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The Gap Between Dreams and the Waking World

As Coleridge indicates in the poem’s subtitle, “Kubla Khan” essentially describes “a vision in a dream.” With this designation, the poet implicitly highlights the thematic importance of the gap that separates the dream world from the waking world. Readers are likely to develop a vague sense of this gap simply by reading the poem, the recursive and hallucinatory nature of which can be quite disorienting on a first—or second!—pass. The surreal quality that arises from the combination of dense naturalistic description and frequent references to the supernatural makes it difficult to discern what’s actually going on. Then there is the abrupt transition to the third stanza, where the speaker drops their discussion of Xanadu and begins describing a different dream altogether. These elements of the poem all pose a challenge even for the attentive reader and thus emphasize the difficulty of bridging the speaker’s dream logic and the waking world. Significantly, the speaker highlights this same difficulty in an explicit way. In the third stanza, they describe their longing to manifest what they’ve seen in their dreams in their waking life (lines 42–47):

   Could I revive within me
   Her symphony and song,
   To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

The speaker thinks that if they could simply remember the tune the Abyssinian woman sang in their second dream, they might be able to build the pleasure-dome they saw in their first. Yet as the convoluted nature of this logic suggests, it likely won’t be possible to bridge the gap between dream and reality.

The Coexistence of the Holy and the Demonic

In the speaker’s dream vision, everything seems to be infused with some kind of occult or spiritual presence. Yet this presence is never purely good or evil, but rather an ambiguous blend of both. Everywhere the speaker looks, the holy and the demonic appear to coexist. For example, consider the “deep romantic chasm” the speaker describes at the beginning of the second stanza (lines 12–16):

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

Crucially, this description frames the chasm on the hillside as being both “savage” and “holy.” The speaker indicates that this place is darkly “enchanted,” even “haunted” by a ghostly figure who cries out for her “demon-lover.” And yet, as the speaker goes on to note in the passage that follows, this same chasm contains a fountain from which springs Alph, the “sacred river” (line 34) that courses through Xanadu. The speaker unites the holy and the demonic again at the end of the poem, where they describe a supernatural figure who, though terrifying, has also drunk the proverbial “milk of Paradise” (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.

The final lines of this passage allude to the biblical book of Exodus, where Moses promises the Israelites that God will send nourishing bread and honey-like liquid called “manna.” If the anonymous figure described here has fed on manna-like “honey-dew” and “drunk of the milk of Paradise,” then the suggestion is that he belongs among God’s chosen people. And yet, he is also a figure of terror, with his “flashing eyes” and “floating hair.” The speaker qualifies this duality as “holy dread,” which nicely describes the coexistence of the holy and the demonic.

The Possibilities and Limits of Poetry

The story goes that Coleridge wrote “Kubla Khan” immediately upon waking from a strange dream fueled by opium. In the poem’s third stanza, the speaker alludes to a similar situation. After describing a second dream involving an Abyssinian (i.e., Ethiopian) woman playing a string instrument, the speaker muses on the possibility of remembering their dreams (lines 42–47):

   Could I revive within me
   Her symphony and song,
   To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

If they could just “revive” the woman’s song in their waking life, then the speaker would have the inspiration needed to “build that dome in air” they experienced in their most recent dream of Xanadu. The implication, of course, is that the speaker cannot in fact recall the woman’s “symphony and song”—at least, not with any clarity. And if they can’t revive her song, then the speaker stands no real chance of reconstructing “that sunny dome” that they elsewhere refer to as “a miracle of rare device” (line 35). What we get, then, is neither the song nor the pleasure-dome, but rather a poem about these things. From this vantage, the speaker offers a subtle meditation on both the possibilities and the limits of poetry. A poem may well be able to bring forth miraculous images and mysterious ideas. However, no poem can ever actualize the images or materialize the ideas outside the form they take in language. All we really have, in the end, is the dream vision.

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