Kubla Khan – Class 12 English Chapter 9 Notes & NCERT PDF

About the Poet: S.T. Coleridge (1772–1834)

S.T. Coleridge was imaginative even as a child and studied at Cambridge. In 1797 he met Wordsworth; the two belonged to the first generation of Romantic poets. Coleridge was responsible for presenting the supernatural as real, while Wordsworth tried to render ordinary reality as remarkable and strange. Byron, Shelley and Keats belonged to the next generation of Romantic poets.

How the Poem Was Written

The poem's full title is Kubla Khan, Or A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment. Its genesis was a vision seen by Coleridge in a trance-like state of mind. In 1797, when Coleridge fell ill, some medicine was prescribed; under its effect he fell asleep in his chair while reading about Kubla Khan. In three hours of profound sleep he had a wonderful dream. On waking he remembered it clearly and began writing it down, but he was interrupted by a chance visitor, and the poem remained incomplete. A footnote adds that Kubla Khan founded the Mongol dynasty in China in the thirteenth century.

Stanza-wise Meaning

Stanza 1 — The pleasure-dome and its gardens

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.

In Xanadu, Kubla Khan ordered a stately pleasure-dome to be built where Alph, the sacred river, runs through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea. Twice five miles of fertile ground were enclosed by walls and towers, with bright gardens, sinuous rills (winding streams), incense-bearing trees and forests ancient as the hills enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

Stanza 2 — The romantic chasm and the fountain

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

In contrast to the ordered garden is a deep romantic chasm, a savage place! as holy and enchanted as any haunted by a woman wailing for her demon-lover under a waning moon. From it, with ceaseless turmoil seething, / As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, a mighty fountain bursts out. Huge rocks leap up like rebounding hail, / Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail, and the fountain flings up the sacred river. The river meanders five miles with a mazy motion, reaches the measureless caverns and sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean. Amid this tumult Kubla hears Ancestral voices prophesying war! — a discordant note.

Stanza 3 — The miracle of rare device

The shadow of the dome floats midway on the waves, where the mingled measure of fountain and caves is heard:

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice!

The sunny dome and caves of ice together are an impossible, magical union of opposites.

Stanza 4 — The damsel with a dulcimer and the inspired poet

A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw:

It was an Abyssinian maid,

The poet recalls a vision of an Abyssinian maid playing a dulcimer (a stringed instrument struck with two light hammers, used in China and Europe) and singing of Mount Abora. If he could revive within him her symphony and song, he would with music build that dome in air — that sunny dome! those caves of ice! All who heard would see them and cry Beware! Beware! at the poet's flashing eyes and floating hair. They would weave a circle round him thrice and close their eyes with holy dread, for:

For he on honeydew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Poetic ecstasy is likened to a divine, magical state — the poet has tasted the food of Paradise.

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