According to Coleridge's Preface to "Kubla Khan", the poem was composed one night after he

experienced an opium-influenced dream after reading a work describing Xanadu, the summer palace of
the Mongol ruler and Emperor of China Kublai Khan.

The poem begins with the description of an extraordinary piece of architecture, ‘A stately pleasure-
dome’, of the despotic monarch, Kubla Khan. Coleridge’s Khan is a kind of artist, summoning into
being with a God-like command not only the beauty of the pleasure-dome but the ordered loveliness
of its cultivated gardens, full of sweet smells and tinkling streams, all sheltered from the outside
world by robust ‘walls and towers’

The second verse then turns to picture that outside world, which it places in stark antithesis to the
pleasures of the garden: ‘But oh!’ Outside, nature is exuberant, tumultuous, violent, ‘savage’, full of
erotic feeling (‘woman wailing for her demon-lover’), and punctuated chiefly by exclamation marks (l.
12; l. 14; l. 16). The energy of the scene is superbly conveyed through breathless, on-running
sentences, and the verse comes to a close with a vivid sense of that energy’s potential for
destruction: ‘And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far / Ancestral voices prophesying war!’

In the final stanza the poet speaks directly in the first person. Here he reveals his once-seen vision
of an enigmatic ‘damsel’, playing on a musical instrument, and singing about ‘Mount Abora’ or, as
Coleridge originally had it, ‘Mount Amara’, one of the candidates for the site of Paradise that Milton
mentions in Paradise Lost. The damsel is a figure of poetic inspiration, but her powers are evoked
here only to be felt missing: were she to sing, the poet would then be able to recreate the dome and
its landscape; but the conditional mood of the lines (‘Could I…’, ‘I would…’) conveys this to be a wish
rather than any realised achievement. Harold Bloom suggests that the power of the poetic
imagination, stronger than nature or art, fills the narrator and grants him the ability to share this
vision with others through his poetry. The narrator would thereby be elevated to an awesome, almost
mythical status, as one who has experienced an Edenic paradise available only to those who have
similarly mastered these creative powers.

Coleridge ends his poem on an unexpectedly ambiguous note, with the triumphant act of creativity
that one might reasonably have thought he had just witnessed turning out to be deferred to another
day and more propitious circumstances. Coleridge’s attitude towards his ‘Kubla Khan’ is
correspondingly hard to pin down. He did not print the poem for years, and when finally he did
publish it, in 1816, he added a preface which described it as a mere ‘psychological curiosity’ and told
an elaborate story about its composition.

The complexity of the poem makes it difficult to fully believe that “Kubla Khan” is nothing more than the
remnant of a half-remembered dream. The thematic repetition, intricacy of rhyme and metrical schemes,
as well as the carefully juxtaposed images beautifully “harmonize and support” the poem’s purpose and
theme. In “Kubla Khan,” Coleridge has created more than simple lyric poetry. He has fulfilled his poetic
ideal of a harmonious blend of meaning and form, which results in a “graceful and intelligent whole.”
Critic Humphry House feels that "it is exactly the coherence, unity and strength of 'Kubla Khan' that are
striking: and that they would never have been doubted but for Coleridge's unnecessary confession about
the dream.” It is hard to think of a poem that sounds more utterly completed when we arrive at its last
lines (‘And drank the milk of Paradise’); but then, as the distinguished scholar John Beer once remarked,
‘One can continue a poem in the middle .. as well as at the end’.