One of the great curiosities of English literature, also one of the glories of English literature, everyone knows the story about Coleridge's opium dream of Kubla Khan, and the person from Porlock who interrupted it. I, rather against the grain of things, think that the person from Porlock may possibly have been a discriminating editor, that it might actually just have run about as far as it was going to, profitably, but absolutely marvellous it is. Two quite distinct fragments really compose the fragment, split rather in, I think, a way that looks forward to Eliot and the latter section certainly looks very strongly forward to Yeats, who must ...

One of the great curiosities of English literature, also one of the glories of English literature, everyone knows the story about Coleridge's opium dream of Kubla Khan, and the person from Porlock who interrupted it. I, rather against the grain of things, think that the person from Porlock may possibly have been a discriminating editor, that it might actually just have run about as far as it was going to, profitably, but absolutely marvellous it is. Two quite distinct fragments really compose the fragment, split rather in, I think, a way that looks forward to Eliot and the latter section certainly looks very strongly forward to Yeats, who must have learned an awful lot from it. Marvellous it is.

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Kubla Khan

Kubla Khan
Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.

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.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
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.

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