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Caverns, Caves, and Chasms

“Kubla Khan” includes frequent references to caverns, caves, and chasms. Caverns and caves are both underground formations that create enclosed spaces in rocky substrates. Chasms, by contrast, are fissures that, though cutting deep into the earth, remain open to the sky. Despite their geological differences, these formations all have something of a mystical presence in Coleridge’s poem, functioning as repositories for spiritual and occult forces. In this way, they unite the sacred and the demonic, establishing conditions for what the speaker calls “holy dread” (line 52). The repetition of references indicates the speaker’s dreamlike fixation on these places, which further enhances their occult allure. To take just one example, when the speaker first mentions the sacred river, Alph, they note how it “ran / Through caverns measureless to man” (lines 3–4). They repeat this phrasing in near-identical form when they redescribe the river in the second stanza (lines 25–28):

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion    
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean

Yet another version of this language appears yet again, when the speaker describes the pleasure-dome that was suspended above the waves, “where was heard the mingled measure / From the fountain and the caves.”

References to the Occult

The speaker makes several references to occult phenomena in the poem, all of which help amplify the hallucinatory quality of their fragmentary dream vision. The first clear references to the occult appear in the second stanza, where the speaker describes a “deep romantic chasm” (line 12) that’s slashed into a hillside in the following manner (14–16):

A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

This description of the chasm as “holy,” “enchanted,” and “haunted” by a ghostly figure “wailing for her demon-lover” infuses the landscape around Xanadu with a sense of exotic terror. Later, the speaker describes how Kubla Khan could hear “ancestral voices prophesying war” (line 30), which emerge from “the tumult of a lifeless ocean” (28). These voices also directly precede the speaker’s description of the pleasure-dome, which hovers above the waves—a phenomenon they classify as “a miracle of rare device” (line 35). Finally, the poem concludes with an image of a terrifying man who occupies the imaginary pleasure-dome the speaker wishes to build (lines 50–54):

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

As has occurred earlier in the poem, these lines blend references to the demonic and to the sacred, yielding a strange form of “holy dread.” In the end, then, the various occult references create a curious ambiguity about whether the speaker’s vision is ultimately one of good or evil.

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