# data[].attributes.body
Along with “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Kubla Khan” is one of Coleridge’s most famous and enduring poems. The story of its composition is also one of the most famous in the history of English poetry. As the poet explains in the short preface to this poem, he had fallen asleep after taking “an anodyne” prescribed “in consequence of a slight disposition” (this is a euphemism for opium, to which Coleridge was known to be addicted). Before falling asleep, he had been reading a story in which Kubla Khan commanded the building of a new palace; Coleridge claims that while he slept, he had a fantastic vision and composed simultaneously—while sleeping—some two or three hundred lines of poetry, “if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or conscious effort.”

Waking after about three hours, the poet seized a pen and began writing furiously; however, after copying down the first three stanzas of his dreamt poem—the first three stanzas of the current poem as we know it—he was interrupted by a “person on business from Porlock,” who detained him for an hour. After this interruption, he was unable to recall the rest of the vision or the poetry he had composed in his opium dream. It is thought that the final stanza of the poem, thematizing the idea of the lost vision through the figure of the “damsel with a dulcimer” and the milk of Paradise, was written post-interruption. The mysterious person from Porlock is one of the most notorious and enigmatic figures in Coleridge’s biography; no one knows who he was or why he disturbed the poet or what he wanted or, indeed, whether any of Coleridge’s story is actually true. But the person from Porlock has become a metaphor for the malicious interruptions the world throws in the way of inspiration and genius, and “Kubla Khan,” strange and ambiguous as it is, has become what is perhaps the definitive statement on the obstruction and thwarting of the visionary genius.

Regrettably, the story of the poem’s composition, while thematically rich in and of itself, often overshadows the poem proper, which is one of Coleridge’s most haunting and beautiful. The first three stanzas are products of pure imagination: The pleasure-dome of Kubla Khan is not a useful metaphor for anything in particular (though in the context of the poem’s history, it becomes a metaphor for the unbuilt monument of imagination); however, it is a fantastically prodigious descriptive act. The poem becomes especially evocative when, after the second stanza, the meter suddenly tightens; the resulting lines are terse and solid, almost beating out the sound of the war drums (“The shadow of the dome of pleasure / Floated midway on the waves...”).

# data[].attributes.body
The speaker describes the “stately pleasure-dome” built in Xanadu according to the decree of Kubla Khan, in the place where Alph, the sacred river, ran “through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea.” Walls and towers were raised around “twice five miles of fertile ground,” filled with beautiful gardens and forests. A “deep romantic chasm” slanted down a green hill, occasionally spewing forth a violent and powerful burst of water, so great that it flung boulders up with it “like rebounding hail.” The river ran five miles through the woods, finally sinking “in tumult to a lifeless ocean.” Amid that tumult, in the place “as holy and enchanted / As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted / By woman wailing to her demon-lover,” Kubla heard “ancestral voices” bringing prophesies of war. The pleasure-dome’s shadow floated on the waves, where the mingled sounds of the fountain and the caves could be heard. “It was a miracle of rare device,” the speaker says, “A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!”

The speaker says that he once saw a “damsel with a dulcimer,” an Abyssinian maid who played her dulcimer and sang “of Mount Abora.” He says that if he could revive “her symphony and song” within him, he would rebuild the pleasure-dome out of music, and all who heard him would cry “Beware!” of “His flashing eyes, his floating hair!” The hearers would circle him thrice and close their eyes with “holy dread,” knowing that he had tasted honeydew, “and drunk the milk of Paradise.”

# data[].attributes.body
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner begins with one of three wedding guests being accosted by the Ancient Mariner and kept from attending the wedding first by the Mariner’s grasp and then by his hypnotic gaze as the Mariner begins to tell the story of his fateful voyage. The Mariner gives no reason for the voyage, saying that they sailed south until they reached the South Pole, where they became icebound and enshrouded in fog. They see and hear nothing but the ice
The ice was here, the ice was there, The ice was all around: It cracked and growled, and roared and howled, Like noises in a swound .
Then an albatross flies into view through the fog. Happy to see another living creature, the men aboard the ship treat it “As if it had been a Christian soul” and they hail it “in God’s name.” It circles the ship, accepting the crew’s hospitable offerings of food, and then the ice splits and a wind begins to blow, allowing the ship to move again.
For nine days the bird follows the ship, coming when the men call and occasionally perching on or near the mast. Then, for no reason, the Mariner shoots it with his crossbow. His shipmates’ initial responses are horror and anger. They blame him for killing the creature responsible for the wind that helped free them from the ice and fear that something bad will happen. However, shortly after the bird’s death, the fog clears and the shipmates change their mind, claiming now that the bird was responsible for the fog and saying that the Mariner was right to kill the bird. As soon as they have gone around Cape Horn and entered the Pacific Ocean, the wind stops, and the ship comes to a standstill beneath the blazing sun, now at the other extreme from the earlier cold and ice, though parallel in immobility, as highlighted by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s paralleling of word choice and order:
Water, water every where,And all the boards did shrink;Water, water, every where,Nor any drop to drink.
The crew now again changes its mind and hangs the dead albatross around the Mariner’s neck. Shortly thereafter the Mariner spots a ship approaching. In initial joy, the desperate Mariner bites his arm and drinks his own blood to get enough moisture in his mouth to announce what he sees. However, as the ship draws closer it occurs to him to wonder how the other ship can be moving when theirs is not. The ghost ship draws close enough to reveal Life-in-Death and Death gambling for the Mariner. Life-in-Death wins the Mariner and Death takes his consolation prize, the two hundred other men on the ship.
A week passes with the Mariner alone with the dead bodies, whose eyes curse him, and guilty but unable to pray. One night as he watches water snakes swimming in the moonlight, he is so struck by their life and beauty that he loves them and blesses them.
Now that he has repented, the journey homeward begins: The albatross drops from his neck, rain begins to fall, and a strange wind begins to blow above the ship, mysteriously moving it along. The Mariner falls into a trance as the ship speeds faster than mortal endurance, driven by the spirit of the South Pole and manned by spirits who assume the bodies of the fallen crew. While in this trance, the Mariner hears two voices discussing his crime/sin, the fact that he will have to continue to do penance, and the manner by which the ship is moving. When he revives from his trance, he again witnesses the curse on him visible in the dead men’s eyes, which prevents him from looking away from them and from praying. Then the spell snaps, “the curse is expiated,” Coleridge explains, and the Mariner feels a gentle breeze just as he spies the familiar landscape of home.
As his ship enters the harbor, it is approached by a boat containing a Pilot, the Pilot’s boy, and a Hermit. All but the Hermit are afraid of the appearance of the Mariner’s ship. As the Pilot’s boat draws close, the sea rumbles, and the Mariner’s ship suddenly breaks in two and sinks. The Pilot collapses in a fit and the Pilot’s boy goes mad, leaving the Hermit to fish the Mariner from the water and the Mariner to row the boat to shore. Once on land, the Mariner begs the Hermit to shrive him, which the Hermit does by having the Mariner answer his question concerning what manner of man the Mariner is. The Mariner responds by feeling a terrible agony that forces him to tell his story; only after he has finished does he feel free. From that point on the Mariner periodically and unexpectedly feels the same agony and travels “from land to land” until he spots the face of the person that he somehow knows must hear his tale.
The poem draws to a close just as the bridal party is leaving the church. The Mariner tells the Wedding Guest that far better for him than any wedding is a walk in good company toward a church to pray and that the best way to pray is to love all things. With that the Mariner bids the Wedding Guest farewell, and the Wedding Guest is left to wake up the following morning a “sadder and a wiser man.”