Kubla Khan

Coleridge’s unfinished poem about Kubla Khan’s pleasure-dome in Xanadu, with his prose account of how the lines came to him in a dream and were broken off.

Start reading2 parts, 835 words

Famous lines

• 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.

  Kubla KhanIn context

  • Poetry

• And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
  Ancestral voices prophesying war!

  Kubla KhanIn context

  • War & Peace

• A damsel with a dulcimer
  In a vision once I saw:
  It was an Abyssinian maid,
  And on her dulcimer she played,
  Singing of Mount Abora.

  In context

• And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
  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 drank the milk of Paradise.

  Kubla KhanIn context

  • Genius
  • Poetry

Contents

1. Of the Fragment of Kubla Khan
2. Kubla Khan