Kubla Khan

Leslie Ringgold

World Literature II

February 3, 2006

"Kubla Khan or a Vision in a Dream, a Fragment" is Samuel Taylor Coleridge's expression of the inability of language (particularly poetry) to adequately convey meaning. The circumstances surrounding the way in which the poem was supposedly written are very important in understanding why Coleridge refers to the poem as a "fragment". The dream that the poet has "in which all the images rose up before him as things" represents every individuals ability to be inspired by imagination and is a metaphor for the indescribable beauty that the artist seeks to bring form to in their chosen medium. While at first they are ecstatic and in a frenzy to start their work, interruptions from the world inevitably come into play and the glory of the original idea deteriorates and is distorted and will never again be fully grasped. Coleridge enlightens the reader:

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. (1-4 of introduction)

The designer will be left with a second-rate approximation for the primary vision, a "fragment" of a masterpiece in Coleridge's case.

In the first stanza the speaker describes the landscape of Xanadu using expressions such as sacred, measureless, sunless, and ancient that give the site a sort of sanctity or holiness. This scene represents the vastness of the mind where the imagination and inspiration take place that Coleridge was yearning to seize. Here the speaker also mentions a "stately pleasure-dome" that symbolizes the genius composition in Coleridge's mind that he was eagerly trying to record after his journey to Xanadu before he was interrupted.

In the second stanza the speaker's tone seems to shift when he describes Xanadu as "A savage place... / ...haunted by woman wailing for her demon lover.../...with ceaseless turmoil seething..." (14-18). The verse becomes like a mystical chant and there seems to be more to Xanadu than just peace and serenity.

In lines 37-54 the speaker remembers a vision of an Abyssinian maid, a damsel who sang as she played her dulcimer. He explains his inability to remember everything about