Kubla Khan - Sources

Sources

There are many sources attributed to Kubla Khan for the style, imagery, and topic. Of the sources, Coleridge was influenced by the surrounding of Culbone Combe and its hills, gulleys, and other features including the "mystical" and "sacred" locations in the region. He admitted that he was directly influenced by Purchas's Pilgrimage, but there are additional strong literary connections to other works, including John Milton's Paradise Lost, Samuel Johnson's Rasselas, Chatterton's African Eclogues, William Bartram's Travels through North and South Carolina, Thomas Burnet's Sacred Theory of the Earth, Mary Wollstonecraft's A Short Residence in Sweden, Plato's Phaedrus and Ion, Maurice's The History of Hindostan, and Heliodorus's Aethiopian History. The poem also contains allusions to the Book of Revelation in its description of New Jerusalem and to the paradise of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. As for specific places, the main character is Kublai Khan the Tartar king from China, the river is Alpheus in Greece and is similar to the Nile, and the Abyssinian woman sings of Mount Amara, and the caves are like those in Kashmir. Also, the name "Alph" could connect to the idea of being an alpha or original place. The sources used for Kubla Khan are also those used in Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Much of the poem could have been influenced by Coleridge's opium dream or, as his friend and fellow poet Robert Southey joked, "Coleridge had dreamed he had written a poem in a dream". If Coleridge's dream did originate ideas within the poem, then the dreams are related to those experienced by contemporary opium eaters and writers, Thomas de Quincey and Charles Pierre Baudelaire. It is possible that the dream affected Coleridge's later mood and caused him to enter into a depression, influencing the ideas in his writing that followed the dream night. Of these ideas, Coleridge's emphasised the vastness of the universe and his feeling overwhelmed by how little the universe seemed to him. Also, Charles Lamb provided Coleridge on 15 April 1797 with a copy of his "A Vision of Repentance", a poem that discussed a dream containing imagery similar to those in Kubla Khan. The poem could have provided Coleridge with the idea of a dream poem that discusses fountains, sacredness, and even a woman singing a sorrowful song. The poem's use of original names and disorganised use of action can also be attributed to an opium induced state of mind. In terms of spelling, Coleridge's printed version differs from Purchas's spelling, which refers to the Tartar ruler as "Cublai Can", and from the spelling used by Milton, "Cathaian Can". His original manuscript (as reproduced above) spells the name "Cubla Khan" and the place "Xannadu".

The Abyssinian maid is derived from many figures in Coleridge's life, including women who Coleridge admired in some way: Charlotte Brent, Catherine Clarkson, Mary Morgan, and Dorothy Wordsworth. Although Asra/Hutchinson is similar to the way Coleridge talks about the Abyssinian maid, Hutchinson was someone he met after writing Kubla Khan. The person who was the closest match to the figure was Evans, the subject of Coleridge's Lewti. The poem's claim that the narrator would be inspired to act if the song of the maid could be heard was a belief that Coleridge held regarding Evans after she become unattainable to him.