but as real. If, taking the opposite point of
view, we ask why the man from Porlock came, answers may be: to reestablish
everyday, rational consciousness, to end the solitude of the poet and associate
him again with ordinary human beings, to turn the poem into a fragment,
and to stop a transgression. When Coleridge’s mind was “Voyaging through
strange seas of Thought, alone” (to use Wordsworth’s great metaphor for the
mind of Sir Isaac Newton), his speculations, emotions, and mental imagery
might become deeply disturbing to him. The person from Porlock serves the
same function in the plot as the mildly reproving glance darted from the eye
48 David Perkins

of Sara in line 49 of The Eolian Harp; her glance causes the poet to retract
the “dim and unhallowd” speculations he has just been pursuing—”shapings
of the unregenerate mind”—and to reestablish solidarity with ordinary, good
people, “the family of Christ.” The person from Porlock is also somewhat
analogous to the “goodly company” with which the Ancient Mariner, at the
end of the poem, would wish to walk to church, and he has affinities with the
friend, in chapter 13 of the Biographia Literaria, who has read Coleridge’s
chapter on the imagination and advises him not to publish it.18 Many critics
have suggested what transgression was imminent in the poem. It had to do
with the vision of poetry and the poet as rivaling the creative power of God
and/or of the demonic.

Appendix
The Introductory Note
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 own opin-
ions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground
of any supposed poetic merits.
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 Pilgrimage”: “Here the Khan Kubla com-
manded 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 com-
posed 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 par-
allel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or
consciousness of effort. On awaking 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 has been cast, but,
alas! without the after restoration of the latter!
 The Imaginative Vision of Kubla Khan 49

Then all the charm

Is broken—all that phantom-world so fair
Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,
And each mis-shape[s] the other. Stay awhile,
Poor youth! who scarcely dar’st lift up thine eyes—
The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon
The visions will return! And lo, he stays,
And soon the fragments dim of lovely forms
Come trembling back, unite, and now once more
The pool becomes a mirror.
[The Picture; or, the Lover’s Resolution, lines 91–100]

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. Σαμερον αδιον ασω: but the to-morrow is yet to come.
As a contrast to this vision, I have annexed a fragment of a very different
character, describing with equal fidelity the dream of pain and disease [“The
Pains of Sleep”].

N   
1. Timothy Bahti, “Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ and the Fragment of Romanti-
cism,” Modern Language Notes 96:5 (December 1981): 1037.
2. In the earlier printings of 1816, 1828, and 1829 the subtitle was “Kubla
Khan; or, a Vision in a Dream,” and the introductory note was entitled “Of the
Fragment of Kubla Khan.”
3. Irene H. Chayes, “ ‘Kubla Khan’ and the Creative Process,” Studies in
Romanticism 6:1 (Autumn 1966): 1–4; Kathleen M. Wheeler, The Creative Mind in
Coleridge’s Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 17–41; Jean-Pierre
Mileur, Vision and Revision: Coleridge’s Art of Immanence (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1982), 24–33, 80–88.
4. Mileur, Vision and Revision, 66, and Warren Stevenson, Divine Analogy: A
Study of the Creative Motif in Blake and Coleridge (Salzburg: Institut für Englische
Sprache und Literatur, 1972) also compare the introductory note with the gloss to
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
5. Mileur, Vision and Revision, 24, also notes that the introductory note and
the poem each challenge “the other’s literality.”
6. Though there was a legend, which Coleridge probably knew, that Kubla Khan
had envisioned his summer palace in a dream before he built it. See John Livingston
Lowes, The Road to Xanadu, 2d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1930), 358.
7. Bahti, “Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan,’ ” 1046; Mileur, Vision and Revision, 31;
and other commentators.
8. This point was suggested to me in conversation by Judson Watson.
9. Some opinions may be cited without giving complete references: Lowes,
Abrams, Hanson, Shaffer, and Piper accept that the poem was produced much as the
introductory note says; Schneider, Ober, Watson, Mackenzie, and Stevenson doubt
50 David Perkins

that its composition was involuntary. Schneider thinks it is a fragment; House, Bate,
Beer, Bloom, and McFarland deny this.
10. Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth,
Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1981), 225; Geoffrey Yarlott, Coleridge and the Abyssinian Maid (London: Methuen,
1967), 128; Elizabeth Schneider, Coleridge, Opium and Kubla Khan (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1953), 27.
11. John Beer, “Coleridge and Poetry: I. Poems of the Supernatural,” in S. T.
Coleridge, ed. R. L. Brett (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1971), 66–69; Walter Jackson
Bate, Coleridge (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 82–84; Leslie Brisman, Romantic
Origins (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 26–28; Charles I. Patterson, “The
Daemonic in Kubla Khan: Toward Interpretation,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern
Language Association of America] 89 (1974): 1039.
12. Bate, Coleridge, 78.
13. Donald Pierce, “ ‘Kubla Khan’ in Context,” Studies in English Literature,
1500–1900 21:4 (Autumn 1981): 581, points out that Kubla Khan is “a poem about
suspended powers. The unfinishedness of ‘Kubla Khan’ is integral to the theme.”
14. Most persons who have written about the poem seem to assume this, but I
have found in conversation that many Coleridgeans do not. Hence I make the point
explicitly.
15. David Simpson, Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry (London: Macmil-
lan, 1979), 92, points out that “the ‘once I saw’ (l. 38) seems to invoke a time outside
of and prior to the vision of Xanadu.”
16. G. H. von Schubert, Symbolik des Traumes, 3d ed. (Leipzig: F. A. Brock-
haus, 1840), 6. Drawing his notions of the formal characteristics of dreams and
dream-poems from Freud, John Beer remarks that the poem “has the arbitrariness
and reductive economy of much dream work” and “provides a many-faceted example
of the ‘over-determination’ that Freud traced in much dream-work” (“The languages
of Kubla Khan,” in Coleridge’s Imagination, ed. Richard Gravil, Lucy Newlyn, and
Nicholas Roe [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985], 220, 252). Since I do
not know whether or not the poem was actually a dream, but do know that Coleridge
wanted it to be read as a dream, I do not compare it with Freudian descriptions of
dream form but with the ideas of Coleridge and his contemporaries on this subject.
17. Chayes, “ ‘Kubla Khan’ and the Creative Process,” 2, remarks, “Among the
Romantics, ‘fragment’ sometimes has almost generic meaning.”
18. Mileur, Vision and Revision, 14, connects the introductory note with chap-
ter 13 of Biographia Literaria; see also Brisman, Romantic Origins, 34.