What do you think Kubla Khan is about? What is its theme?

The unnamed speaker of the poem tells of how a man named Kubla Khan traveled to the land of Xanadu. In Xanadu, Kubla found a fascinating pleasure-dome that was “a miracle of rare device” because the dome was made of caves of ice and located in a sunny area. The speaker describes the contrasting composition of Xanadu. While there are gardens blossoming with incense-bearing trees and “sunny spots of greenery,” across the “deep romantic chasm” in Xanadu there are “caverns measureless to man” and a fountain from which “huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail.” Amid this hostile atmosphere of Nature, Kubla also hears “ancestral voices prophesying war.” However, Kubla finds relief from this tumultuous atmosphere through his discovery of the miraculous sunny pleasure-dome made of ice.

In the last stanza of the poem, the narrator longs to revive a song about Mount Abora that he once heard a woman play on a dulcimer. The speaker believes that the song would transport him to a dream world in which he could “build that dome in air” and in which he can drink “the milk of Paradise.”

In Coleridge’s poems, sleep and dreams offer a portal to experiencing happiness and ecstasy. In “Kubla Khan,” the dream-world of Xanadu offers fantastical features of nature such as a “sunny pleasure-dome.”

The power of the imagination is a familiar motif in several of Coleridge’s poems. In “Kubla Khan,” Coleridge explores the fantastical creations of the imagination. The imagination is connected to nature and to childhood in Coleridge's works. Kubla Khan's "stately pleasure dome" is a thing of imagination, but the reader knows this primarily because it is an inconceivable juxtaposition of natural elements (caves of ice over an underground sunless sea).