[In the following essay, Pearce proposes that Coleridge's notebooks, letters, and early poetry all contain details that are strongly reminiscent of the landscape in “Kubla Khan.”]

In the Paradise Lost—indeed in every one of his poems—it is Milton himself whom you see; his Satan, his Adam, his Raphael, almost his Eve—are all John Milton; and it is a sense of this intense egotism that gives me the greatest pleasure in reading Milton's works.

—S. T. Coleridge¹

The Notebook accounts Coleridge kept of the walking tour of the Lake District which he took with Wordsworth in the fall of 1799 and the detailed entries on other excursions, taken for the most part alone, into the mountains around Keswick the following summer, are among the most interesting pages of natural description to have come down to us from the entire period. For sheer absorption in the act of looking at things, in richness and closeness of observed detail, they are often superior to the Alfoxden and Grasmere Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth; and certainly they make William's Guide to the Lakes seem sedate reading enough.

Coleridge of course, in 1799, was “discovering” the Lake country and that must account for some of the passion with which he experienced and wrote about it. Yet one is struck by the objectivity of the passion; there is no tendency to moralize about the landscape, the aim obviously being to get down in the most direct and exact terms—color, shape, height, distance in feet—the actual appearance of the scenes before his eyes. His speculative powers seemed put to rest in the mountains, and seeing, sensing, feeling, recording took over instead.

One is aware, however, especially in the pages devoted to the solitary walks of 1800 (written probably for Sara Hutchinson's eyes), of an urgency and alertness quite different from that of the mere nature lover. What emerges is the image of a man searching for something he more than half expects to find just over the next ridge—“Some wilderness-plot, green & fountainous, & unviolated by Man,” as he put it in one early entry.² Again and again he will seem to be on the point of finding it, whatever it is, then not. One notices a quickening in the writing whenever certain features of landscape or certain effects of light and shade are found together. Here are a few examples from the 1799-1800 Notebook:

we look up the River & behold it pouring itself down thro' a steep bed of rocks, with a wall of woods on each—& again over the other wall of the Bridge the same scene in a long visto [sic] except that here instead of rapid a deep-solemn pool of still water, which ends in a rapid only in the far distance.—The grey ruin faces you on the one side—over the other in contrast of this still pool with the soft murmur of the distant rapid—& a handsome Gentleman's house in the distance.³

—River Greta near its fall into the Tees—Shootings of water threads ever down the slope of the huge green stone—The white Eddy-rose that blossom'd up against the stream in the scollop, by fits & starts, obstinate in resurrection—It is the life that we live—⁴

—The solemn murmur of the unseen river far in the distance behind us—& the silence of the Lake—⁵

the wild betongued savage mountained upper Lake—& the pastoral River, on its right bank mirror-smooth enclosed Meadows, the steep Mountain its one precipitous huge Bank!⁶

What an effect of the Shadows on the water! / —On the left the conical Shadow, On the right a square of splendid Black, all the area & intermediate a mirror reflecting dark & sunny Cloud / —⁷

before me—O God, what a scene.—the foreground a sloping wood, sloping down to the River & meadows, the serpent River beyond the River & the wood meadows terminated by Melbreak walled by the Melbreak.⁸

how beauteously the river winds between this Hill & the ridge that runs up between the vales into Threlkeld … From this point I hear swelling & sinking a murmur—is it of water? or is it of falling screes?—Fine columns of misty sunshine sailing slowly over the crags.⁹

but (O God) the river that runs across the vales, & that beauteous bridge just seen over the bottom of the ridge … the Trees by the side of the river near it!¹⁰

What is especially interesting about these passages—others like them could be cited, not just from the Notebooks, but from the letters and early poetry and prose pieces as well—is that each contains details strongly reminiscent of the landscape of “Kubla Khan.” Here are the all-important “serpent river,” shadows on the water, “enclosed” meadows, a murmur of far off rapids, a Gentleman's house or a castle seen in the distance, sloping woods, “savage” places. There is no “mighty fountain,” but there is the River Greta “shooting its waters,” and there is the pulsating “Eddy-rose.” Other entries have cascades and bursting waterfalls.

I do not mean to suggest that the landscape of “Kubla Khan” is a confection of these and similar Notebook entries; they were written in 1799, and Coleridge gives 1797 as the date of composition of the poem (though it may have been as late as 1799). What I do suggest is, first of all, that a landscape strikingly similar to that found in the poem had been of obsessive importance to Coleridge for many years, both before and after writing the poem, and second, that aspects of that famous setting scattered through the Notebooks and elsewhere point to the existence of an ur-landscape underlying all of them, of which the most glamorous, or idealized, version is the one found in “Kubla Khan.”

Where should we turn to find that first landscape, parent of all the others, the initial Xanadu? Probably not in the books of travel listed by Lowes as among those read by Coleridge in 1796 or 1797. These might conceivably have triggered the poem, but not generated it; it is much more likely that they would simply have stirred memories of a much earlier and more daemonic setting. The same can be said of the poetical romances of Southey and Landor and others so carefully examined by Elizabeth Schneider. While these works presumably played a part in building up the atmosphere and some of the incidental imagery in the poem, they didn't generate the primary landscape itself; that, I want to show, had been in Coleridge's mind years before he had read them.

But Coleridge himself, in his early poetry (as Marshall Suther has noticed in Visions of Xanadu) makes it clear where we should look for that original landscape: in the Devonshire countryside of his early childhood around Ottery St. Mary, with its sunny fields, wooded hills, its Vicarage full of sun and shadow, and (especially) its meandering river, described in “To the River Otter”:

Dear native Brook! wild Streamlet of the West!
                    How many various-fated years have past,
                    What happy and what mournful hours, since
                              last
I skimm'd the smooth thin stone along thy breast,
Numbering its light leaps! yet so deep imprest
Sink the sweet scenes of childhood, that mine eyes
                    I never shut amid the sunny ray,
But straight with all their tints thy waters rise,
                    Thy crossing plank, thy marge with willows
                              grey,
And bedded sand that vein'd with various dyes
Gleam'd through thy bright transparence! On my way,
                    Visions of Childhood! oft have ye beguil'd
Lone manhood's cares, yet waking fondest sighs:
                    Ah! that once more I were a careless Child!

(1796; Poems, p. 48)

The last three lines were mere patchwork, added when Coleridge took the other eleven bodily from the much earlier “Lines on an Autumnal Evening” (1793). But the greeting of the stream is convincing. And three other images—the skipping stone, the crossing plank, the veins of sand on the river bottom—are genuine touches of excitement, beautifully evoking what had clearly begun to be for him a sacred river along whose banks and on whose neighboring hills he had roamed, a young Kubla, planning future empires.

In “Lines on an Autumnal Evening,” a divine maiden, plainly the muse of poetic inspiration, appears to him in his “dear native haunts.” There is, once more, a “placid,” “meek,” “slow,” stream, “smoothing through fertile fields” as if under a spell. At the end comes a poignant (and thoroughly period) comparison of the evening sky to the fading of his hopes. By 1793 Coleridge was already “clustering” a meandering river, fertile fields, bowers, secluded grots of pleasure, a maid of poetic inspiration, his own faded powers and hopes—all of them, of course, key elements of the famous later poem.

“Songs of the Pixies” (also 1793), tells how a “youthful Bard,” standing as usual close to a rushing river, is plunged in reverie on reading the names of certain vanished persons (“ancestors”?) which he finds carved on the walls of a cavern. He is roused from his gloomy trance by the “soothing witcheries” of the pixies who twine “faery garlands” around his head. Five or so years later, Kubla Khan, similarly rapt, will stand in a similar landscape, musing on ancestors, listening to distant voices, not far from a rushing river. But this time no pixies come to wake him from his trance. The Abyssinian maid, whose singing could have done so, has vanished as has the memory of her music; in which case Kubla, trapped in the poem, inaccessibly, undisturbably, will not wake from his trance at all, but go on standing by the river forever and never enter his sunny dome again.

The Abyssinian maid of “Kubla Khan” and the pixies' “goddess of Night” have interesting points in common. The goddess (called “Mother of wildly-working dreams” and “Queen of Solemn Thought”) Coleridge associates with such mental states or powers as fancy, reverie, dream, imagination, mystical trance. Like the night sky she is both black and brilliant: round her “raven brow / Heaven's lucent roses glow.” The Abyssinian maid of “Kubla Khan” is also black, and possesses supernatural powers that make possible the building of poems and pleasure domes. She is clearly a version of the earlier ebony goddess; and both are versions of the black muse of Il Penseroso,

Whose saintly visage is too bright
To hit the sense of human sight
And therefore to our weaker view
O'erlaid with black, staid Wisdom's hue.

In any case, an obsessively recurrent landscape, with meandering stream, sunny meadows, hill bearing an important or majestic building, deep woods, a haunted or supernatural atmosphere, and a maid of divine significance, turns up repeatedly in Coleridge's early poetry—earlier, in fact, than the instances we have just been looking at would suggest. The very early sonnet “Life” (1784), for instance, opens with a poet brooding “Where native Otter sports his scanty stream.” He climbs a hill slowly, right to the top, where suddenly a vast scene, “Wood, Meadow, verdant Hill, and dreary Steep,” opens out below him in a breathtaking panorama. His eye is “ravish'd,” and he dedicates himself and his life with these words:

May this (I cried) my course through Life portray!
New scenes of Wisdom may each step display,
.....And thought suspended lie in rapture's blissful trance!

(Poems, pp. 11-12)

The poem is more than a dedication of Coleridge-to-be. It is an incarnation, and dedication, of a much earlier Coleridge, “the inspired charity boy” of Charles Lamb's reminiscence (“Logician, Metaphysician, Bard!”) who even as a school boy had seemed to view all life panoramically, as if from a hilltop. It reaches even further back, to “Coleridge the talker,” who at the age of nine had astonished members of his father's circle with his eloquence and knowledge; and back still further, to the six-year-old child who devoured all the fairy tales and books of marvels he could get his hands on till his father had to put a stop to it. The image of a youth high on a hilltop in the act of discovering his life's meaning, vowing to dedicate himself to some noble end, seems in fact perfectly to express one of the central impulses of Coleridge's intellectual history—an enraptured lifelong quest for encyclopedic or panoramic knowledge.

Such meanings are not, of course, inherent in landscapes. But they are not merely read into them arbitrarily, either. A landscape can become “charged” with meaning when it has been the setting in which some human crisis has been lived out, or some personal breakthrough experienced. The boy Wordsworth climbs down a hill to discover at the bottom a decaying gibbet, with the name, or the initials, of the murderer who had been hanged there still carved in the turf nearby. He flees back up the hill in horror, and the quite ordinary scene he finds at the top—a naked pool, a girl with a pitcher, a beacon on a hilltop—seems, years later, to be bathed for him in a “sublime” radiance (The Prelude, XII, 225-66).

Had not Tom Poole asked Coleridge in 1797 for an autobiographical sketch we would have no knowledge of events in Coleridge's early life comparable to the above incident in the life of Wordsworth. We have from Coleridge's own hand, however, a detailed account of one such incident that is extremely interesting in the present context. It is too long to give here in full, but we may risk abridgement since it is likely that most Coleridge scholars will be quite familiar with it. In his seventh or eighth year, after a violent quarrel with his brother Frank the young Coleridge

ran away, to a hill at the bottom of which the Otter flows—about one mile from Ottery.—There I stayed; my rage died away; but my obstinacy vanquished my fears—& taking out a little shilling book which had, at the end, morning & evening prayers, I very devoutly repeated them—thinking at the same time with inward & gloomy satisfaction, how miserable my Mother must be! … I watched the Calves in the fields beyond the river. It grew dark—and I fell asleep—it was towards the latter end of October—& it proved a dreadful stormy night—/ I felt the cold in my sleep, and dreampt that I was pulling a blanket over me, & actually pulled over me a dry thorn bush, which lay on the hill—in my sleep I had rolled from the top of the hill to within three yards of the River, which flowed by the unfenced edge of the bottom … Several men & all the boys were sent to ramble around & seek me—in vain! My mother was almost distracted—and at ten o'clock at night I was cry'd by the crier in Ottery, and in two villages near it—with a reward offered for me.—No one went to bed—indeed, I believe, half the town were up all one night! … I saw the Shepherds & Workmen at a distance—& cryed out so faintly, that it was impossible to hear me 30 yards off—and there I might have lain & died—for I was now almost given over, the ponds & even the river near which I was lying, having been dragged.—But by good luck Sir Stafford Northcote … came so near that he heard my crying … I remember, & shall never forget my father's face as he looked upon me while I lay in the servant's arms—so calm, and the tears stealing down his face: for I was the child of his old age.—My Mother, as you may suppose, was outrageous with joy … I was put to bed—& recovered in a day or so—but I was certainly injured—For I was weakly, & subject to the ague for many years after.¹¹

A landscape that has been the scene of events as remarkable as these is virtually certain to remain charged with significance for the person who experienced them. Commonplace objects in the scene will retain an unusual power to evoke states of feeling that had accompanied the original events—pride, dread, shame, joy, dejection, whatever they may have been. And because they evoke such feelings in a purified form (liberated from the former demands for action) such objects will become sacred objects, the entire scene the place where the gods are, or were (as of course will other scenes that resemble the primal one sufficiently to awaken it). Treasured in memory, it will acquire mythic status, a place where great acts occurred, great issues were faced, fundamental solutions worked out: the formulaic place.

The extent to which Coleridge may have shaped or idealized this incident (the only one from his childhood he chose to preserve in this way) we can never know. It may be of some importance, however, to remember that he was describing it expressly for Tom Poole, his principal benefactor, to whom often in his letters he presented himself in a pathetic, or a heroic, light, at times as the victim of cruel misunderstandings. It is tempting also to ask whether the whole event may not be doing duty for other earlier related events, attitudes, or impulses—epitomizing them, in a kind of heroic paradigm. A child of eight years who runs away from home to spend a long and terrifying night alone on a cold hilltop a mile or so from his village, while being all the while called for by parents who love him, undoubtedly has other reasons for staying there than the mere wish to avoid being punished if he should give in and go home. The entire incident reeks of deeper motivations: self-fulfillment, perhaps. Or even self-invention.

The youngest in a family of fourteen children, Samuel had early become the most powerful child in the home in the sense of having made himself from a very early age the favorite of his parents. This was a privileged position which he would not have relinquished without a struggle. It was also one that would be constantly under challenge by any of his brothers who felt they had been displaced by him. As indeed they had. He would live in a kingdom of vigilant tensions, surrounded by rivals. At the cost of much brotherly affection, he seems to have maintained his princely status, however, at length building about himself (in a way that might easily remind one of Kubla's walled retreat) a sunny solitude of books, fantasies, dreams:

At six years old I remember to have read Belisarius, Robinson Crusoe, & Philip Quarle [Quarll]—and then I found the Arabian Nights' entertainments—one tale of which (a tale of a man who was compelled to seek for a pure virgin) made so deep an impression on me (I had read it in the evening while my Mother was mending stockings) that I was haunted by spectres, whenever I was in the dark—and I distinctly remember the anxious & fearful eagerness, with which I used to watch the window, in which the books lay—& whenever the Sun lay upon them, I would seize it, carry it by the wall, & bask, & read [my italics].¹²

The happiest hours of his early childhood, possibly of his whole life, were those spent with his beloved books, by a sunny wall, reading romances of heroes on wonderful adventures. Paradoxically, the same books also had the power of inducing nightly terrors; it became necessary to develop a counter-rite of waiting for the sun's rays to fall on the bookshelf before daring to open the dangerous, marvelous pages. Such a mixture of terror and pleasure, the stuff of dreams, is perfectly capable of transforming the milieu in which it occurs into “a savage place, holy and enchanted,” in the words of the famous poem. It would only be natural if, as he sat by the wall in the warm sunshine poring over the charmed volumes, the family Vicarage at Ottery St. Mary should become, in certain very basic respects, a sunny palace for its gifted inhabitant. It might be equally natural if it should turn up twenty years later, elegiacally transformed, as the sunny pleasure dome of “Kubla Khan.” At any rate, thinking of that home, and the whole setting in which Coleridge grew up—a gifted child, dream- and book-oriented, in a milieu charged both with anxiety and bliss, the charmed scenery around Ottery St. Mary with its valley, meadow, woody hill, and winding river—it is tempting to discover the initial outlines of the landscape and the sources of most of the atmosphere that were to reappear, heightened and transformed, years later, in “Kubla Khan.”

The quarrel that flared between Coleridge and “Brother Frank,” in which the family “dreamer” suddenly became a figure of violent action, is chiefly significant because of what it occasioned: the first of those prodigious Agonies-in-the-Garden so familiar to readers of Coleridge's letters and Notebooks, of which two of the most impressive nightwatch poems in the language, “Dejection: an Ode” and “Frost at Midnight,” are formal versions (public private meditations) and “The Ancient Mariner” an extended ballad treatment. That intimate, urgent voice, a special blend of earnestness, eagerness, dismay, came into existence on a hill just outside Ottery St. Mary one cold night in October 1780, as the eight-year-old boy was tossed to and fro on seas of self-accusation and self-exoneration. It is not difficult to imagine probable details of that night: hearing now and then through the darkness and gusty wind voices “from far” calling to him, listening to the “tumult” of the Otter along its rapids, thinking of his searching mother, imagining—possibly hearing—a “woman wailing,” waking in the cold dead of night an object of infinite pity wrapped in a blanket of thorns; in the morning, waking again to find himself no longer on the hilltop that had been his temple, so to speak, or fortress-tower, but down at the bottom only a few feet away from the river that might have swallowed him in his sleep but that had spared him instead (his river of rivers, his Alpha of all rivers); being rescued by a late searcher and returned to his parents who received with joy and forgiveness the terrible hero who in only a few years would become the subtlest introspective psychologist and (for a while at least) the profoundest poet of nightmare of his time.

Several themes and images of suffering in Coleridge's mature work seem obviously related to the events of that night: a given-up-for-lost mariner “alone on a wide, wide sea”; a melancholy prince in a haunted solitude; visions of lost Edens; desolate landscapes; skies of storm; mournful voices; hope in a context of despair; the need for atonement and redemption through forgiveness and love. Memories of that night could spring up as much as twenty years later, as in the case of the following Notebook entry. (Coleridge is at Keswick, his muse quite silent—“for five months past my mind has been strangely shut up”¹³—his domestic life in ruins.)

Tuesday night, July 19, 1803—Intensely hot day—left off a waistcoat, & for yarn wore silk stockings—about 9 o'clock had unpleasant chilliness—heard a noise which I thought Derwent's in sleep—listening anxiously, I found it was a Calf bellowing—instantly came on my mind that night I slept out at Ottery—& the Calf in the field across the river whose lowing had so deeply impressed me—chill + child + Calf-lowing probably the rivers Greta and Otter.¹⁴

My argument, boiled down, is this: the landscapes that most excited Coleridge as poet and note-maker seem always to be those that recapitulate features of the countryside around Ottery St. Mary; one early experience in particular, a night spent alone in his eighth year on a hill outside his village had been sufficiently traumatic to leave the whole setting permanently charged; “Kubla Khan” may be seen as a glamorized evocation, two decades later, of that “holy and enchanted” landscape. It is an intriguing coincidence (for Coleridge almost certainly did not know modern Greek), that the word Xanadu—his variation of the Xamdu (or Xaindu) of his sources—should be the subjunctive form of the verb Xanado, and mean could I (that I might) see again.¹⁵

II

On the other hand, the poem is not called “Xanadu,” but “Kubla Khan.” And as it stands, it is Kubla's poem. He dominates it. His commanding position in the title, his immediate appearance in line one, the lordly “did … decree,” are enough to make everything that follows directly dependent upon him, effects, so to speak, of his character. Gardens, meadows, forests, palace, fountain, sacred river, all are his, absolutely. You feel you know a great deal about him just by thinking about them. He is an induced presence, like the Hamlet of Shakespeare, strongly realized before being seen. When he decrees something, things start happening—workmen spring into action, walls get built, gardens spout sinuous rills, stately pleasure domes go up in the middle of wildernesses. And it is just because one knows this kind of thing about him that it is so puzzling when he is not found where you would expect to find him—in his chambers of state, or somewhere in the palace environs, in the adjoining courtyard, for instance, or in the formal garden area (where Coleridge's sources almost invariably locate him). He is in none of these places. It is only after a bit of searching that you do, in fact, get a glimpse of him and then only by implication—standing alone, at a considerable distance from the palace, close by the river at a spot where the shadow of the pleasure dome can be seen floating on the water, not too far from where rapids burst into an enormous cavern.

That Kubla should be there alone is definitely odd. No princely retinue; no attendants, companions, foreign ambassadors, ministers of state, court maidens; no one but himself. No activity on the river, either, or in the fields, or in the surrounding forests. No indication that there will be any, or that there ever has been. It is a perfect solitude. The only other presences are ghosts—voices of ancestors that emanate from the “tumult” of the waters. Were it not for those voices, you might perhaps think of him as meditating there; or as charmed by the view. But considering that family and those ancestors, the most despotic and violent of the Mongol dynasties, it is easier to suppose that he is being prompted, or summoned. Or, for that matter, accused.

We are not told what wars the voices are warning him of, or reminding him of, or summoning him to, what sorts of battles there will be, where they will be fought, or against whom. All we know is that Kubla hears “from far” voices that must evoke a torturing contrast between life in the pleasure dome and life on the tented field. What is Kubla's reaction to these voices? If such a question cannot be answered, still it can be turned over a bit. Is he on the point of obeying them? Does the fact that they speak to him of war, not peace, make them “voices of conscience,” reminders of things like public service, official duties, military conquest, and so forth? Do they make life in Xanadu seem a kind of truant life? Is Kubla remembering some other life outside the walls, some other self than the palace self? If he should be lured away from Xanadu by the voices, does he think it will be only for a little while? Once outside the walls, will he look back in nostalgia and regret at the palace he has left behind? Or will he ignore the voices entirely and go back to his pleasant residence? His glance falls (let us say) on the dome's shadow on the water, rests there, and he is pulled two ways: one to the ancestral wars, the other to the pleasure dome. And there the poem leaves him, suspended between two worlds. Or so one might picture it; the exact details aren't really important. What is important is seeing Kubla as a static figure, alienated, alone in a haunted solitude, listening to voices—important because this Kubla and this setting have almost nothing to do with those found in Coleridge's main sources, Purchas His Pilgrimage and Purchas His Pilgrimes.

Purchas's own source, The Most Notable and Famous Travels of Marcos Paulus, translated into English by John Frampton in 1579, pictures “Cublay” as a vigorous prince who has great aptitude both for courtly pleasures and official business, and who prides himself on having the blood of Genghis Khan in his veins. In Pilgrimage, “the Grand Can” is regularly shown executing some princely function—presiding at communal meals, festivities, sacrificial rites, or other important events; or he is hunting, or making war—there are many sudden expeditions. He is a keen military strategist: “he not only inherited what the former [Cans] had conquered, but in the sixteenth year of his raigne subdued in a manner the rest of [those parts of] the world.”¹⁶ Purchas describes him as “of mean stature, of countenance white, red, and beautiful. He had foure wives which kept several courts, the least of which contained at least ten thousand persons. He had many concubines.”¹⁷Pilgrimes is even more specific: Cublai is “twentie seven yeares old,¹⁸ and ruling the people with great wisdom and gravitie. He is a valiant man, exercised in Armes, strong in bodie, and of a prompt minde for the performance of matters, before he attained to the dignitie of the Empire—he often showed himselfe a valiante Souldier in the warres.”¹⁹ His ceaseless palace building is often noticed by Purchas (in Pilgrimes) and by Marco Polo; from the latter we learn of Cublai's sensible practice of visiting all parts of his empire on an annual basis to check on local governments in person. We learn further that he needed “a marvellous goodly palace” at each stopping place “to lodge him & his Court when he cometh to that Citie.” Clearly, he had a taste for “imperial delights,” but there is nothing in any of these accounts to suggest the indolent, abstracted, solitary prince of Coleridge's poem.

As for Cublai's residence at Xanadu, Pilgrimage speaks of “a stately palace, encompassing sixteene miles of plaine ground with a wall.”²⁰ The grounds are called remarkable for their fertility and park-like beauty. Marco Polo, writing of what he had personally observed, goes into fuller detail:

a very fine Palace, the rooms of which are all guilt and painted with figures of men and beasts and birds and with a variety of trees and flowers, all executed with such exquisite art that you regard them with delight and astonishment. Round this palace a wall is built, inclosing a compass of sixteen miles, and inside the Park there are fountains and rivers and brooks, and beautiful meadows, with all kinds of wild animals (excluding such as are of ferocious nature).²¹

Nowhere in Purchas's or Marco Polo's accounts is there any hint of Coleridge's enchanted solitude. Instead, what we read of is people buying, selling, eating, working, trading, going and coming, or merely milling about. Without fail there is a river that “winds” through the grounds of the palaces, plied by barges and other commercial vessels, and which in some instances “runneth his course into the Occean Sea.” By contrast, the palace and grounds of Coleridge's poem are empty and still; the river hasn't so much as a single sail. One could be looking at a scene from which all the inhabitants had fled, possibly ages ago. In both Purchas and Marco Polo, Cublai is normally pictured hearing legal cases, pronouncing on them, dispatching messengers to foreign courts, attending lectures, studying and promoting the arts and sciences, listening to reports of the public works commissions, inspecting his stables, or (best of all) going to or returning from the hunt. There is always something going on. Coleridge's Kubla, on the other hand (what we can see, or deduce, of him), is utterly aloof, his Xanadu a retreat, more hideaway than imperial court. Both he and the setting have been almost totally transformed. How are we to account for these transformations?²²

III

There is probably always some identification, not necessarily conscious, between a writer and his subject. The crucial passage in Purchas that touched off “Kubla Khan” may imply a personal or situational analogy of some kind between Coleridge, “poet-philosopher,” and Kubla Khan, Oriental monarch. Is the poem perhaps a medal with two sides, one stamped Coleridge, the other Kubla Khan? The two figures appear to be connected, although they face in different directions and have corresponding but reversed dilemmas. Each is on the point of betraying his true vocation for another one—Kubla, man of action par excellence, deserting affairs of state for those of the pleasure dome, Coleridge his career as philosophic poet for that of intellectual explorer outside the walls, i.e. as professional lecturer, journalist, literary and political theorist, religious thinker. Both are seriously concerned with making and administering empires (civilizations), with their various divisions, provinces, departments, histories, traditions, manners, etc. Both are concerned with bringing speech to speechless tribes and with unifying the life of the mind within their borders. Both possess a vision of a complete empire, not merely practical knowledge of its parts.

Serious poets feel genuine responsibility for the civilization to which they belong. They want to know how it evolved, what moves it, what may happen to it if it continues along its present course, what it might yet become. But after a certain point, allegiance to poetry must prevail over alternative interests. In Coleridge's case, as has often been noted, the claims of poetry and the claims of speculation were uniquely balanced. (“I hope,” he wrote Poole in February 1801, “that Poetry & Philosophy will not neutralize each other & leave me an inert mass.”²³) For years he devoted more and more of his energies to social and philosophic thought and analysis, and made longer and longer excursions into theology, history, criticism, enlisting his powers in the service of a lower encyclopedism until what were once short field trips outside the walls of “Xanadu” became full-scale expeditions, journeys of settlement. From about 1800 to the end of his life in 1834, he applied himself increasingly to the preparation of what he came to describe as his “great work on the Logos, Divine and Human, on which I have set my Heart and hope to ground my ultimate reputation,”²⁴ a work that was, in the words of W. J. Bate, “nothing less than a new Summa of theology, morals, psychology, logic, the sciences, and the arts, or rather of a series of works that together might make up a new Summa.”²⁵ Coleridge loved to speak of it in architectural terms: “What a Hope, Promise, Impulse you are to me!” he writes Thomas Alsop in 1820, “in my present efforts to realize my past labors, and by building up the Temple, the shaped Stones, Beams, Pillars, Yea, the graven Ornaments & connecting Clamps of which have been piled up by me only in too great abundance.”²⁶

Such a statement (the letters and Notebooks contain others like it) makes it easy to picture an ideal Coleridge, the Coleridge of intention, Wordsworth's “most wonderful man I have ever known,” as a serene and powerful ruler, a veritable Kubla Khan, dwelling in a palace of philosophy, science, and art at the center of a marvelous landscape of the mind. It wouldn't be a false picture of Coleridge; it would simply be a clarified one, stripped of everything that doesn't, in the end, really matter and that had only got in the way of the ideal Coleridge that did. It might even seem that this, after all, is what “Kubla Khan” is essentially about—Coleridge's intellectual “temple,” or Logosophia, on which he had “set his heart,” glimpsed from afar as a “stately pleasure dome” that was fated never to be brought to completion. It might seem a satisfying reading—if dates and other factors weren't definitely against it. For even if we don't accept Coleridge's “summer 1797” as the date of composition and take instead October 1799, or even “May or June 1800” (as suggested by Elizabeth Schneider), it would surely be much too early for him to have been lamenting in a poem the failure of a philosophic career which at that date could hardly be said to have begun.

There was, however, another more important failure occurring in Coleridge's life around 1798-1800: the drying up of his poetic genius. Here would be a disaster that might fittingly be represented as loss of the power to build a bright “dome in the air.” It was, in fact, a far from unanticipated failure. He seems to have been expecting it almost from the start of his career. The early poems and letters contain a variety of complaints:

Oh! might my ill-past hours return again
.....'Tis vain to wish, for Time has ta'en his flight—

(“Quae Nocent Docent,” 1789; Poems, pp. 7-8)

Then sigh and think—I too could laugh and play
And gaily sport it on the Muse's lyre,
Ere tyrant Pain had chased away delight,

(“Pain,” 1790, lines 11-13; Poems, p. 17)

O pleasant days of Hope—for ever gone!
Could I recall you!—But that thought is vain.

(“The Gentle Look,” 1793; lines 9-10; Poems, p. 48)

To me hath Heaven with bounteous hand assigned
Energetic Reason and a shaping mind …
.....Sloth-jaundiced all!

(“Lines on a Friend,” 1794; lines 39, 40, 43; Poems, p. 77)

By 1800, after his remarkable, though remarkably short, burst of poetic activity while collaborating with Wordsworth on Lyrical Ballads, the atony he dreaded yet had somehow half-invoked began to show in earnest: “The poet is dead in me—my imagination (or rather the Somewhat that had been imaginative) lies like a Cold Snuff on the circular Rim of a Brass Candlestick, without even a stink of Tallow to remind you that it was once cloathed & mitred with Flame” (March 25, 1801).²⁷

The loss that is lamented in Part II of “Kubla Khan” is the loss of the power to lift a work of art above mere “fancy,” loss of the constructive and unifying power which Coleridge later termed “secondary Imagination.” In “Kubla Khan,” this power is seen as dependent upon a damsel's inspired song. She plays on a dulcimer, her proper instrument,²⁸ and sings of a distant mountain, her sacred home, which she visualizes with such apparent clarity and certainty that it is almost as if she had never left it. The damsel is the soul's visionary faculty, by which we know and re-enter the eternal world. It is her singing that harmonizes the other powers of the mind and soul—imagination, reason, moral sensibility, the will. We know exactly what her song is about because Coleridge left so many glosses on it and versions of it: “Truth is one and entire, because it is vital”²⁹—“all things have a life of their own and yet they are all one life”³⁰—“He to whom all things are one, who draweth all things to one, and seeth all things in one, may enjoy true peace & rest of spirit.”³¹

The intuition of oneness is the soul's essential joy—the visionary instant “in which the divisions between inner and outer, between symbol and letter, between subject and object, and between objects themselves vanish and the lost connections are suddenly recaptured.”³² If it is eclipsed, or becomes lost, the true relation of the mind's faculties promptly deteriorates: Reason falls to doing the work of the Understanding, Imagination loses its power of “discovering the cause in the Effect” and becomes “Fancy,” partial truths are mistaken for the whole truth, correspondencies vanish, the universe becomes, as Coleridge wrote to Poole in October, 1797, “but a mass of little things.”³³ The disappearance of the maiden and her song is the failure of the visionary impulse, with the accompanying failure of the fountain of imagination. When the fountain fails, the river of unified thought and feeling starts to dry up. With the drying of that river comes an end to any plans for building above its banks stately pleasure domes of art and song. This is what the bard of Part II knows, hope though he may to the contrary. He exclaims, “I would build that dome in air / That sunny dome! those caves of ice!,” but the nostalgic repetitions belie his hopes, putting them well beyond probability of fulfillment. The poem that seemed to have begun as an epic, or perhaps as a “verse romance,” after a mere thirty-six lines changes abruptly into an elegy—not just for its own incompleteness, or for other poems of Coleridge's that would never even get partly written, but for all unfinished poems, palaces, lives, visions, paradises: the most celebrated lines ever written on hopes that come to nothing.

“Kubla Khan,” that is to say, isn't an unfinished, or suspended poem in the sense that “Christabel,” for example, is. It is a poem about suspended powers. The unfinishedness of “Kubla Khan” is integral to the theme, not a deformation of it. “Finishability,” given such a term, not failure to finish, but a longing to finish, or to have finished, is what the poem is about. In spite of its many tensions, contrasts, oppositions, though teeming with portentousness and a sense of imminent action, nothing significant happens—nothing, at least, that you can put your finger on. Significance is precisely what is withheld. If there is an action, it is that of pure expectation arrested, as in a dream, by dread.

In the view of Leslie Brisman, the interesting thing in this situation is not Coleridge's inability to finish the poem, but his need to interrupt it—an event that also occurs, though in differing ways, in several of his other poems. The man from Porlock is an aspect of Coleridge's self that insists upon breaking in on the act of composition to disrupt it. In Brisman's words: “He is the person, as opposed to the poet in the poet. At best he is what makes the conversational Coleridge so personable; at worst, he is what keeps the poet from producing works like Lycidas … to the extent that he is no poet this Porlock is always dumb, though in fact he can be, as Coleridge the man was, unquenchably garrulous.” And a little farther on, “If ‘Kubla Khan’ internalizes the fact of interruption and becomes, more than an interrupted poem, a poem about interruption, it does so in a manner like that by which dreams absorb the Porlocks of conscious waking life”³⁴ (as personifications of Freud's “Daytime Worry”).

It would be easy, in other words, in ways such as these, to see “Kubla Khan” as a monument to Coleridge's failure, involuntary or deliberate, as poet. But this would be a mistake; the poem is richer than that. Coleridge's thought was so subtly interwoven with the deepest thought of his time that in wider perspective we can see the poem as imaging a much vaster failure, of which Coleridge's was but a symptomatic part. The West has far from succeeded in harmonizing heart and head, desire and reason, morality and science, imagination and reason. Now that the wars prophesied by the “ancestral voices” have finally come about and the stately pleasure dome of Western civilization appears to lie in ruins, “Kubla Khan” may come to seem less a personal elegy about the failure of S. T. C. than a prophetic elegy about the failure of an entire culture. That is to say, the famous interruption of the poem may in fact have been inherent in the subject.

Yet, who knows? Perhaps no interruption, in the usual sense of intrusion, occurred at all. Perhaps the person from Porlock was expected, or even, as Brisman suggests, was sent for by Coleridge—I mean by Coleridge the 24-year-old poet, because of a poetical need, whatever the 44-year-old philosopher of the same name may have chosen to remember about the occasion. For there was another book—always, with Coleridge, there is another book—besides Purchas His Pilgrimage that may have been in the young poet's thoughts that autumn night and may have served as the other parent, so to speak, of “Kubla Khan”: Andrew Baxter's Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul (1737). This work had interested Coleridge ever since 1795 when, as he says, he had “walked with Southey on a desperate hot summerday from Bath to Bristol with a Goose, 2 vol. of Baxter on the Immortality of the Soul, and the Giblets in my hand.”³⁵ He was still able in 1827 to say of it, “I should not wonder if I found that Andrew had thought more on the subject of Dreams [the section “The Phaenomenon of Dreaming” runs to some 200 pages] than any other of our Psychologists, Scotch or English.”³⁶

The main appeal of Baxter for Coleridge in 1795 would be his unabashed defense of “the spiritual principle in human life” against the materialism of Godwin, Hobbes, and Locke. “Matter, in the philosophy of the many,” Baxter writes, “has usurped the power of the human soul, and the power of all other living intelligent Causes.”³⁷ It is even imaginable that Coleridge had this work with him on the walk that ended at the farmhouse near Porlock, rather than the bulkier Purchas—the 2 lbs. 9 ozs. of the two Baxter volumes being about half the weight of the 1625 edition of Purchas. However that may be, Baxter had the following things to say about dreams and visions:

Again, another hath this scene presented to him in his sleep. He fancies a person reads to him certain sentences out of a book, and that neither the person reading, nor the subject read, are unknown to him, but that he is familiarly acquainted with both; insomuch that he knows beforehand, what the other is to read to him, and the design of the writer: and hath his remarks ready to offer upon it, as if he had perused this visionary Author long since. And upon awaking, he remembers some of the words read to him, and something of what he had to observe concerning it: but the scene gradually disappears; and the more he seeks to recover his own sleeping arguments, and the other's reasons, by the help of his waking memory, the more they are darkned by that very endeavor. One under this disappointment will be vexed that he did not dream on, or that anything should disturb him, while he is endeavoring to catch the shy remains of his vision, or if possible, to replace himself in the same state of consciousness.³⁸

[Italics in original, except in last two sentences.]

A marvelous book, found and read in a dream, the contents of which, because of some trivial waking circumstance, are then lost beyond recall. Only, instead of a dream book that dissolves upon waking, why not a real book, a book of wonderful travels, Purchas His Pilgrimage, for instance, and “fall asleep” over it, and carry it into a dream, where it then generates a strange poem, a long one, on the life and deeds of one Cublai Can … and have the copying-out interrupted, à la Baxter, and the rest of the poem fade away and vanish, to leave author and reader straying back and forth from book to poem, from life to dream, in search of the meaning forever after?

Notes

1. In Table Talk, ed. H. N. Coleridge, 2 vols. (London: J. Murray, 1835), 2:87.

2. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 3 double vols. (Bollingen Series, New York: Pantheon Books, 1957), 1:220-G216. Hereafter: C. N. B., citing volume and entry number.

3. C. N. B., 1:495.

4. C. N. B., 1:495.

5. C. N. B., 1:510.

6. C. N. B., 1:510.

7. C. N. B., 1:536.

8. C. N. B., 1:537.

9. C. N. B., 1:798.

10. C. N. B., 1:978. Quotations from Coleridge's poetry are taken from The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge (London: Humphrey Milford, 1931).

11. The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (London and Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1971), 1:352-54. Hereafter: C. L., citing volume and page.

12. C. L. 1:347.

13. Letter to Tom Wedgewood, September 16, 1803. Quoted in Joseph Cottle's Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Houlston and Stoneman, 1847), p. 466.

14. C. N. B., 1:1416.

15. Pointed out to me by Irene Burtness.

16. Purchas His Pilgrimage, or Relations of the World and the Religions Observed in All Ages (London, 1613), The Fourth Booke, p. 337.

17. Purchas His Pilgrimage, p. 353.

18. Coleridge's age in 1799.

19. Hakluytus Postumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes, by Samuel Purchas, B. D., in 20 vols. (Glasgow, 1906), vol. 11, ch. 3, p. 233.

20. Purchas His Pilgrimage, p. 350.

21. The Most Noble and Famous Travels of Marco Polo together with The Travels of Nicolo De Conti, ed. from the Elizabethan Translation of John Frampton by N. M. Penzer, M. A. (London: The Argonaut Press, 1929), p. 263.

22. The two best known studies of the poem, John Livingston Lowes's The Road to Xanadu (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927) and Elizabeth Schneider's Coleridge, Opium and Kubla Khan (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1953), do not really supply answers to this question. Lowes, clearly trapped by associationist psychology, sees the poem as a feat, essentially, of memory (Coleridge's “Fancy”)—a structure of allusions fished up from Coleridge's reading by an almost mechanical unconscious mental process which Lowes equates with the work of the imagination. Elizabeth Schneider, in her classic study, views the poem as (among other things) an attempt by Coleridge to write a pseudo-oriental romance in the going style of the period. (She instances Landor's Gebir, Southey's Thalaba, and other contemporary romances, both English and continental.) The poem failed chiefly because it had begun in too densely lyrical a fashion to have been sustained and had, in the event, to be abandoned. Cogent as an “objective” explanation of why the poem is a fragment, this doesn't touch the question of why Coleridge should have altered the Purchas materials as radically as he did, and in the manner he did.

23. C. L., 2:668-69. In Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1969) Thomas McFarland argues that poetry and philosophy did not neutralize each other but remained mutually supportive (see especially ch. 2). This might be true of Coleridge's view of the ideal relations of these two faculties, but it hardly conforms to the facts of Coleridge's own case.

24. To John Gutch, 17 September 1815. C. L., 4:585.

25. Walter Jackson Bate, Coleridge (New York: Collier Books, 1973), pp. 181-82.

26. C. L., 5:95-96 (to John Thelwall).

27. C. L., 2:714 (to William Godwin).

28. Not, of course, the modern instrument (played with two felt-headed hammers on a concert platform) of Norman Fruman's and Alethea Hayter's predilection. See Norman Fruman, Coleridge, The Damaged Archangel (New York: Braziller, 1971), p. 544; and Alethea Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967), p. 220. According to Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, “dulcimer” originally also meant “other musical instruments common in the Elizabethan period, and according to the usage in the English Bible, Hebrew musical instruments, about which we have no sure knowledge.” Grove's, 3rd edn., 6 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1937), 2:107. Coleridge was clearly using the word in the more ancient “biblical” sense.

29. C. N. B., 3:4251.

30. C. L., 1:406.

31. C. N. B., 1:876.

32. Thomas R. Frosch, The Awakening of Albion (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1974), p. 97.

33. C. L., 1:354.

34. Leslie Brisman, Romantic Origins (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 32-33.

35. Quoted by Kathleen Coburn in C. N. B., 1 (Notes): 188.

36. Ibid.

37. Andrew Baxter, An Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul, 2 vols., 2nd edn. (London, 1737), 2:48.

38. Baxter, 2:228-29.