In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

   Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round;

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

Considered to be one of the greatest poems of the Romantic era, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, or A Vision of a Dream, A Fragment, has undoubtedly the most enduring impact on English literature because of its symbolic opening stanza, which sets the tone of the imagery of the theme of beauty, before exploring its other themes of violence and creativity within the other stanzas. Depicting Xanadu, a luxurious pleasure dome surrounded by sacred rivers, fertile ground, and enchanted forests, the genesis of the poem’s dream-like imagery may be explained by Coleridge’s use of Opium when he composed it in 1797. Still, the poem’s suggestion of the mythical and its exemplary musical effect emanates from a transcendental atmosphere. The appealing rhythm and the varying length of the verses yield a harmony of pure literary pleasure, being also bound by an interlacement of alliteration, sonorant consonants, and onomatopoeia. The intoned, musical incantations of Kubla Khan result from Coleridge’s adept use of iambic tetrameter and alternating rhyme schemes. Yet strangely, the poem was not published until 1816.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in 1772 and left this world in 1834. He was a poet, literary critic, philosopher, theologian, and one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England. Coleridge was also a member of the Lake Poets with his friend, William Wordsworth. Throughout his adult life, Coleridge had crippling bouts of anxiety and depression. He was also physically unhealthy, and he was treated for these conditions with laudanum, which manifested into a lifelong opium addiction. From 1791 until 1794, Coleridge attended Jesus College, Cambridge. In 1792, he won the Browne Medal for an ode he wrote attacking the Atlantic slave trade. In December 1793, he left the college and enlisted in the British Army’s 15th Light Dragoons using the false name ‘Silas Tomkyn Comberbache’. His brothers arranged for his discharge several months later, resorting to the reason of insanity for his discharge, and he was readmitted to Jesus College at Cambridge. However, he would never receive a degree from the university. In 1795, he married Sara Fricker, and they had one daughter, who was also named Sara. Yet it was an unhappy marriage, and they separated in 1808. However, during that time, he published his first volume of poetry in 1796 and subsequently a joint volume with William Wordsworth, while also travelling to Europe. In 1812, he delivered a lecture on Hamlet, and that lecture has influenced studies about that play ever since. In April 1816, Coleridge, with his addiction worsening, his spirits depressed, and his family alienated, took residence in the Highgate homes, then just north of London, of the physician James Gillman, first at South Grove and later at the nearby 3, The Grove. It is unclear whether his growing use of opium (and the brandy in which it was dissolved) was a symptom or a cause of his growing depression. Coleridge remained in Highgate for the rest of his life, and the house became a place of literary pilgrimage for writers including Carlyle and Emerson. He passed from heart failure in 1834, but his legacy lives on in his numerous literary works. Yet, it is Kubla Khan that has endured as his most prominent literary legacy.

While the origins of Kubla Khan stem from Coleridge’s opium-induced hallucination (or dream), that fact must not overshadow the poem’s standing as one of the greatest in the history of English literature. May we all blossom among many an incense-burning tree and bask in enfolding sunny spots of greenery.