The “Dream” of Kubla Khan

Abstract

Interpretations of Coleridge's Kubla Khan have varied widely. The commonest view has always been that the poem is a beautiful meaningless vision, “delicious nonsense” to be read or heard as pure music. Many ingenious and some over-ingenious explanations have however been published, the most extraordinary being that of Mr. Robert Graves, which Professor Lowes demolished with obvious gusto. According to this theory Mrs. Coleridge is represented in the “Abyssinian maid” whose music the poet could not remember; the “caves of ice” are Dorothy Wordsworth, whose love for Coleridge is thus shown to be purely intellectual; and the closing lines of the poem describe Coleridge's own superego getting after him about his opium. After this pseudo-Freudian flight, a mere literal interpretation will no doubt come as an anti-climax. It seems necessary now, however, to revise certain traditions, most of them outgrowths of Coleridge's own note prefixed to the poem upon its publication in the Christabel volume of 1816. The note is too familiar to require full quotation. The poet says that he had been prescribed an “anodyne, … from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair” while reading Purchas. “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 composed 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 parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort.” “On awaking,” Coleridge continues, with what seemed a complete recollection of the whole, he “instantly and eagerly” wrote down the lines that are preserved. After an interruption by a man from Porlock on business, he was unable to recall the rest.