SOURCE: “Pandemonium in Xanadu,” Romanticism Past and Present, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1981, pp. 23-40.

[In the following essay, Tapscott proposes that Coleridge's vision of Xanadu in “Kubla Khan” closely parallels Milton's Eden before the Fall, both in its description of the physical detail and in its moral ambiguity.]

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 Khan decrees his dome in an Edenic setting. Mythic, exotic, and remarkably tangible for a visionary landscape, the first representation of Xanadu locates the mystical drama and prepares for the full description of the dome.¹ In the first two lines of the poem, Coleridge specifies the place (Xanadu), the central actor (Kubla Khan), his action (the decree), and its effects (the dome). That is, the opening lines pre-scribe Xanadu and Kubla Khan's action in it. The effects of that action precede the materials in which the action takes form. Kubla Khan establishes his construct over “Alph, the sacred river” by pronouncing his “decree”—a verbal power—over the innate, pre-verbal possibilities of the scene. So he establishes a wall around “forests ancient as the hills.” This enclosure changes not the place itself, but its status. Uncircumscribed, the scene is a wilderness. Walled in, the scene is a “natural” wild garden.

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.

Most of the details of this locus amoenus are archetypally common to representations of Paradise. In his prefatory note to the poem, Coleridge alludes to a section of Purchas his Pilgrimage, the history of English explorations he had been reading when the substance of his own poem first oneirically occurred to him. That account gives the shape and first details of Kubla Khan's garden in terms that make the landscape sound less like a wilderness paradise than like an eighteenth-century park with “fertile,” “pleasant,” and “delighteful” details:

In Xanadu did Cublai Can build a stately Palace, encompassing sixteene miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleasant Springs, delighteful Streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure.²

Clearly, the Pilgrimage supplies many details for Coleridge's paradise-garden—but I am interested in what happens as Coleridge reorganizes those given details into his own vision. The change involves both nuance and scope. What had been a sumptuously cultured hortus conclusus in the seventeenth-century text becomes in the nineteenth-century version an energized early-Romantic garden. Coleridge's revision of the oriental of British landscape architects like Capability Brown and William Kent, who rejected the linear and geometrical formalism of Le Nôtre in favor of a more organically shaped formalism. To make the formal garden a cultivated miniature of a natural wilderness, Kent even planted dead tree-stumps in the panorama, “to give the air of a greater truth to the scene.” Horace Walpole characterized the change in gardening attitudes with a metaphor of the architects' new freedom: “They leaped the fence and saw that all nature was a garden.”

The terms of Coleridge's revision of Purchas's original scene are the terms of Edmund Burke's distinction between beauty and sublimity: beauty consists in smallness, smoothness, and brightness of color (Purchas), while the sublime emerges from huge, rough, dark potential sources of pain and danger (Coleridge).³ As he changes the descriptive emphasis from that of his source, Coleridge makes the enclosed territories offer a pleasure less constrained and more potentially sublime: what had offered sumptuous and stately pleasures now affords a wider range of emotional responses. In Burke's terms, beauty causes love, but sublimity generates desire:

And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery …
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

Besides the Byronic foreshadowing, Coleridge adds caves, grottoes, and subterranean waters to his paradise, to make the landscape itself sound like a field that generates sublime emotions. And yet this landscape is not allegorical but archetypal, figuring the emotional action itself: it is the symbolic narrative at this point in the poem. Part of the change in emphasis is the result of a change in style. It seems to me that part of Coleridge's adaptation of his source consists in a formal “Miltonizing” of the original details, especially the images, the diction, and the line. The elaborated description of Xanadu, in fact, verbally echoes that section of Paradise Lost (IV, 138-181) in which Satan approaches the fertile, prelapsarian earth. On his mission of disharmony, Satan lands and surveys a morally untested world, an “Assyrian Garden, where the Fiend / Saw undelighted all delights” (PL, IV, 285-286). The details Satan notes in this new world surrounding the tree of knowledge resemble the details of Xanadu around the pleasure-dome. In Milton's paysage moralisé, I hear the beginnings of Coleridge's “green hill athwart a cedarn cover”:

So on he fares, and to the border comes
Of Eden, where delicious Paradise,
Now nearer, Crowns with her enclosure green,
As with a rural mound the champaign head
Of a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides
With thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild,
Access deni'd; and over head up grew
Insuperable highth of loftiest shade,
Cedar, and Pine, and Fir, and branching Palm,
A silvan Scene.

(PL, IV, 131-140)

Above the trees Satan observes that “the verdurous wall of Paradise up sprung” (IV, 143)—an observation consonant with Purchas's garden, with the Genesis depiction of Eden, and with Coleridge's opening description of walled Xanadu.⁴ Of these alternatives, Xanadu most closely resembles the Eden Milton's Satan sees. In Xanadu “blossomed many an incense-bearing tree”; Milton's Satan, arriving in Eden, had also seen

… higher than that Wall a circling row
Of goodliest Trees loaden with fairest Fruit,
Blossoms and Fruits at once of golden hue …
                                                  … now gentle gales
Fanning their odoriferous wings dispense
Native perfúmes, and whisper whence they stole
Those balmy spoils.

(PL, IV, 146-148, 156-159)

As he nears Eden, Satan smells the flowering aromas of vernal innocence (“So entertain'd those odorous sweets the Fiend / Who came thir bane” [IV, 166-167]), and he is slightly better “pleas'd” (IV, 167) by those smells than Asmodeus in The Book of Tobit had been pleased by the smell of burning fish entrails (“Asmodeus with the fishy fume,” [IV, 167]). But Asmodeus, the “demon-lover” of Sara in The Book of Tobit, was frightened away by those fumes, when Sara's new human lover Tobias burned the fish in exorcism. When Coleridge represents the “holy and enchanted” grandeur of Xanadu with the image of a “woman wailing for her demon lover,” he indirectly suggests the innocence of Milton's Eden—but innocence with a difference. In Milton, Satan had been attracted-and-repelled by the smell of innocence rising from the garden; innocence had seemed, at the moment, its own defence against evil. In Coleridge, however, the innocence of Xanadu is less self-protective, more complicated in its relation to moral evil. In Milton the landscape is neutral, the battleground on which moral struggles are waged; in Coleridge the landscape itself seems to be a part of the struggle. Milton pictures Satan climbing the wooded hill to Eden, up “th' ascent of that steep savage Hill” (IV, 172), but “savage” here seems to mean primarily “wooded” (from the Latin “silvaticum”). When Coleridge describes Xanadu as a “savage place … holy and enchanted,” he seems to make the place itself participate in the emotional sublimity. Thus from the top of Eden's hill “our general Sire” (IV, 144) can see the walls of Paradise among “his nether Empire neighboring round” (IV, 145), just as Kubla Khan can survey “twice five miles of fertile ground / With walls and towers … girdled round.” Coleridge seems to take many of the details of his Xanadu from Milton's depiction of Eden—but, significantly, Coleridge chooses those scenes in Paradise Lost in which Eden is pictured through Satan's eyes. In Paradise Lost we see not only innocence, but innocence-already-threatened. In “Kubla Khan” we see not simply a wilderness where Kubla builds his palace, but a landscape of dangerous sublimity, in which Kubla Khan's energy participates.

Like Milton's threatened Eden, Coleridge's woody, fragrant Xanadu suggests elements of a frightful power: a “deep romantic chasm” shatters the hills. As in Eden, something in the grottoed landscape is already (literally) undercut, figuratively vulnerable, but the situation in neither poem decays immediately into evil. Milton separates the evil (Satan) from the place (Eden) and then narratively brings them together, as Satan leaps into Eden. But Coleridge's setting contains both elements of the Miltonic duality of Satan-in-Eden. It is a “savage place,” with a sublime and demonic potential in itself: beneath the terrain, “caverns measureless to man” pock a sunken river's path to a “sunless sea.” That is, like the general structure of Paradise Lost, the narrative delineation of Xanadu already implies a dark subversive force beneath the Edenic aspect. Milton had fully chronicled the danger of Satan's example, even before the poem's first glimpse of Paradise. Similarly, Coleridge suspends the story of Kubla Khan's dome for thirty lines, until he has set it in a dualistic landscape in which the “chasms” and the “sunless sea” undercut the physical geography as overtly as the moral darkness and void of Milton's hell (Books I-III) had tacitly subverted the sunlit Eden (Books IV and V) of Paradise Lost. Milton keeps his landscape neutral by relying on his narrative to suggest threat; Coleridge lyrically makes the place itself the image of a sublime tension.

The descriptions of the rivers in the landscapes of Milton and Coleridge illustrate both the influence of Milton on Coleridge and also the differences between their uses of setting. Coleridge makes the deep chasms a part of Xanadu itself—but Milton separates innocent Eden from the dangerous part of the universe. Through the darkness of the inferno in Book II of Paradise Lost, several of the most ambitious demons wander in search of a place to found their terrible kingdom. They bend

Four ways thir flying March, along the Banks
Of four infernal Rivers that disgorge
Into the burning Lake their baleful streams;
Abhorred Styx, the flood of deadly hate,
Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep;
Cocytus, nam'd of lamentation loud
Heard on the rueful stream; fierce Phlegeton
Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage.

(PL, II, 574-581)

Discovering a “frozen Continent” (II, 587) of snow and ice, the demons continue

O'er many a Frozen, many a Fiery Alp,
Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and shades of
          death,
A Universe of death.

(PL, II, 620-622)

In stark monosyllables, Satan surveys the material features of his universe. His alienating pride shapes itself in sunken rivers, in fire, and in ice much like Dante's deepest circle as well as Coleridge's “dome.” In Milton, the landscape is an allegorical vista through which the narrative moves sequentially. Miltonic place is static in its figurative implications, because the ontological truth it figures is a fixed, doctrinal truth: Satan recognizes his moral state as a projection onto God's originally and ultimately good universe. In Coleridge, place serves not only as the location but as the vehicle of the symbolic narrative itself. In his narrative Milton brings innocence and evil together; Coleridge in his lyric mode shows that innocence and evil coexist in the same place.

Thus Xanadu resembles Milton's prelapsarian Eden both in the tangible details (vista, trees, walls, hills, odors) and in its moral ambiguity; it is innocence, but described in a context that implies a threat to that innocence. The danger in both Xanadu and Eden is a moral danger, but it is also the result of a narrative frame; each paradise is made to seem subverted because of the narrative order of its presentation. Eden is endangered because Satan approaches it; Xanadu is already “savage,” and Kubla Khan's “decree” seems to participate in the dangerous sublimity already latent in his world. But a simple equation of Xanadu with Milton's Eden or with one of Milton's “false Paradises” (“that faire field / Of Enna” (IV, 268) or even Mount Amara, the seat of “Abassin Kings” [IV, 280]) states the relation a little too baldly.⁵ The important feature of Xanadu is not that it is an Edenic world, nor that it is tacitly undercut, nor even that it resonates with Miltonic or Romantic depths—but that it is a fierce and tenuous world, where Kubla Khan's construct rises from its surroundings. Xanadu is not “fallen”; rather, as in Milton's Eden, a naturally malign force underlies its order. In Milton the landscape is neutral, a field on which forces of good and evil will contend; Coleridge works the allegory to a symbolic fusion as he makes the landscape of Xanadu itself the figure of moral ambiguity. In Paradise Lost the moral threat is Satan, whose appearance in the poem frames the picture of Eden, and the aesthetic threat is Milton's sympathy with Satan. In “Kubla Khan,” however, the moral and the aesthetic are more overtly equated, both in the sublime landscape and in the figure of Kubla Khan.

Thus far, that is, Xanadu sounds like Eden under threat. But Coleridge's poem of Xanadu could certainly exhibit Romantic tendencies without overtly alluding to Miltonic precedents: the Romantic tradition of the theogony of the landscape, one might object, could explain the resemblances between Xanadu and a sublime vista. By the middle of the opening movement of “Kubla Khan,” however, the scene is more directly set for human action (with Kubla's dome), and the directly Miltonic echoes increase.⁶ By line 19, the “chasm” in Xanadu, with “ceaseless turmoil seething,” erupts with the raw force of the “sacred river” into a “mighty fountain,” a well-spring of wild energy over which Kubla Khan declares his dome. Strikingly, the underlying water images of Paradise Lost similarly erupt with Satan's official entry into the garden, in Book IX. That scene had been prefigured in Book IV, when Milton had described how, in Satan's ken, the river Tigris winds through Eden and emerges as a fountain near the Tree of Life:

Southward through Eden went a River large,
Nor chang'd his course, but through the shaggy hill
Pass'd underneath ingulft, for God had thrown
That mountain as his Garden mould high rais'd
Upon the rapid current, which through veins
Of porous Earth with kindly thirst up-drawn,
Rose a fresh Fountain, and with many a rill
Water'd the Garden; thence united fell
Down the steep glade, and met the nether Flood,
Which from his darksome passage now appears,
And now divided into four main Streams,
Runs diverse, wand'ring many a famous Realm.

(PL, IV, 223-234)

Xanadu, with its “gardens bright with sinuous rills,” begins to sound more like Milton's Garden “with many a rill / Water'd.”⁷ Within the narrative of Paradise Lost, this close rendering of the geography in Book IV focuses attention on the fountain; eventually, in Book IX, Satan uses that entrance into Eden when he approaches Eve for the last time. The “sacred river” of Coleridge's Xanadu may have as its literary source just this place in Book IX, the scene of the eruption of the Tigris into Eden and, with it, the arrival of Satan's linguistic temptation and duplicity:

… thrice the Equinoctial Line
He circl'd …
                                                            There was a place,
Now not, though Sin, not Time, first wrought the
          change,
Where Tigris at the foot of Paradise
Into a Gulf shot under ground, till part
Rose up a Fountain by the Tree of Life;
In with the River sunk, and with it rose
Satan involv'd in rising Mist, then sought
Where to lie hid.

(PL, IV, 64-65, 69-76)

Both of these eruptions—the fountain and the emergence of Satan into Eden—seem to underlie the fountain section of “Kubla Khan”:

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced;
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.

A thematic pattern thus links the enclosed scene of Xanadu with Satan's prospect of Eden in Paradise Lost; and it also links the eruption of the “sacred river,” a symbol in Coleridge's poem of the raw imaginative power over which Kubla Khan constructs his dome, with the sudden introduction of temptation or of willfulness into Eden. These overtones also seem implicitly to ally the achievement of Kubla Khan in Xanadu with the temptation of Satan in Eden. Satan, the agent of subversion and of untoward self-assertion, tempts Eve with the promise of forbidden knowledge and with the ability to speak the language of the gods, just as the serpent, Satan's disguise, aspires above his station to speak human language. Kubla Khan's achievement over “Alph, the sacred river,” is more subtle; his construction hovers over the waters of the fountain, and from the “caverns measureless to man” the echoes of the torrent resound to the dome. Acting on the power of the jetting fountain, Kubla Khan decrees a dome removed from the shouts of human history. He accomplishes a “miracle of rare device,” from which he can hear—but does not participate in—“the mingled measure / From the fountain and the caves.” Kubla Khan's is the realization of a different kind of tempting abstraction, not exclusively that of Satanic language but that of self-enclosed, perfect, willed form: of blazing ice. What had been a moral question in Milton—the fire and ice of Satanic self-assertion, countermanding God's orderly creation—becomes in Coleridge's revision a tension between morality and aesthetics; Kubla Khan's dome associates the “ice” of aesthetic form with the “light” of Satanic egotism.

Of course, Coleridge may have intended to manipulate these Miltonic overtones into a subtle irony. After all, one could argue, Kubla Khan's miraculous achievement was a “sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!” Its convex of light illuminates the caves; when Kubla Khan decrees the dome—realizing it by pronouncing it—he may be acting as an agent of verbal ordering, like the divine Creator who with his word gave form and light to chaos. This analogy between human imagination and the divine creation does underlie Coleridge's famous description of the primary imagination: “The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite i am.” Distinguished in this section of the Biographia Literaria from the primary imagination, the “secondary” imagination shares the “kind of its agency” but differs in the degree and mode of its operation. The secondary imagination, which coexists with the “conscious will,” “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it struggles to identify and unify.”⁸ The primary imagination is essentially synthetic, perceptual, and reconciling; it resembles the Creator's force through analogy (“repetition”). But the secondary imagination demands independent identity and will; it rivals the Creator's work because its wielder assumes that his power is metaphorically identical with God's. Thus the secondary imagination seeks to recreate unity through “identification,” not through “repetition” of a divine self-assertion in a human consciousness. We may ask whether Kubla Khan's imaginative construction is a construct of the “primary” or of the “secondary” imagination—and what such a distinction might mean. To answer that question, we should return to “Kubla Khan” and to the Miltonic subtext its author seems to be constructing.

Though “holy and enchanted,” Xanadu is a “savage place.” The chasm there underlies the fountain “with ceaseless turmoil seething.” In this tumult, above the dancing water and the rocks, Kubla Khan builds his palace. This construction, consistently described via Satanic references from Milton, recalls the rearing of the Satanic edifice that dominates Milton's hell: Pandemonium. That citadel of evil pride and of self-aggrandizing imagination rises over another deep and sublime chasm, drawn from the natural resources of the landscape. “That underneath had veins of liquid fire / Sluic'd from the Lake” (I, 701-702): a demonic precursor of Coleridge's dome above the fountain. The imagination of Kubla Khan seems to build, by implication, the new Pandemonium that is Xanadu. Its shape is certainly appropriate: Pandemonium is the spherical projection of Satan's spherical mind as a place—hell—with spatial dimensions (“The mind is its own place,” “Space may create new worlds”). The “dome” shape of the pleasure-dome seems an analogue to the “huge convex of Fire” that is the shape of hell, Satan's skull-bounded, materialistic self-consciousness.

                                                            … long is the way
And hard, that out of Hell leads up to light;
Our prison strong, this huge convex of Fire,
Outrageous to devour, immures us round
Ninefold, and gates of burning Adamant
Barr'd over us prohibit all egress.

(PL, II, 432-437)

Coleridge maintains that Milton “himself is in every line of ‘Paradise Lost,’”⁹ and though he claims that the character of Satan is “pride and sensual indulgence, finding in Self the sole motive of action,” Coleridge admires and emulates Milton for his ability to write his own moral autobiography in colossal cipher. Milton's externalized subjectivity is his greatness as a writer, though paradoxically Satan's subjective sublimity is the cause of his sin.¹⁰ In this Miltonic context, the relations between “Kubla Khan” and Paradise Lost—that is, relations (1) between the site of the dome above the source of Alph in Xanadu and the site of Satan's temptation at the fountain in Eden, (2) between the assertion of Kubla Khan's imaginative energy and the introduction of Satan's perversely egotistic imagination into Eden, and (3) between the realization of Kubla Khan's decree of an enclosed “pleasure-dome” and the generation of Pandemonium as the spatial outgrowth of Satan's solipsistic pride—begin to spell out an underlying thematic concern of Coleridge's poem. Kubla Khan declares his palace above the magic fountain of Alph, and by identifying Kubla's creative power as somehow dangerous in its resemblance to the infernal construct, Coleridge begins to characterize the generative or constructive power of the master-builder of such an imaginative form. If Kubla Khan's achievement seems to make him an agent of commanding genius, his imagination, like Satan's, impresses itself upon the world in order to find reassurance of its own power; the detail of the “ancestral voices” is strangely incongruous with a notion of the dome as sunnily, positively self-complete. By associating Kubla Khan's dome with the convex pride of Milton's Satan, Coleridge characterizes a certain kind of imaginative power as potentially solipsistic and dangerous, both to its wielder and to the world in which he operates.

Coleridge's famous definition of the primary imagination stresses the synthetic power of the purified imagination, the creation on earth that figures the Creation in the universe. But Coleridge's secondary imagination—though also subjective and vivifying—suggests further, the concomitant danger of such a power when it is exercised by fallible human will. The problem is the willful self's apparently egotistic assertiveness: the self begins to loom huge, an element of diversity that may hinder a complete interpenetration of subject and object, or that may make part of a universal matrix insubordinate to a whole.¹¹ The secondary imagination relies on “identification” to “recreate” a unity: it is an “echo” of the primary imagination, a copy of a copy. Milton's Satan, whose imagination willfully replies “i am” to God's universe, generates an imaginative dome of pride from the grandeur of his own mind, which in its paradoxically destructive construction opposes the universal order of God's creation. Like Kubla Khan, who from his dome can hear the welter of history, Satan represents a movement of the imagination toward self-assertion, solipsism, and seductively willful diversity. He is still a ruined archangel, radiant in his grandeur despite his egotistical alienation from God. Though Kubla Khan is not an angel, he is a marvellous and powerful emperor, and his construct hovers above the deep sublime chasms of Xanadu as a decree of genius, both glorious and potentially dangerous. Kubla Khan builds an aesthetic object in “ice”: he is more overtly a figure of the human creator than is Satan, whose construct is his own mind projected outward.

Coleridge superimposes on the scene in Xanadu the memory of a visionary experience, beginning the final movement of “Kubla Khan”:

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.

The speaker of the poem then aspires to recreate that music in an effort to copy the copy, to rebuild that “sunny dome” in air. That is, Coleridge carries the “creator” figure of human will into a mode of further mimesis, copying the creation of a creation; the shift enacts the Biographia's argument about the willful repetitive action of the secondary imagination. In Coleridge's image, the maiden's song, followed by the poet's subsequent reconstruction of it, will be the vehicle for his participation in the creative energy emblematized by the dome in Xanadu.

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!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

Milton's heavenly choirs often sang hymns of praise to God (PL, IV, 944ff., is a good example), and Coleridge in his career often tried to describe the sacramental song of praise that creation returns to its Creator (as in the “Hymn before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouni”). But in Milton the ability to make and to enjoy music is not reserved to the angels in heaven. Satan and his followers also need and make music:

                                                                      … Anon they move
In Perfect Phalanx to the Dorian mood
Of flutes and soft Recorders …
                                                                      … Thus they
Breathing united force with fixed thought
Mov'd on in silence to soft Pipes that charm'd
Thir painful steps o'er the burnt soil.

(PL, I, 549-551, 559-562)

Even the construction of Pandemonium itself has a musical quality; as the agents of Mammon shape the molten metals for the palace, the effect is one of huge sounds, “As in an Organ from one blast of wind / To many a row of Pipes the sound-board breathes” (PL, I, 708-709). Most significant, however—and closest to Coleridge's vision of a “damsel with a dulcimer … Her symphony and song”—is this description of Satan's blasphemous construction in hell, Pandemonium, rising as a musical dome or temple:

Anon out of Earth, a Fabric huge
Rose like an Exhalation, with the sound
Of Dulcet Symphonies, and voices sweet,
Built like a Temple.

(PL, I, 710-713)

To be sure, there are at least as many dissimilarities as similarities between the Satanic music and the dulcimer “symphony and song.” The devils' music, played on pipes, flutes, recorders, and breathing organ pipes, is concerted and subdued. Their song is slow, shared, and social. Coleridge, however, yearns toward a music that is “loud and long”: that song of the poet-seer in “Kubla Khan” would “revive” the maiden's solo, so that both songs would noisily and publicly recall the scene in Xanadu (the crashing rocks, tumultuous waters, and echoing shouts). Not to press the point too strongly, it seems that Coleridge rewrites the “Dulcet Symphonies” of Milton's Pandemonium (as the convex of Satan's pride swells like an organ chord) into the dulcimer “symphony and song” of his vision and re-vision. In doing so, he stresses not the shared and subdued qualities of the devils' common music, but the individual performers (the seer, the maiden, Kubla Khan, Satan—and implicitly Coleridge himself), as if to illustrate the alienating and reconstitutive effects of their performances. Associating the recreated vision with Pandemonium and with Kubla's dome, Coleridge suggests that the act of making art is implicitly individuating and potentially solipsistic.

Thus “Kubla Khan” concludes in a regressive series of analogies: the poet-seer “revives” the damsel's song, and that re-creation allies both damsel-and-song and poet-and-poem with Kubla-and-his-work—the description of which, further, verbally resembles Milton's description of Satan-and-his-construct. Through this link of the creator-figures in Coleridge's poem with Milton's energetic and egotistic Satan, “Kubla Khan” describes a process of imaginative construction that has its source of creative energy in an ominous subjective power: all who thus “perform” are isolated by their performances. The decree in Xanadu builds an isolated sunny palace above a river that runs through caverns “measureless to man” and the analogous exercise of creative power by the poet seems, by implication, to suggest a participation both in the Satanic energy of self-definition and in the unworldly activity of formal musical expression. Art serves both as a new temptation to the ambition of superhuman knowledge and language and as the cause of a fall into duality and relativism. Coleridge's poem presents first an image of Kubla Khan's dome in its landscape, then a visionary moment, and finally a yearning toward a third construct, the re-creation of the first image through the second: “could I revive within me / Her symphony and song.” But if the speaker of “Kubla Khan” could recreate the dome in air, he would find himself demonically distant from human contact, just as Kubla Khan is—he can hear, but does not join in with, the “ancestral voices” of human history outside his charmed circle. The irony here is that, by articulating his wish to recreate the song, the poet of “Kubla Khan” achieves his wish: the poem ends as if the seer had recreated it! The outside observers of the final six lines of the poem are not moved toward a sympathetic unity with the prophet-poet; rather, they proclaim his distinctness and the isolating force of his visionary power: “Beware! Beware!” Those who are not moved by the Satanic energy “close [their] eyes with holy dread.” In “Kubla Khan” the poet-seer whose creative energy might participate metaphorically in a Satanic principle has seen a vision; this visionary sense makes him unique and fearful. “His flashing eyes, his floating hair”: the others mark him within the boundaries of himself, because his prophetic knowledge cannot be shared.¹²

Coleridge's poem implies that the creative imagination, when exercised with forceful will, can build a new Pandemonium in Eden, by bringing a knowledge of evil and of its energy—self-consciousness that tends toward willful solipsism—into a world that had had no overt moral dualities. In Milton's threatened Eden, Satan had observed a world untainted because untried, a world morally unenjoyed. In Eden, Adam and Eve did not know about the threat of Satan, but tacitly—through the narrative structure of the poem—that Eden had been threatened. (Satan had fallen and had approached Eden, and Eve herself seems constitutionally weak-willed.) And Adam after the fall foresees the ineluctable consequences of his sin, in Books XI and XII. Like fallen Adam instructed by the angel, Kubla Khan can hear the prophecy of terror in human history. Coleridge's poem, that is, makes the creator figures both self-assertive like Satan and melioristically self-conscious, like Adam. The effect of the seer's vision should be to make the observers “beware.”

And yet, if “Kubla Khan” suggests that certain sublime forms of the imagination are potentially dangerous, how do we account for the unavoidable seductiveness—the tone of celebration and of necessity—in the image of the dome? Coleridge's concept of the sublime seems to imply that a dualistic and relativizing egotism is indeed necessary for the poet. (Even Longinus himself describes sublimity as “the echo of greatness of spirit” in a style.)¹³ Sublimity—difficult as it is to define succinctly—involves a change of mode or status or even of identity. Just as the speech of Satan's serpent suggests a transference of power from one species to another, so the poet enacts this sublimation of divine and human powers when he wills unto himself a power of linguistic re-creation, making certain ecstatic emotions of the self the vehicle for an assertive and alienating “delight.” In the example of Milton himself, for instance, Coleridge generalizes that “In the ‘Paradise Lost,’ the sublimest parts are the revelations of Milton's own mind, producing itself and evolving of its own greatness.”¹⁴ Thus the sublime poet—the poet of the self that swells to cosmic proportions—is potentially Satanic in his energies and scope, pitting the Leviathan self against the synthetic unity that was Coleridge's philosophical ideal. M. H. Abrams conflates Coleridge's aesthetic and philosophical ambitions into a single general belief: “This is the root principle throughout Coleridge's thought: all self-compelled motion, progress, and productivity, hence all emergent novelty or ‘creativity,’ is a generative conflict-in-attraction of polar forces, which part to be united on a higher plane of being, and thus evolve, or ‘grow,’ from simple unity into a ‘multeity in unity,’ which is an organized whole.”¹⁵ If Satan and Kubla Khan are representatives of a dangerous power of imagination, the final vision of “Kubla Khan,” though it does suggest Satanic assertiveness, also paradoxically yearns for the best “synthetic and magic” power of the imagination.¹⁶

                                                  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!
And all who heard should see them there. …

To rebuild Kubla Khan's pleasure-dome “within” himself (an act of internal vision) and to rebuild the dome “in air” (as a public object, transformed from the ice of the original)—these two modes of “reviving” or of legitimizing that energy of sublime self-assertion make the final effort of the poem a gesture toward an imaginative reconciliation, or at least toward the self-qualifying unity the imagination (even the secondary imagination) can effect. Acknowledging the danger of this egotistical sublimity—the “i am” that the imagination necessarily yet dangerously repeats—the speaker of the poem nevertheless recognizes that to handle such potentially dangerous energy is the necessary work of the visionary poet, a task that risks a Satanic overassertion of the self, that asserts the power of “pleasure” above the power of truth,¹⁷ that marks the seer as “sacred” (etymologically both “consecrated” and “damned”), and that leads him to the highest and most synthetic powers of vision and of coherence.¹⁸

Recognizing many of the Satanic overtones in “Kubla Khan,” we may finally read the poem as Coleridge's attempt, perhaps not wholly conscious, to work out the implications of the assertion of the generative self weighed against the demands of this ideal of “multeity in unity.” Envisioning the terror of the assertive and imaginative self-in-the-act-of-creation, the poet admits the need to “beware” even as he drinks the forbidden milk of paradise. In “Kubla Khan” the poet recognizes both the terror and the inevitability of manipulating Satanic energies.

An apparent paradox threatens such a “Satanic” (or “demonic”) reading of “Kubla Khan”—but I believe it is a paradox Coleridge anticipated. In fact, it is the problem Blake finds in Milton's relation to Paradise Lost—the possibility that Milton may be “of the Devil's party” without recognizing the fact. The emotional imbalance of Paradise Lost is aesthetically treacherous. In the opening books of the poem Milton portrays a Satan so glorious and self-sovereign that his narrative presence in the rest of the poem threatens to compromise the poetic energy of his enemies—just as, teleologically, Satan's aggrandized self finds no accommodation in God's subordinated universe. For Coleridge the problem of “Kubla Khan” is analogous: to portray the willful dangers of the visionary imagination in such a way as (1) to assure that he is justly representing the vivid imagination at work and yet (2) to prevent that vigorous portrayal from dominating the poem's larger argument.

This apparent conundrum is the reason, I suspect, why Coleridge frames his lyric poem with the narrative context of an opium dream. The legend is not necessary to the visionary success of the poem, but it can, in effect, block the possibility of self-contradiction by the writer who must use the “genial spirit” to imply its terror. By crediting the poem to the effect of an unwilled opium dream, Coleridge can project a sublimely egotistic poetic vision without sacrificing his ambition for the absolute, the unity that supervises diversities. The opium legend both intensifies and distances that compulsive self-assertion the poem presents.

This rhetorical strategy of setting up a convincing figure that will subsequently be qualified is a familiar gesture in Coleridge.¹⁹ In different poems, the strategy appears both in the conflict of diverse emotions and in the conflict of competing philosophical positions. Emotionally, for instance, the poignant sonnet “To a Friend Who Asked How I Felt When the Nurse First Presented My Infant to Me” (1796) opens on a note of surprised sadness in the young father. This slow-paced melancholy is finally submerged in a more complex joy when, at the end of the poem, the young man sees his wife and child together. Similarly, the first forty lines of “This Lime-tree Bower my Prison” (1797) embody the private meditative loneliness of the speaker, in order to transmute those feelings into a solitude enriched by sympathy and by imagined companionship in the poem's last movement: “A delight / Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad / As I myself were there!” These poems, from the years just preceding “Kubla Khan,” are instances of the strategy in an emotional mode; an example of the strategy applied to the conflict of philosophical positions—like its use in “Kubla Khan”—might be “The Eolian Harp” of 1795. Addressing his wife in that poem, the speaker of “The Eolian Harp” pursues a waftingly transcendental argument about the benevolent properties of “intellectual” Nature. He leads to the speculation:

                                        And what if all animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversely fram'd,
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all?

Eventually, however, the simple presence of the silent woman in the scene seems to force the speaker to return to a position of almost dismissive emotional faith. Thus “The Eolian Harp” ends on an abrupt repudiation of those visionary philosophical conclusions the rest of the poem had won. In this emotionally dominant key, Coleridge ends the poem with an affirmative address to his wife.

Well hast thou said and holily disprais'd
These shapings of the unregenerate mind;
Bubbles that glitter as they rise and break
On vain Philosophy's aye-babbling spring.

This double gesture of extension-and-repudiation is overtly the argument in “The Eolian Harp,” as Coleridge emotionally withdraws from a philosophical position to which he is clearly sympathetic. “Kubla Khan” works the same rhetorical effect, not through the argument but through the framing gesture of the poem, to enact the same withdrawal. In “Kubla Khan” the opium is willed, but the dream is not. Thus Coleridge tries to have both things simultaneously in the one poem: both the glamour of the visionary imaginative projection and the necessary humble qualification of that projection. However, far from relativizing the Satanic elements of his poem—or of his image of Milton—Coleridge's recognition of the demonic implications of his re-vision of the dome seems to allow him to ally himself at this stage of his career with Milton's power as a sublimely egotistical poet of the terrible energies (the creator of Satan, whether or not consciously sympathetic to Satan). Coleridge can assume this power (of the “secondary” imagination) under the guise of the dreamer (retaining the humility of the “primary” imagination). For the imagination seems to require symbolic acts of differentiation and of willful egotism; the poem must enact the Satanic impulse in order to achieve sublimity, terrible as the consequences are that threaten, and to build its constructs from the finite self. In the Biographia, Coleridge refers to just this form of contradiction or balance, as he outlines the claims of his “Dynamic Philosophy” by which opposites and diversities are conjoined in an energized synthesis: “in the existence, in the reconciling, and the recurrence of this contradiction consist the process and mystery of production and life.”²⁰ In its Satanic imagery and in its qualifying framing-gesture, “Kubla Khan” is Coleridge's poetic attempt to win just this perilous reconciliation. For the space of the poem, the visionary imagination is both self-generatingly potent and also delimited, precariously contained in the dream.

Notes

1. All the poems cited here are either found in John Milton: Complete Poems and Prose, ed. Merritt Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957), or in Coleridge's Poems, ed. E. H. Coleridge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912).

2. See John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), pp. 356-364. Livingston Lowes argues for sources of the poem's images in travel literature, such as William Bartram's Travels and in accounts of the exploration of the Nile. See also pp. 367-370, 393-396.

3. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. J. T. Boulton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), pp. 39ff. Coleridge knew Burke's work directly, indirectly (through Christian Garve, who translated it into German), and analogously (through related arguments in Schiller). See Coleridge's Notebooks, 2 vols., ed. Kathleen Coburn (New York: Pantheon/Bollingen, 1957), I, 1675 and II, 1675n.

4. Elisabeth Schneider traces several echoes from Milton's description of Satan's approach to Eden (in Book IV of Paradise Lost). Pursuing the similarities of geography and of diction, Schneider demonstrates that much of “Kubla Khan” follows from Satan's view of Eden. See Coleridge, Opium, and ‘Kubla Khan’ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935), pp. 264-265. She also specifically associates the “incense-bearing trees” of Milton's Eden with the vegetation of Xanadu (p. 198), On the whole, Schneider reads “Kubla Khan” as an effort toward a reconciliation of opposites—an un-Satanic assertion—because of the apparent integration of dream and dreamer at the end.

5. In his important study Coleridge the Visionary J. B. Beer reads the first section of “Kubla Khan” as a collection of images of “anti-types of the true Paradise,” in a Miltonic mode, and the final section of the poem (beginning with line 30) as a depiction of a visionary paradise regained. See Coleridge the Visionary (London: Chatto and Windus, 1959), pp. 216ff. In this context of human historicity—distinct from mythic history—Beer also specifically compares “Kubla Khan” to Adam's vision in Paradise Lost, Books XI and XII. Humphrey House, in a scrupulous reading of “Kubla Khan” and other poems, generalizes about this aspect of Coleridge's “Miltonizing”: “Positively, it causes a distortion of the poem if we try to approximate this Paradise either to the earthly Paradise of Eden before the Fall or to the Heavenly Paradise which is the ultimate abode of the blessed. It may take its imagery from Eden, but it is not Eden because Kubla Khan is not Adam.” See “‘Kubla Khan,’ ‘Christabel,’ and ‘Dejection,’” in Romanticism and Consciousness, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Norton, 1970), p. 310. The narrative situation of Eden in both poems, in any case, precludes any identification of Xanadu with an earthly Paradise or with Heaven. Milton carefully represents not Eden unfallen or Paradise already lost, but Eden undermined. Coleridge copies this careful ambiguity in the symbolic terrain of Xanadu.

6. Charles I. Patterson, Jr., notes in passing some resemblances to “Mount Amara,” the amoral seat of pleasure in Paradise Lost. See “The Daemonic in ‘Kubla Khan,’” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association of America], 89, (October 1974), 1033-1043, which also suggests other echoes from Milton in “Kubla Khan.” Patterson presents a “daemonic” reading of the poem, defining the daemonic element in the poem as an “unrestricted and amoral joy” like that of the pre-Christian philosophers and especially like Plato's notion of the poet's furor divinus. Citing Livingston Lowes, Patterson concludes: “Coleridge well knew that a daemon and a demon were not the same thing.” In this context, the distinction is essential. Recent “daemonic” readings of Coleridge have tended to stress the ecstatic or even deterministic nature of poetic identity; in a “demonic” reading—as in the overtly Satanic implications of the subterranean forces of “Kubla Khan”—the poet's will or moral choices seem more directly to inform the aesthetic decisions.

7. Marshall Suther also locates “fountain” images in other works of Coleridge. See Visions of Xanadu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965). For both Milton and Coleridge, the final source of the image of the rivers of paradise is the description of the River of Eden, in Genesis 2:10-14.

8. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (New York: William Gowans, 1852), p. 378.

9. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk and Omniana, ed. T. Ashe (London: George Bell and Sons, 1909), p. 250: “… it is a sense of this intense Egotism that gives me the greatest pleasure in reading Milton's works. The egotism of such a man is a revelation of spirit.”

10. See M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953; New York: Norton, 1958), pp. 252-254.

11. In the Biographia Coleridge associates the “commanding genius” with figures of action; his fullest elaboration of this skeptical and monist attitude toward the self is in “Religious Musings” (December 1794; see lines 127-158).

12. Critics have often associated the “Eyes / That sparkling blaz'd” of Milton's Satan (PL, I, 193-194) with the glance of the Ancient Mariner—and with Coleridge's eyes! See, for instance, Lowes, p. 230.

13. Longinus, On the Sublime, tr. William Smith (1739; rpt. Delmar, N.Y.: Scholar's Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975), sec. XXX, pp. 70-71.

14. Coleridge, “Milton,” p. 624.

15. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 268.

16. Coleridge, Biographia, p. 451.

17. I am stressing the element of pleasure here as distinct from the terrible voices of human history Kubla Khan can hear from the dome. Compare this emphasis on the enclosing purposes of the dome with Coleridge's definition of a poem as a species of composition, the purpose of which is not truth but pleasure; Coleridge deliberately eliminates the pedagogic and the admonitory as purposes for the poem (Biographia, p. 448).

18. This change from the “pleasure” of the dome to the “delight” of the recreated event echoes Burke's distinction between the aesthetic effects of “pleasure” and of “delight.” “Pleasure” is relatively straightforward, but self-enclosed, while “delight” is related to the sublime in a mode of negative desire: “delight” is the gratification when pain ends or when a danger is removed. In this sense, one could argue that the ending of “Kubla Khan,” with its substitution of delight for pleasure, reflects a change to a morally formative “beauty.” See Burke, Sublime, pp. 35-37.

19. I am indebted to my colleague, Professor Irene Tayler, for showing me this recurrent pattern in several Coleridge poems.

20. Coleridge, Biographia, pp. 179-185.