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Xanadu: The Poem |
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In their prospectus, the builders reprinted Coleridge's Kubla Khan, together with the author's explanatory preface "from a treatise on English Poetry" in an effort to capture the mood of Coleridge's pleasure-dome.
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"Kubla Khan: Or,
A Vision in a Dream" |
The following fragment is published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity [Lord Byron] and, as far as the Author's own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological courtesy, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits.
In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas's Pilgrimage': 'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed [sic] within a wall.' The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that can indeed be called composition in which all of the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, 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 from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!
(From the Picture, or the Lover's Resolution)
And yet from the still surviving recollections in his mind, the Author has frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as it were, given to him, but the to-morrow is yet to come.
As a contrast to this vision, I have annexed a fragment of a very different character, describing with equal fidelity the dream of pain and disease. |
Kubla Khan |
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© 2019 University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Do not copy or reuse without permission. |
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Last modified
Tuesday, 06-Dec-2022 10:30:40 PST
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