Sunday Pages: "Kubla Khan, Or, a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment."

A poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Dear Reader,

A contemporary of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born a year before the Boston Tea Party. His name certainly sounds like it could have been with John Hancock’s on the Declaration of Independence, and, as a self-proclaimed “genuine Sans culotte,” his heart was certainly with the American patriots. He was known as a great reader, a great scholar, a great critic, a foundational literary thinker; one of my English professors suggested that Coleridge was the last littérateur to have read everything—meaning, whatever passed for Western canon at the time. After Coleridge, there was too much content for any one reader, however dedicated or voracious, to possibly consume in entirety. (I blame Dickens.)

Coleridge was one of those historical figures who was a giant in his day but now is little more than a footnote. Fame is hard to quantify, but his Q rating probably trails behind that of the aforementioned Byron and Shelley. And if we were to go back in time and tell those three esteemed poets that 300 years in the future, Mary Shelley, Percy’s wife and the author of Frankenstein, would be orders of magnitude more famous than any of them, they would have never have believed it.

In my view—fans of British Romantic lyrical balladry may beg to differ—Coleridge has two canonical works. “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” an overrated epic poem about the creepiest and most annoying wedding guest of all time, is the first. Famous for its use of situational irony (“Water, water, everywhere / Nor any drop to drink”), it bequeathed the English language the crazypants idiomatic expression “albatross around my neck.”

The second entry is “Kubla Khan.” Half the reason for the poem’s staying power is that its second word is “Xanadu,” which name we all recognize from either Rush or Olivia Newton-John. The other half is the (possibly apocryphal) origin story of its composition. The poem came to Coleridge, famously, in a dream, which was interrupted during its climax by an unexpected visit by an unnamed “person from Porlock”—which is sort of like some bumbling rando yanking down the ladder while Michelangelo was up there putting the finishing touches on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Coleridge called “Kubla Khan” a “fragment,” which is a writer’s way of saying, “I don’t want to finish this.”

Most of the “Kubla Khan” analyses I came across focus on its exotic wordplay, the mood it creates, the musicality of its verse—“some playful thoughts and fanciful imagery” that evoke “much of the Oriental richness and harmony,” as a contemporary review had it. A critic wrote in 1897—a hundred years after it was written—that “the mystical effect [of ‘Kubla Khan’] is given almost wholly by landscape.” The adjective these 19th century critics were searching for, and could not find because it did not exist back then, is “trippy.” That’s what the poem is, in a word. Coleridge was, also famously, an opium eater, which is what polite Hanoverian society called a dope fiend.

My theory is that the reason so many staid Victorians lost their minds reading “Kubla Khan” is because it is the first poem (in the English language, anyway) that everyone knew was the product of a drug-induced fever dream—a sort of proto-“Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” You know how everyone still thinks of Black Sabbath as heavy metal, but “Paranoid” is not nearly as menacing to the ears now as it sounded in 1970? “Kubla Khan” was the sex-drugs-and-rock ’n’ roll of 1797; Coleridge, the late-18th-century Ozzy Osbourne, going off the rails of a crazy train. All aboard! Next stop: the river Alph!

But if we strip away all the grand poetical creation mythology—the long strange trip, the Porlockian coitus interruptus, the myriad source material Coleridge was lifting from—is the actual poem, like, any good?

The short answer is: yes. Not only that, but “Kubla Khan” is more relevant to America in the Age of Trump than I imagined when I busted out the Norton Anthology. But then, it is a poem about a tyrant.

The titular Kublai Khan—Coleridge spelled it wrong—is a real historical figure: a grandson of the great Genghis, the founder of the Chinese Yuan Dynasty, and the fifth Mongol Emperor. He really did found a city, called Shangdu, that was his summer capital and, by all accounts, including Marco Polo’s, a lush and happening place. The rest of the poem is completely made up, including the bit about the “pleasure-dome.” Mythical Xanadu was about as far as you could get, geographically and spiritually, from dreary Industrial Age London.

The poem has three stanzas, each a bit different in terms of tone, length, and meter. It reads like the lyrics to some rock epic, “Stairway to Heaven” maybe, or the second side of Abbey Road. The first stanza is the easiest to understand, once you get past the iambic phrasings:

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
With walls and towers were girdled round;
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.

Basically, Xanadu is a holy land, the place where the sacred and the profane converge—a sort of Far Eastern Garden of Eden, where runs the River of Life. And Kubla is like, “Perfect! Let’s build my pleasure-dome here!” At his tyrannical command, Chinese sans-culottes erect walls and towers to claim possession in his imperial name. (In both Greek mythology and horror movies, this sort of hubris never ends well.) We see echoes of this today, when our modern-day khans sacrifice natural beauty and splendor for their own useless vanity projects.

The second stanza is where things get freaky. From the top, Coleridge leaves little doubt as to what type of dream he was having when “Kubla Khan” came to him (and, thus, why he was so pissed when the “person from Porlock” roused him). Talk of fast thick pants and deep romantic chasms and a mighty fountains bursting can only mean one thing—our poet is putting the pleasure in “pleasure-dome.” By 1797 standards, this is borderline pornographic. He also increases the number of beats per line from four to five, subtly altering the rhythm:

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

Sexual metaphors aside, what causes the “burst” that shoots “huge fragments like rebounding hail” into the sky? Is it natural disaster? Or is it due to the structural changes wrought by Kubla’s engineers?

The environment has gone bonkers. But inside the dome—literally a bubble of pleasantness—the Khan’s courtiers and courtesans can blissfully ignore what’s happening out in the wild. Only Kubla himself, heeding the “ancestral voices,” knows how fragile his pleasure palace really is, how delicate the balance between sacred and profane:

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 shadow of the dome of pleasure
   Floated midway on the waves;
   Where was heard the mingled measure
   From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

Then the lines get shorter, quieter. If this were an eight-minute rock ballad, the drums and bass and electric guitar would cut out, isolating the vocals on the mix, backed only by the warble of an archaic, impossible-to-tune string instrument:

   A damsel with a dulcimer
   In a vision once I saw:
   It was an Abyssinian maid
   And on her dulcimer she played,
   Singing of Mount Abora.

The scholarly consensus is that this is a vision of the moon goddess. More curious to me is the use of the first person. It’s late in the game for “I” to appear. Who is “I?” Coleridge? Kubla? Someone else entirely? The poem ends thus:

   Could I revive within me
   Her symphony and song,
   To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
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.

My read is that “I” is a newcomer to the action—not the poet interjecting himself, and certainly not Kubla, who has already built his dome. Our nameless interloper is a man of great ambition, massive ego, and nihilistic tendencies—rather like Louis XV, the king of France between the Louis who built Versailles and the Louis who lost his head, who famously said, “Après moi, le déluge.” That phrase has become shorthand for “After I’m dead, I don’t give a shit what happens. Let the floodwaters consume the earth for all I care.” Our “I” is a wannabe tyrant, a would-be strongman. In 2023, this type is all too familiar.

The “I” wants to build his own “dome in air,” with its fire and its ice—not to enjoy its earthly delights, but rather to express his own raw power. The last five and a half lines, I believe, are what this strongman imagines people will say when they see what he has built. It echoes (or, rather, prefigures) Shelley’s “Ozymandias:”

‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Ah, but there is a twist. Ozymandias doesn’t stand the test of time. All that remains of the once-mighty king is sand and ruins. Coleridge’s ambitious tyrant is permanent, eternal. As anyone familiar with Greek myth well knows—cut to Persephone with pomegranate juice running down her chin—humans who taste of the food of the gods become immortal. Once the tyrant feeds on honeydew and slurps down Paradise milk, it’s game over for the rest of us.

“Kubla Khan” is a poetical warning about the perils of absolute power. Kubla erects his pleasure palace at the convergence of the mundane and the godly. It is an earthly Paradise. But it does not make him happy. All he can think about is that terrifying prophesy of war.

Absolute power, Coleridge tells us, does not bring happiness. It only engenders fear, paranoia, and anxiety. Look at Donald John Trump. He created his very own pleasure dome in air, filling it with money and models and lush golf courses and gilded toilets. What did that bring him? An inmate number: P01135809.

On January 6, 2021, Trump made a run at the milk and honeydew. He failed. He lost. In Moscow, meanwhile, Putin is veritably bathing in the stuff. He does make the Russian people close their eyes in holy dread. He does make us all say Beware! He just blew up an airplane to knock off one of his ex-besties, for Pete(r the Great)’s sake. And for what? He gets no joy from his pleasure-dachas. He looks for all the world like the most miserable man alive.

Because all the honeydew on earth can’t stave off the awful truth that Coleridge buries at the heart of the poem: The sacred river leads only to an ocean of lifelessness.

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ICYMI

Our guest on The Five 8 was Tom Kemp, author of Containing Big Tech:

The karaoke was more of a Mugshot Week celebration:

Finally, I was a guest this week on Jim and Lionel’s “Funny, Not Funny” podcast, where I got to talk about my novel, Empress: The Secret History of Anna K. Jim and Lionel are terrific, and it’s a fun discussion if you want to listen to me talk about something other than the fuckery:

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Photo credit: Philip Firsov. “Kubla Pleasure Dome.”