Xanadu

I’ve had a poem stuck in my head of late: Samuel Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” with its evocative opening lines.

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.

The poet claimed to have dreamt it all up in an opium-induced slumber, after having read a description of Xanadu, the summer palace of the Mongol Emperor of China. Upon waking, he sought to commit his vision to paper. Alas, an unexpected interruption derailed his train of thought, such that he could not recall the bulk of it once he had returned—or so he claimed. The resultant incomplete fragment he shared privately with friends for nearly 20 years, before eventually publishing it in 1816.

I won’t reproduce it here in its entirety, when it’s easy enough to find online [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43991/kubla-khan]. Suffice to say that “Kubla Khan” consists of three stanzas. The first describes Xanadu, with its fortified walls and manicured gardens, erected beside a wild and sacred river. Said river began in a canyon via a great hydrothermal explosion—interpreted by the Khan as the voice of his ancestors “prophesying war”—winding through woodlands down to massive caves and a dark subterranean sea.

Here the poet, the dreamer, glimpses the shadow of Xanadu upon the River Alph, “a miracle of rare device” combining the ornate and orderly edifice of man with the primal cold and chaos of nature, bordering upon the divine. This juxtaposition or synthesis of opposites, where the intellect rests upon the collective unconscious, proves a fertile fusion of creative energies. It whisks the poet into realms of religious rapture.

In the third stanza, the dreamer then hears “a damsel with a dulcimer” and realizes that if he could but “revive within me her symphony and song” then he would be able to build the pleasure dome upon the air, recreating the vision and the ecstasy it induced. Then all could see the phantasy for themselves, and cry together a warning: “Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair!” But who is this sudden imposing figure? The Khan, the poet, the ancestral voice—or someone else entirely unbidden?

And the singing woman, the “Abyssinian maid,” ends the poem with the insistence that he, the poet, must carry it out, must reproduce the vision to the best of his abilities, for he has “tasted the milk of Paradise.” Thus he shares his fever-dream with us. What to make of this haunting, remarkable work? Most interpreters read “Kubla Khan” as an experience of the creative imagination: the metaphor of the artificial palace on the untamed waters, a vision both of beauty and of terror. Artists of all sorts speak of the Muse, of divine inspiration, of that creative spark from beyond or beneath. Might that be the maid, whose song empowers us to craft our castles on the clouds?

How telling that Coleridge cannot speak of this—of dreams, of creativity, of art and imagination—but in religious terminology. Here he encounters the Good, the True, and the Beautiful as both rapturous and terrible, both rational and ferocious, demanding expression, demanding to be shared. When one has tasted Truth, what option has one but to bestow it now unto others, to be to thine own self true?

The religious impulse, the creative impulse, the artistic impulse, these are all one and the same. They are encounters with the divine—with God—beyond mere words or worldly expression. The catastrophic flood from whence the river wends rushes us through “caverns measureless to man.” Yet we must try as best we can, in whatever ways that we can, in song and verse and parable, to give voice to our wonder, to our terror, to our ecstasy. What other choice do we have?

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!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

We too have tasted the Bread of Life, and must share Him with the world.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

By: Reverend Sir Knight Ryan Stout