Coleridge’s curiosity

The first thing to strike a reader about the sole manuscript of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, on show at the Museum of Somerset, Taunton, is that it starts slightly unfamiliarly: “In Xannadù did Cubla Khan...” The lines following are so vivid that the reader might think: “If only Coleridge had told us how he wrote this astonishing stuff.” Well, he did, but few seem to believe him. He had taken an “anodyne” or “two grains of opium to check a dysentery”. After a sleeping vision he began to write, before being interrupted by a “person” from Porlock – when the poem he thought complete in his head melted away. “Cublai” is the spelling in the book by Samuel Purchas that Coleridge was reading. It all fits, and drugs fall short as a poetical shortcut, which may be why Coleridge published the poem as “a psychological curiosity”.