Kubla Khan

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Kahn” is an example of imaginative poetry due to an opium addiction. This poem creates its own kingdom and paradise while Colridge expresses his ideas of Heaven and Hell through his own drug induced thoughts and opinions.

Coleridge paints the picture of a kingdom, Xanadu, and the surrounding scenery is described with a heavenly, dreamlike vividness that can only result from smoking a little too much opium. This kingdom has a “pleasure dome” that was created by Kubla Kahn. The paradise-like kingdom consists of ten miles of “fertile ground” and is surrounded by walls that are securely “girdled” around the property. The gardens are “blossoming with many an incense baring tree” and are watered by a wandering stream. There is a river, and it gives life to Kubla Kahn’s creations and runs “through caverns measureless to man.”

The landscape is described in an interesting fashion with contrasting adjectives. It is described as “savage,” but it is “holy” and “enchanted.” The enchantment is compared to a “woman wailing for her demon lover.” This image of sexuality leaves the impression that the Earth is anxiously mourning for a fulfillment of evil. The chasem below Kubla Kahn’s paradise “pleasure