Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [195]
“In consequence of a slight indisposition,” he continues, “an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence…in ‘Purchas His Pilgrimage’”—the chronicle published in 1613 by Samuel Purchas, which incorporated broad swaths of Marco’s book. “In Xanadu did Cublai Can build a stately palace,” wrote Purchas, never imagining he would inspire some of the most famous words in English poetry, words that would be attributed to someone else, “encompassing sixteen miles of plain grounde with a wall, wherein are fertile Meadows, pleasant Springs, delightful Streames, and all sort of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure, which may be removed from place to place…Here the Kubla Khan commanded a palace to be built, and stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed within a wall.”
After reading those words, Coleridge passed three hours “in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses.” It seemed to him that while he drowsed, his unconscious mind composed “two to three hundred lines” of verse “without any sensation or consciousness of effort.” When he roused himself from his drug-induced stupor, he “instantly and eagerly” tried to set down as many of these dream verses as he could remember. The phantom verses presumably concerned Kublai Khan, given the material that Coleridge had been reading when he nodded off.
Just then, the infamous “person on business from Porlock” arrived to distract the young poet from his labors. Afterward, the poet, “on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!”
After struggling with his half-forgotten material, stolen as if from a dream, Coleridge commenced writing the first lines of “Kubla Khan”:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
The euphoric mood builds until Coleridge concludes with a warning about the dangers of unrestrained rapture. He imagines others observing him, or a kindred spirit, and crying out:
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.
Coleridge’s harmonious vision of power and space extended so far ahead of its time that almost twenty years passed before he felt ready to publish his poem about “Kubla Khan,” the work that gave the Mongol leader a permanent place in the Western imagination.
Despite the difference in temperament between Marco, the peripatetic merchant, and Coleridge, the neurasthenic poet, the grandeur of the Mongol Empire spoke to them both. Coleridge was no stranger to hallucinations; they served as the source of his poetic visions. Without realizing the true source of his inspiration, he fell under the spell of the Venetian’s hypnotic descriptions, as paraphrased by Samuel Purchas. Marco, for his part, may have become familiar with opium while in Afghanistan, and the drug might have been connected with his illness there. Perhaps both men employed drugs, which would have heightened their perceptions and imparted unnatural vividness to their literary works. As Marco learned to tolerate