Kubla Kahn

"Kubla Khan: or A Vision in a Dream" (/ˈkuːblə ˈkɑːn/[1]) is a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, completed in 1797 and published in 1816. It is sometimes given the subtitles "A Vision in a Dream" and "A Fragment." According to Coleridge's preface to "Kubla Khan", the poem was composed one night after he experienced an opium-influenced dream after reading a work describing Xanadu, the summer capital of the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty of China founded by Kublai Khan (Emperor Shizu of Yuan). Upon waking, he set about writing lines of poetry that came to him from the dream until he was interrupted by "a person on business from Porlock". The poem could not be completed according to its original 200–300 line plan as the interruption caused him to forget the lines. He left it unpublished and kept it for private readings for his friends until 1816 when, at the prompting of Lord Byron, it was published.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Have you ever heard of Kubla Khan? I bet you have. Well,
did you know that during his rain the Chinese used
lions on hunting expeditions. They didn't like to use hunting
dogs because it were in their lunch. But lions are
trained to act and were dragged down large prey like
wild bulls and bears and stay with the kill until
the hunting party arrived. I wonder how they knew. I mean,

(00:23):
did they sort of telegraph back all, of course, what
do you want? Yeah, twenty minutes in. It's like calling
an uber. Anyway. The Kublers, as they known a lot
of our Kubler's also had hunting leopards for this huge
hunting park in Shangdu. Marco Polo reported that the big

(00:44):
cats were housed indoors with the companion dogs we're not hunting,
in order to keep them calm. There's an old saying
the lamb might lay down with the wolf, but one
of them isn't going to get much sleep,