Kubla Khan The Visionary Dream of Samuel Coleridge. In the summer of 1797, somewhere on the Exmoor borders of Somerset and Devonshire, in a lonely house between Porlock and Linton, the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge sat in a garden drowning in hot haze, leafing through a history book.
It was none other than Purchas’s Travels with Marco Polo’s notes on life at the court of the Mongol Khan Kublai in Khanbaliq.
A line from the book about how the emperor Kubla Khan ordered a beautiful palace to be built for himself—a model of eastern luxury—would not come together into a harmonious expression, and Coleridge, being a creative person, involuntarily, slightly changing “Xanadu” to “Xandu,” formed a verse for a suitable sound. And so, the book’s narrative in the first lines, the poet retold in verse distinguished by “flexibly modulated intonation and varied rhythm.” After that, the mysticism began…
Whether it was Samuel’s ability, as a gifted and creative person, to perceive information from the subconscious, or the use of opium as a painkiller by the ailing poet, but only after three hours of deep sleep Coleridge woke up unshakably convinced that during his sleep he had composed no fewer than two hundred stanzas of a poem. The images in the dream rose before him in all their tangible essence, and in parallel, divine lines composed themselves effortlessly, completely without any effort.
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Here it must be said that everything described appeared before Coleridge in all its majestic divine beauty, namely that very palace of the emperor.
Upon waking, the poet took up pen, ink, and paper and from memory restored and wrote down in one breath fifty-four of the two hundred stanzas that had come in the dream.
At that very moment a servant came in to him and informed him that a certain man had arrived, having come from Porlock. Coleridge broke off, went out to meet the newcomer, but…it turned out that no one was there.
When he returned to continue writing down the lines, he realized with horror that he could not remember anything more! The dream had melted away, and with it the rest of the poem…
However much Coleridge tried to recall the stanzas or compose further himself, alas, nothing came of it. The poem remained unfinished. To this day.
And if it had not been for his friends and Byron himself, who considered the text of the poem perfect and persuaded Samuel to publish it in print, perhaps the world would never have known this divine work. For even unfinished, the poem took a prominent place in English literature.
However, that is not all. Later, in the nineteenth century, an ancient legend about the Mongol emperor surfaced. It turns out that Kubla Khan ordered the palace to be built only because… it had appeared to him in every detail in a DREAM…
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.
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!
