On the Poem
Ø  Completed in 1797 and published in 1816

Ø  Lord Byron insisted on its publication

Ø  Coleridge said he published the poem” at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity, and as far as the author’s own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits”

Ø  Coleridge said:

Ø  “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.

Ø  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 Pilgrimes:’

Ø  ‘Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto: and thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.’

Ø  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 had been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter”

Ø  The book Coleridge was reading was Purchas, his Pilgrimes, or Relations of the World and Religions Observed in All Ages and Places Discovered, from the Creation to the Present, by the English clergyman and geographer Samuel Purchas, published in 1613.

Ø  The book contained a brief description of Xanadu, the summer capital of the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan.

Ø  The description in the book was based upon the writings of the Venetian explorer Marco Polo who is widely believed to have visited Xanadu in about 1275.

Ø  According to Coleridge, the poem, is a fragment of what it should have been.

Ø  Kubla Khan was the grandson of the legendary Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan, and he built a summer palace (called Xanadu, in English) in Mongolia.
Rhyme and Meter
The first lines of the poem follow iambic tetrameter, with the initial stanza relying on heavy stresses. The lines of the second stanza incorporate lighter stresses to increase the speed of the meter to separate them from the hammer-like rhythm of the previous lines
1.      “Where Alph, the sacred river, ran”. What is the implication of ‘Alph’?

A.    It has an association with Alpha, the first letter of the Greek alphabet, which may suggest the beginning of life and language and with Eden, located in Abyssinia and with Alpheus, the classical underground river

2.     The adjective chaffy has been derived from

A.     chaff

3.     What does “Ancestral voices prophesying war!” suggest?

A.     The construction of the place will be a natural disaster accompanied by man-made destruction

4.     The imagery of the poem can be said to be

A.     Primordial and archetypal

5.     In the poem, the sun stands for

A.     God, divine authority, benediction

6.     What does the “pleasure-dome” imply traditionally?

A.      The created art object [Coleridge’s own poem]

7.     The image “pleasure-dome” is based on

A.      Neo-Platonic idea

8.     What does the name Abyssinia symbolically suggest?

A.      The Abyss

9.     What does the dulcimer suggest in the poem?

A.    chords of harmony which underlie all creation [Pythagorean idea]

10.   What does the damsel traditionally stand for?

A.    She stands for the mystery of love [also a Muse for the poet]

11.     The “waning moon” implies a

A.      Demonic aspect

12.    “And all shall cry, Beware! Beware!/His flashing eyes, his floating hair!” What is she possessed by

A.      Divine frenzy for creation [Platonic idea]

13.    Is Kubla Khan an unfinished poem?

A.    Finished

B.     Unfinished

C.     Both

14.   “For he on honey-dew hath fed,/And drunk the milk of Paradise.” Plato derived the image from

A.    The Bible

B.     Plato

15.    The poem is marked by

A.     heavy use of assonance, the reuse of vowel sounds, and a reliance on alliteration, repetition of the first sound of a word

16.   The poem can be read as

A.     Transformative Power of the Imagination

17.    How can the poet be equated with Kubla Khan?

A.     Kubla Khan decreed a stately pleasure dome, while Coleridge created a poem that is equated with the dome.