Kubla Khan is one of the most popular and appreciated poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge that he wrote in 1797. The poem was first published in 1816 in a pamphlet along with his other poems, Christabel, and The Pains of Sleep. The subtitle of Kubla Khan is "A Vision in a Dream". Coleridge also used another subtitle ‘A Fragment’. Coleridge saw a dream and when he woke up, he began writing his dream in poetic verse. However, he was interrupted before he could complete and by the time he returned to writing, he forgot the rest of the dream, hence, ‘A Fragment.’ The poem is offered as a dream, a poetic dream removed from any intellectual content, but offering the essence of a dream. The enchanting vivacity of its color, artistic beauty, and sweet harmony appear like a dream.
As a child, Samuel Taylor Coleridge got addicted to opium when he used an opium-based medicine Laudanum to get rid of pain due to an injury. He continued using Laudanum to treat depression and stress and failed to get rid of the addiction. One night in 1797, he was suffering pain and to ease it out, he took a dose of laudanum. He fell asleep and had a strange dream about a Mongol emperor named Kubla Khan. Coleridge dreamed that he was actually writing a poem in his sleep, and when he woke up after a few hours, he sat down to write the dream poem. Coleridge had this dream of Kubla Khan (or Kublai Khan) because before he fell asleep, he was reading Purchas, his Pilgrims, a book by Renaissance historian Samuel Purchas. The book briefly describes Xanadu, the summer capital of the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan. Coleridge mentioned this source of inspiration in his preface to Kubla Khan. Samuel Purchas never visited Xanadu but his description of Xanadu was based on the writings of Marco Polo who visited Xanadu in 1275.
The main theme of the poem is the interaction between nature and man as the speaker highlights the limits of man’s creativity. The poem celebrates the power of human creativity while also recognizing that such creativity is limited, fragile, and quickly lost. The poem’s dreamlike, hallucinatory tone invites the reader to treat the speaker’s descriptions as an allegory for creativity and the human mind. In the poem, he explores the depths of dreams and creates landscapes that could not exist in reality. The “sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice” exemplifies the extreme fantasy of the world in which Kubla Khan lives. While the speaker describes Kubla Khan’s pleasure dome, not everything is pleasurable in the landscape. Along with the harmonious, beautiful, and pleasing aspects of nature, the poem also depicts the dangerous and threatening aspects of nature, which suggests that for Kubla Khan, pleasure constitutes not only natural beauty but also the violent aspects of nature. The speaker suggests that pleasure does not exclude violence, rather, pleasure emerges from the tension between beauty and violence, or chaos. In “Kubla Khan,” nature is characterized by a rough, dangerous terrain that can only be tamed by a male explorer such as Kubla Khan.
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