Kubla Khan

[ koo-bluh kahn ]

Phonetic (Standard)IPA

noun

“Kubla Khan”

An evocative poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge about an exotic emperor. It begins with these lines: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree….”

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Another strangely beautiful poem, Kubla Khan—which came to him, he said, in sleep—is even more fragmentary.

Kubla Khan, with its slumberous melody and vague music, embodies the Asiatic sentiment.

Kubla Khan went unfinished because the call of a friend broke the thread of the reverie in which it was composed.

Marco Polo returned to the court of Kubla-Khan when he had finished the expedition of which we spoke in the last chapter.

Coleridge says that he wrote his Kubla Khan from his recollection of a dream.

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