Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and "To Nature"

Authors Avatar by winsmith (student)

Power of dreams

This paper deals with S.T. Coleridge’s poems „Kubla Khan“ and “To nature”. It discusses the connection between dreams, imagination and mostly the hallucinating effect that drugs had on Coleridge while he wrote his poems.

Coleridge was so high that he had vision of his own „opium world“ and later he wrote about the lack of respect humans have for nature.

         “Kubla Khan” is divided in two parts where the first part starts with a description of the palace which was built by the Mongolian ruler Kubla Khan and the second part is about a vision of a woman.”To nature” is shorter poem but more direct and easier to understand.

These first lines show how huge the opium effect actually was, because he dreamed of a pleasure dome that was supposed to be built. He was just dreaming about an opium house where everything around it is close to perfection regarding the description of the nature and where he put his imaginary dome. The river is a picture of huge amounts of opium oozing from the dome and running through some caverns that ordinary people did not see relating to opium as some kind of deity because according to the lines it is beyond the mankind.

Join now!

„In Xanadu did Kublai Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man.

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 “(1-9)

This calming image from the first part suddenly becomes more extreme and it is disturbed in the second stanza. Dark and mystical images appear and change the mood of the poem completely regarding the first part. I think this happened because he suffered from opium crisis because he ran out of ...

This is a preview of the whole essay