Kubla Khan

In Girl in the Glass, James receives an anonymous postcard with a quatrain including the following line:

“Where Kubla Khan did a stately pleasure-dome decree, find the largest branch on that tree.”

This line references "Kubla Khan" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a poem describing a magnificent palace and its surroundings in Xanadu. The poem describes a "stately pleasure-dome" built by Kubla Khan, surrounded by a fertile landscape, a sacred river (the Alph), and caves. It explores themes of creation, imagination, and the power of the poet's vision, contrasting the idyllic beauty with a sense of wildness and the supernatural. Click here to read the entirety. Below is an excerpt:

“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.”

3 artistic interpretations of Kubla Khan’s Xanadu