Kubla Khan Summary: Pleasure and Violence

KUBLA KHAN SUMMARY
This poem describes Xanadu, the palace of Kubla Khan, a Mongol emperor and the grandson of Genghis Khan. The poem's speaker starts by describing the setting of
Emperor's palace, which he calls a "pleasure dome." He tells us about a river that runs across the land and then flows through some underground caves and into the sea. He
also tells us about the fertile land that surrounds the palace. The nearby area is covered in streams, sweet-smelling trees, and beautiful forests.
Then the speaker gets excited about the river again and tells us about the canyon through which it flows. He makes it into a spooky, haunted place, where you might find a
"woman wailing for her demon lover." He describes how the river leaps and smashes through the canyon, first exploding up into a noisy fountain and then finally sinking down
and flowing through those underground caves into the ocean far away.
The speaker then goes on to describe Kubla Khan himself, who is listening to this noisy river and thinking about war. All of a sudden, the speaker moves away from this
landscape and tells us about another vision he had, where he saw a woman playing an instrument and singing. The memory of her song fills him with longing, and he imagines
himself singing his own song, using it to create a vision of Xanadu.
Toward the end, the poem becomes more personal and mysterious, as the speaker describes past visions he has had. This brings him to a final image of a terrifying figure with
flashing eyes. This person, Kubla Khan, is a powerful being who seems almost godlike: "For he on honey-dew hath fed/And drunk the milk of paradise" (53-54).
Pleasure and Violence

“Kubla Khan” begins by announcing that it is a poem about “pleasure.” It
proposes to describe the Mongol leader’s summer palace, along with all its
luxurious—and, for the speaker, exotic—pleasures. However, the poem soon
takes a curious turn. Instead of describing sumptuous decorations or brilliant
jewels, it focuses mainly on the river that runs through the grounds of the
palace. What’s more, instead of describing that river in pleasant terms, it
often focuses on the river’s violent energy. Through these descriptions,
“Kubla Khan” suggests that pleasure and beauty are neither simple nor
uncomplicated. Rather, the poem shows that pleasure and beauty come
from the conflict between opposing forces—and that they always contain
some degree of violence and ugliness.
The grounds of Kubla Khan’s “pleasure-dome” are not quite as pleasant as
one might expect. True, they encompass “twice five miles of fertile ground”
and “gardens bright with sinuous rills.” But the speaker moves quickly
beyond these pleasant places, devoting only six rather formulaic lines to
describing them. Instead, the focus of the poem—and the speaker’s energy
—lies in the poem’s middle stanza, where the speaker describes what
happens to those “sinuous rills” (small streams) when they exit the pleasant
gardens.
They become a violent river, which has cut a deep gorge into the earth; its
geysers throw up massive boulders. The speaker describes this place in
unsettling terms: it is a “savage place,” “as holy and enchanted / As e’er
beneath a waning moon was haunted / by woman wailing for her demon
lover!” In contrast to the bright, sunny gardens, the chasm is a haunted,
uncivilized place.
As the river continues its journey, the unsettling description intensifies. The
river enters unfathomable caves, where its rushing sounds like “ancestral
voices prophesying war.” From the bright gardens where it runs in little
“rills,” the river quickly becomes a powerful and violent force—both “holy”
and terrifying.
Given these descriptions, one might think that Khan’s “pleasure” must lie in
the bright gardens at the start of the river’s course. But Khan himself does
not seem to take this view. It turns out that his palace is not in the “gardens
bright” where the river is peaceful.

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KUBLA KHAN SUMMARY

Pleasure and Violence

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