Kubla Khan

Sensory imagery is one of poetry’s greatest tools. Writers recreate smells, sounds, sights, textures, and tastes with vivid language, inviting the reader into the experience of the poem. Coleridge packs his description of Xanadu with sensory imagery, particularly visual images to show readers the vision that inspired “Kubla Khan.”

The poem opens with a stanza filled with Kubla Khan’s creation: his palace and its surrounding gardens. A great, calm river winds through the green, hilly terrain and the sizable gardens the Khan planted. The sun shines on the historic land (which suggests heat--a tactile image). An olfactory image, or appeal to the sense of smell, occurs in Line 9 as Coleridge references the blooms of “many an incense-bearing tree.” However, a mysterious force lurks beneath the land: the “caverns measureless to man” (Line 4) appearing throughout the poem.

As Coleridge continues into the second stanza, the images turn more mysterious with the introduction of “that deep romantic chasm” (Line 12). Soon comes an auditory image of “woman wailing for her demon-lover” (Line 16)—a ghostly cry that may foreshadow danger. The poet describes the sound of the fountain as the world panting in anticipation or exertion.