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“Kubla Khan” consists of three stanzas of uneven length, each of which features an unpredictable mix of different iambic meters. This basic description of the poem’s form is a helpful starting point for considering its odd and somewhat fragmentary structure. Coleridge himself points to the poem’s fragmentary nature in the unusual subtitle he provided for the poem, which reads: “Or, a Vision in a Dream: A Fragment.” Although presenting the entire poem as fragment, the parts that make up the whole have an equally fragmentary effect in themselves. This effect isn’t immediately clear in the short opening stanza (lines 1–11), which offers a straightforward description of Xanadu and its lush surroundings. However, in the second and third stanzas, the fragmentary quality of the poem becomes very clear. Throughout these stanzas the speaker’s attention wanders from one thought to the next, often without clear transitions. The result is a disorderly and strange vision that resembles the logic of a dream.

As an example, let’s start with the long second stanza, which, despite being a single unit, doesn’t cohere at all. The speaker begins with a lengthy description of the chasm where the fictional River Alph originates. Following this description, the speaker’s attention leaves the chasm and describes the Alph’s meandering path through some woods down into an oceanside cave (lines 25–28). As the speaker’s mind returns to the cave, they also return to Kubla Khan and indicate that he can hear “ancestral voices prophesying war” (line 30). This note about prophecy appears to set up the next part of the stanza, which features an indented quatrain of lines written in tetrameter instead of the stanza’s more standard pentameter (lines 31–34). However, this quatrain doesn’t concern any kind of prophecy. Instead, it simply describes the pleasure-dome as it floats uncannily above the water. The stanza then ends with two non-indented pentameter lines where the speaker expresses enthusiasm for the sight (lines 35–36).

More fragmentary still is the break between the second and third stanzas. After describing the pleasure-dome and its surroundings in a disjointed manner, the speaker’s attention shifts dramatically. No longer focused at all on Kubla Khan or Xanadu, the speaker describes a dream vision they once had of an Abyssinian (i.e., Ethiopian) woman playing a string instrument known as a dulcimer (lines 37–41). It seems that the only thing connecting this vision to that of the pleasure-dome is the sheer fact that they are both dream visions. The speaker suggests as much when they state that, if only they could remember this woman’s song upon waking, then they could also construct their own pleasure-dome in waking life (lines 42–47). But then, as if now imagining a real-life pleasure-dome, the speaker has a terrifying vision of a demon-like man “with flashing eyes” who has “drunk the milk of Paradise” (lines 48–54). The identity of this man isn’t clear. Though it could be a transformed version of Kubla Khan, it also seems like the speaker may have populated their newly imagined pleasure-dome with some other occult figure—perhaps even an alternative vision of themself.

At the poem’s end, then, we readers are left as bewildered as if we have just experienced the same convoluted and fragmentary dream that the speaker describes.

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