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As indicated by Coleridge’s subtitle for “Kubla Khan,” the poem consists of “a vision in a dream.” In the most basic sense, then, the poem must be understood as taking place within the speaker’s own mind. This perspective helps readers make sense of the otherwise confusing mix of references to real and imaginary places. For example, the Xanadu referenced in the opening line is a real place in China. Ordinarily written as “Shangdu” in English, this city served as the summer capital for the historical Kubla Khan, who founded the Yuan dynasty in the thirteenth century. But while Xanadu may be real, the River Alph, which the speaker describes as meandering through the city, is fictional. Another mix of the real and the imaginary appears at the beginning of the third stanza, where the speaker describes dreaming of a woman from “Abyssinia,” also known as Ethiopia. But while Ethiopia is real, the dream-woman is singing of an imaginary place: “Mount Abora” (line 41). It is only by virtue of the speaker’s dream logic that the poem traverses vast distances and moves between different historical eras. The speaker has essentially produced a hallucinatory landscape that exists solely in their own mind.

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