as holy and enchanted Opium was for him what wandering and moral tale-telling became for the Mariner the personal shape of repetition compulsion. Zachary, Owl Eyes Editor In a surprising twist, the speaker imagines how he might look to those around him as he talks of Xanadu. Kubla Khan - In Xanadu did Kubla Khan. As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, "[128] He later argued that the poem "is probably the most original poem about poetry in English, and the first hint outside his notebooks and letters that a major critic lies hidden in the twenty-five-year-old Coleridge. Through wood and dale the sacred river ran. [44] However, the odal hymn as used by others has a stronger unity among its parts, and Coleridge believed in writing poetry that was unified organically. Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. Lines of verse began to pour from his pen. It begins as a dream stimulated by Coleridges reading of Samuel Purchas 17th century travel book, Purchas his Pilgrimage, or Relations of the World and the Religions observed in all Ages and Places discovered, from the Creation unto the Present (London, 1617). The book contained a brief description of Xanadu, the summer capital of the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan. To read it now, with the hindsight of another age, is to feel premonitions of the critical achievement to comeBut the poem is in advance, not just of these, but in all probability of any critical statement that survives. [29] His original manuscript spells the name "Cubla Khan" and the place "Xannadu". In the prefatory note published with the poem, Coleridge claimed he wrote several hundred lines during his reverie, but was not able to finish writing out the poem when he woke because his frenzied writing was interrupted: Kubla Khan is famously incomplete, and thus cannot be said to be a strictly formal poemyet its use of rhythm and the echoes of end-rhymes is masterful, and these poetic devices have a great deal to do with its powerful hold on the readers imagination. Authors: 267, Books: 3,607, Poems & Short Stories: 4,435, Forum Members: 71,154, Forum Posts: And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Compounding the mythical quality of the place Coleridge is describing, the poems next lines name Xanadu as the place. Coleridge described the circumstances of his dream and the poem in two places: on a manuscript copy written some time before 1816, and in the preface to the printed version of the poem published in 1816. The text about Xanadu in Purchas, His Pilgrimes, which Coleridge admitted he did not remember exactly, was: In Xandu did Cublai Can build a stately Pallace, encompassing sixteen miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleasant Springs, delightfull streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure, which may be moved from place to place.[28].