Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"

Original Poem: http://etext.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/poems/Kubla_Khan.html


A Poem Within the Poem:

Kubla Khan ran through caverns measureless to man,
down to a sunless sea. Five miles of fertile ground
were bright with sinuous rills,
where blossomed

spots of greenery. That romantic chasm
slanted down a savage place, as if this earth
in fast thick pants were breathing. A fountain was

forced amid fragments vaulted like hail, and
amid these rocks, the sacred river ran,
then reached the caverns measureless to man,

and sank in tumult to an ancestral ocean.
Kubla heard voices prohesying the dome of pleasure
from the fountain and the caves:

"Could I revive her symphony and song,
that with music loud and long,
I would build
that dome in air, weave a circle
with that sunny hair, floating and flashing
the honeydew milk of Paradise."