[audio 1^st paragraph] [zipped] A lot of students who read Coleridge's "Kubla Kahn" find themselves scratching their heads over what this work could possibly be about.  So if you have been staring at "In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn / A stately pleasure dome decree" and trying for all your worth to hammer out a single definitive explanation about what is going on let me cue you in. . .FORGET IT!

One of the worst things to try and do with this work is to attempt to pin it down.  "Kubla Khan" is meant to be nebulous and in some ways indefinable.  Trying to push it into a single meaning is like trying to determine what particular elements found within a blazing sunset give it its stunning effect.  Like any aesthetic experience, it is the overall collective event not the particular shade of color which defines a sunset.

This is a poem about an aesthetic experience.

[audio 2^nd paragraph] [zipped] "No it isn't," I hear you say, "It's about some building."  Well, yes that's true.  It starts off describing a descendent of Ghegus Khan--Kubla was a historical figure--ordering a new pleurae castle.  However, even that is significant.  The stricture being described is one for pleasure, it is being created as a thing of beauty not as a practical fortification for war, as would have Ghegus Khan's usual choice:

In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But O! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this Earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A might fountain momently was forced,
Amid whose swift half-intermitted bursts
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
On chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.

[Audio 4^th Paragraph] [Zipped] The environment is still breathtakingly beautiful, but it is untamable, savage.  And although the poet never says there is a moon haunted by the wails of a woman for her demon lover (a terrible and fascinating image), the place contains that kind of archetypal "potentancy."  It literally breaths with a fountain that blows up boulders as easily as if they were chaff before a thresher.

The poet then brings together the savage landscape with the wonderfully beautiful construction of the palace by connecting them with the sacred river:

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion,
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man.
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:  . . .
(Two lines removed from here by Prof. Rearick, who will explain later.)

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.

And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
(These were lines removed  by Prof. Rearick, earlier.)

[Audio 5^th Paragraph] [Zipped] The last couple of lines emphasize the transitory nature by the images used to describe the whole artistic endeavor:

It was a miracle of rare device.
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

The poem shifts in details here (like a dream or a vision) and describes something the narrator says he once saw:

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssian maid.
And on her dulcimer she played.
Singing of mount Abora.

[Audio 6^th Paragraph] [Zipped] Where is Mount Abora?  I haven't a clue. . .yet.  But it is not that important.  In fact none of the actual physical details in this poem are overly important.  If you were to try, and scholars have, to actually construct a physical representation in cyber space of the pleasure dome as it is described in the poem, you would find that although it sort of makes sense in words it can not be fully realized in our three dimensional geometry.  What we have with the Abssian maid is another vision of fantastic beauty which is here and gone and only a show of it remains.  Notice how the poet laments his weak ability to recapture this vision of beauty:

Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song.
To such a deep delight 'twould win me

That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air.
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there.
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

I would note that this interpretation of the poem being one about aesthetic vision is given more credence when one reads Coleridge's own claims about "Kubla Khan" in which he dismisses it, of all things, as a curiosity because of its incompleteness (Notes) .  However the entire narrative describing the creation of the poem is one describes a vision which is grasped for a moment and then, to the poet's dismay, lost forever.  Thus, the final emotion experienced in both the poem and the poet's own note is that of longing for a more perfect manifestation of the poetic vision.  Personally I think Coleridge is pulling our leg.  "Kubla Khan" is not a fragment: it expresses the incomplete nature of us all to perceive and express the divine vision of poetry.