Kubla Khan Analysis

Welcome to the land of symbols, imagery, and wordplay. Before you travel any further, please know that there may be some thorny academic terminology ahead. Never fear, Shmoop is here. Check out our...

Rhyming Iambic Meter Iambic just means that the poem is made up of lots of two-syllable units, in which the stress is placed on the second syllable. The lines also rhyme, although maybe not in the...

We think the speaker of this poem sounds like he's trying to impress a crowd. He would be right at home at a circus or a magic show. He could even be a con artist, performing card tricks on the str...

Xanadu, during the reign of Mongol emperor Kubla KhanColeridge has a lot to say about the setting of this poem. He devotes many lines to describing the landscape, the caverns, and the sea. That wor...

This poem sounds to us like a symphony orchestra. It has all kinds of different sounds, movements and tones. When the river is crashing through the caves, we imagine the pounding of kettledrums. Li...

The main title of this poem is just plain "Kubla Khan." It's a pretty great name, isn't it? Sounds tough, mysterious, and exotic. We're willing to bet that Coleridge wanted that name to echo in a b...

Natural DramaThe speaker of this poem finds a lot of dramatic material in nature. He's totally captivated by the power he sees in the natural world. This is pretty typical for Coleridge. His poems...

(5) Tree Line.This poem falls right in the middle on the Tough-O-Meter. It's not going out of its way to make things hard for you, but there are a lot of tricky words and strange images to wade thr...

Coleridge had a close but sometimes rocky friendship with the poet William Wordsworth. They collaborated on a collection of poems called the Lyrical Ballads, one of the big achievements of English...

GThere may not be any sex here, but there are plenty of disturbing images. What about all the intense imagery, and the "fast thick pants" and the Abyssinian maid, and the story about all the opium...

Literature, Philosophy, and Mythology River Alph (line 3) Abyssinia (line 39)Historical ReferencesXanadu (line 1)Kubla Khan (title, line 1, line 29)