Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Poem Kubla Kahn

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Kubla Kahn" is an example of imaginative poetry due to an opium addiction. This poem creates its own kingdom and paradise while Colridge expresses his ideas of Heaven and Hell through his own drug induced thoughts and opinions.

Coleridge paints the picture of a kingdom, Xanadu, and the surrounding scenery is described with a heavenly, dreamlike vividness that can only result from smoking a little too much opium. This kingdom has a "pleasure dome" that was created by Kubla Kahn. The paradise-like kingdom consists of ten miles of "fertile ground" and is surrounded by walls that are securely "girdled" around the property. The gardens are "blossoming with many an incense baring tree" and are watered by a wandering stream. There is a river, and it gives life to Kubla Kahn's creations and runs "through caverns measureless to man."

The landscape is described in an interesting fashion with contrasting adjectives. It is described as "savage," but it is "holy" and "enchanted." The enchantment is compared to a "woman wailing for her demon lover." This image of sexuality leaves the impression that the Earth is anxiously mourning for a fulfillment of evil. The chasem below Kubla Kahn's paradise "pleasure dome" is beset with "ceaseless turmoil" and chaos. It is described as "breathing in fast pants" and there is a powerful eruption, resulting in rock fragments bursting out and being flung from the river. The same river that sustained life for the "pleasure dome" floods the land. Additional to the noises of the chaos are "ancestral voiced prophesying war" and these voices of war are a reminder that the

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creation of Kubla Kahn, though beautiful and lovely, is still perishable.

The poem says that the "pleasure dome" was a "miracle of rare device" and that the "pleasure dome" was a miracle because of it's heavenly perfection. Perhaps the point of this poem was to warn readers not to become too proud of their man-made creations.