Poetry Criticism | Kubla Khan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Richard Gerber (essay date 1963)

Richard Gerber (essay date 1963)

SOURCE: Gerber, Richard. “Keys to ‘Kubla Khan.’” English Studies 44, no. 5 (October 1963): 321-41.

[In the following essay, Gerber traces a “fundamental dialectic principle” in “Kubla Khan,” featured in a coalescence of references to Kubla and the Roman mother-goddess Cybele, as well as in the structure of the poem itself.]

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.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

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...

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