In the Library
Kubla Khan
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1816
- Form
- Form Poem
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 0k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree:
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Coleridge's other great vision poem: the same opium-tinged imagination, but the mariner gets to finish his story.
£1.99
Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Shelley builds the same image of a vanished empire in a fragment, but the desert is drier and the moral is clearer.
Free in the app
The Waste Land
T.S. Eliot
Eliot inherits Coleridge's method of visionary fragments, and the pleasure dome becomes the Unreal City.
£1.99
About the book
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree: the line arrives already chanting itself, sound running ahead of sense, and you are inside the spell before you have parsed a single word. A sacred river winds through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea; a deep romantic chasm slants across a green hill where a woman wails for her demon-lover; ancestral voices prophesy war. Coleridge swore the whole vision came to him entire in an opium sleep, hundreds of lines composed without effort, until a person from Porlock knocked and the rest dissolved like images on a stream after a stone is thrown in. What he saved breaks off at the instant the speaker aches to rebuild that dome in air from the half-remembered song of an Abyssinian maid. The poem cannot finish what it dreams, and that refusal is its glory: a pleasure-dome built of pure sound, sunny and caverned, already vanishing even as you read it.