Critical Appreciation of Kubla Khan

Kubla Khan has been described by the poet himself A vision in a Dream, a Fragment. The poet dreamt of Kubla Khan and his palace during his sleep. On awakening he appeared to have distinct recollection of the whole vision and taking his ink and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business and detained by him over an hour and on his return to his room, found to his great surprise and disappointment that though he still remembered some vague and dim recollection of the vision, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had dwindled into oblivion.

Critical Appreciation of Poem Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Many critics believe that the poem is really a fragmented composition. Its mystery is incomplete and clueless. They take it as a poem of psychological curiosity as the poet suggests. Raymon Wilson says, "To this day, it is for most readers fragment of inspired incoherence, a piece of verbal magic, to ask the meaning of which would be impertinent."

Humphry House is of the opinion that if Coleridge had not told us that the poem is a fragment, it would not have appeared to anyone to be such. He believes it to be a complete poem for reasons more than one. Kubla Khan, to him, is a poem about the act of poetic creation, about ecstasy in imaginative sensibility, a 'triumphant positive statement of the potentialities of poetry.'

According to Humphry House, the precision and clarity of the first pan of the poem is marked in the very order of the landscape. In the centre is the pleasure-dome with its gardens on the river bank; to one side is the river's source in the chasm, to the other are the 'caverns measureless to man' and the 'sunless sea' into which the river falls Kubla in the centre can hear the 'mingled measure' of the fountain of the source from one side and of the dark caves from the other. The river winds across the whole landscape. A geographical consistency is seen in the description. Had there been no geographical consistency, the poem would have been quite different and a new kind of effort would have been required to understand what unity it might have had. Within this landscape too, there is a pervasive order. The fertility of the plain is only made possible by Kubla's decree and the doom is stately: the gardens are girdled round with walls and towers.

A different kind of clarity and precision in the first part leads as closer to the poem's central meaning—the consistency with which the main facts of this landscape are treated, the dome and the river. The dome is an agreed symbol of fulfillment and satisfaction, it is breast-like, full to touch and eye, rounded and complete. In the first pan it is mentioned thrice as 'a stately pleasure-dome' in line 2, as 'the dome of pleasure' in line 31, and as 'A sunny pleasure-dome' in line 36. Each time the word 'pleasure' occurs with it. So too, the word 'river' is used three times in the first part; and each time, without fail it is 'the sacred river': this is its constant, invariable epithet. The centre of the landscape of this part is, as we have seen, the point at which the dome and the river join:

"The shadow of the dome of pleasure

Floated midway on the waves;"

Here, without doubt, the poem presents the conjunction of pleasure and sacredness: that is the core of Part I.. And in Part II the poet, when he has been able to realize this fusion of pleasure and sacredness, is himself regarded as a holy or sacred person, a seer acquainted with the undivided life: and this part is clinched by the emphatic and final word Paradise. The conditional form of Part II does not receive the presentation of Paradise in Part I, though it may hold out the hope of a future fuller vision.