I enjoyed reading Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. It was an imaginative poem written very interestingly. The poem delivers a little bit of history in that it was titled after the emperor of the Yuan dynasty, but it is mostly scattered thoughts illustrating the author’s mental state. It is said that the author was opium induced during sleep, and the poem was inspired by a dream, hence the appropriate subtitle “A vision in a dream”. The secondary title seems more appropriate because after the second stanza Kubla Khans name is no longer mentioned and collectively the poem is not about him. It seems to be about nothing other than scattered images.

The opening descriptions in the poem describe Kubla Khan’s summer palace and the beauty, pleasures and greenery. However, as the poem continues into stanza two it encompasses a much tenser feel as Kubla begins to hear ancestral voices brining prophecies of war. It is thought that before the last stanza the author was interrupted and the remaining visions from the opium induced dream were lost. The descriptive images in the former stanzas of the poem do not have an obvious correlation to the last stanza of the poem. The last stanza which was written post interruption is a description of an Abyssinian maid singing and playing the dulcimer on Mount Abora. The only possible conclusion I can draw from this is that he is reiterating a kind of paradise that he initially spoke of in the first stanza. One contradiction I picked up on was the description of the pleasure dome. In stanza one the author describes the pleasure dome as sunless where in stanza three he calls it “a sunny pleasure-dome”. Overall, the poem is interesting in the language it uses and the images portrayed to the reader however it is a poem with countless interpretations.