‘Kubla Khan’ is a poem of self-recognition, in which the figure of the youth as virile poet is finally identified with the poem's speaker. Behind Coleridge's poem is Collins' masterpiece of a poet's incarnation, the ‘Ode on the Poetical Character', and the dark fates of Collins himself, the young Chatterton, Smart, and the other doomed bards of sensibility. These are the rich-haired youths of Morn, Apollo sacrifices who precede Coleridge in his appearance with flashing eyes and floating hair in the last lines of ‘Kubla Khan.’ In Blake's myth such a youth is a form of the rising Orc, the fiery dawn of a new Beulah or increase in sensual fulfilment, but an Adonis as well as an Apollo, a dawn that is merely cyclic in nature, an outburst of energy in which the organic and the creative are uneasily allied. The young poets of ‘Alastor’ and ‘Endymion', with their dark and glorious destinies, and their sense of both embodying nature and yet being imprisoned by it, are later forms of Coleridge's myth. The old poet of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ with his deliberate voyage out of nature is the fitting dying fall for the Romantic tradition of tragic poetic self-recognition.

Internally, ‘Kubla Khan’ is no fragment but a vision of creation and destruction, each complete. It is not quite a ‘poem about the act of poetic creation,’ for it contains that theme as one element in a more varied unity, just as Yeats's ‘Byzantium’ does.

Kubla Khan and Xanadu belong to the given of the poem; we need to accept them without asking why this potentate or this place. Kubla has power and can command magnificence; that is enough. He builds a dome of pleasure for himself, as the rulers of Byzantium built a greater dome to honor God. But the Byzantine dome, while apt for Yeats's purposes, is too theological for Coleridge's poem. Kubla builds the dome for himself, and the poet with his music will build a dome in air, matching and at length overgoing the mightiest of human material power. The orthodox censor in Coleridge gives him the remote dome in Xanadu, and avoids the issue of the poet's relative sanctity against more than natural verities.

Kubla picks his spot with precision. A sacred river runs into the ground at just the point where the great dome is decreed. Beneath the dome is the underground river, running in measureless caverns down to a sunless sea. The dome rises above an artificial paradise, ten miles in diameter, including both elaborate gardens and ancient forests. Amid these forests is a chasm from which a fountain suddenly bursts, part earthquake, part geyser. ‘Momently’ the underground river is forced up and runs five miles above ground until it reaches the caverns again and sinks down. In this sudden upheaval the fountain evidently comes up near the dome, as that is at the midpoint of the enclosure.

Now it is clear that this upheaval is only a momentary affair; Coleridge emphasizes this by saying ‘momently’ twice, in lines 19 and 24. And so the miracle of rare device of line 35 is only momentary also. Just once in this upheaval, which is to Kubla a presage of the contrary of his pleasure garden (‘ancestral voices prophesying war’), Kubla and we can visualize the following phenomena intimately associated: the dome (with sunlight upon it), the dome's shadow floating midway upon the waves of the seething, forced-up river; the fountain geyser with its hurling rocks, just next to the dome; and the exposed icy caverns beneath, from which the fountain has momentarily removed the covering earth. The effect is apocalyptic, for what is revealed is a natural miracle:

It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

The river, now raised again, is sacred. The chasm is holy and enchanted, and is associated with waning moonlight. The river comes up as the fountain before it settles down again, and so the fountain is sacred too, and the fragments of earth flung up in it take on the orderly associations of the sacred; they are dancing rocks. The exposed caverns are icy; the dome is sunny. What is exposed is holy; what was built for exposure is representative of a perfect pleasure, the dome being necessarily a perfect hemisphere.

At the midpoint of the momentarily flung-up river we see and hear, together, the extraordinary sight of the shadow of the pleasure dome, and the mingled music of the bursting fountain and the exposed underground current. As the contraries of sun and moon, dome and cavern, light and dark, heat and ice meet, Kubla hears the voices of the dead speaking to the living within a scene of peace and prophesying war. The momentary upheaval itself is the contrary and answer of nature to Kubla's decree of the power of art. The fountain rises suddenly like Blake's wind of Beulah or Shelley's West Wind, to create and destroy, to bring sun and ice together. The very sign of the fountain's potential for destruction is also an emblem of ‘chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail,’ and the sexual intimations of the poem are undeniable, though they are subordinated to and subsumed by the more general theme of creation and destruction.

Kubla had not sought the balance or reconciliation of opposites which Coleridge and Blake alike saw as the mark of the creative imagination, but momentarily his dome and the bursting fountain together do present a vision of such a balance; the landscape becomes a poem, and the imagination has its manifestation. The triumphal chant that follows is Coleridge's assertion that he as poet can build a finer dome and a more abiding paradise than Kubla's, and one that would have both convex heat and concave ice without the necessity of earthquake. Coleridge's music would be ‘loud and long’; Kubla's is momentary.

The earthly paradise traditionally takes one of its alternate placings in Abyssinia. The crucial passage here is in Paradise Lost:

Mount Amara, though this by some suppos'd
True Paradise under the Ethiop Line
By Nilus head, enclos'd with shining Rock.

(iv 281-3)

This is Coleridge's Mount Abora, and his Abyssinian maid, in singing of it, is celebrating Paradise. Once the poet saw her in vision; if he now revives within himself her song of Eden he will enter a state of such deep delight:

That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves in ice!

He would rival Kubla's decreed dome, and also produce the imaginative miracle of the juxtaposed contraries, and without the equivocal aid of the paradoxical upheaval that simultaneously creates and threatens the destruction of the ‘rare device.’ For this is the potential of the poetic imagination to create more lastingly than even Nature and Art can do together. And could he do this, he would be a reincarnation of the young Apollo. Those who heard his song would see his visionary creation, for that is the inventive power of poetry. And they would grant him the awe due to the youth who has eaten the fruit and drunk the milk of the Eden forbidden to them, or open only through vicarious participation in the poet's vision:

And all who heard should see them there,
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 drunk the milk of Paradise.