Audiobook · read by volunteers
Kubla Khan
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
Read by Alan Clare, Brian Ackermann, Clarica, David Barnes, Arouet, JemmaBlythe, Jc Guan, Jon Scott Jones, Kristine Mackin, Kristin Hughes (1974-2021) · 19 chapters · 55 min
About the book
A stately pleasure-dome in Xanadu, a sacred river running through caverns measureless to man, and a vision that seems to dissolve as soon as it is glimpsed. Coleridge said the poem came to him in a dream and that a visitor interrupted its writing, leaving only a fragment. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan is one of the most famous and mysterious poems in English, short, strange, musical and full of images that refuse to be explained. This collection offers nineteen different readings by LibriVox volunteers, recorded for the weekly poetry project of June 2007. Each reader finds a different music in the lines, from hushed wonder to incantatory power, so that the poem seems to change shape as you listen. Hearing it several times in a row is a good way to feel how its sound works on the ear. An unforgettable hour for lovers of Romantic poetry.
Introduction
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in 1772 and died in 1834. He was an English poet, critic and philosopher, a key figure of the Romantic movement, and a close friend and collaborator of William Wordsworth. His other famous poems include The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel.
Kubla Khan was published in 1816, though it was written many years earlier. Coleridge himself described it as a fragment, the result of a dream or half-dream, interrupted before he could finish writing it down. Some scholars treat this account with caution, but the poem has always been admired for the beauty of its sound and the richness of its imagery. Its subject is the Mongol ruler Kubla Khan, who is imagined as the builder of a pleasure palace at Xanadu, and the closing lines turn to the poet’s own power of imagination.
Because the poem is short and densely musical, it is especially well suited to being heard aloud. This recording belongs to the weekly poetry project of LibriVox, in which volunteers record the same poem so that listeners can compare their versions. The project for the week of June 24th, 2007, brought together nineteen recordings, and the collection has nineteen short tracks adding up to roughly an hour.
You might listen to a single version or move through several, noticing the choices that each reader makes about speed, emphasis and silence. It is a rewarding way to hear one of the most celebrated poems in the language, and a good introduction for those who have not met it before.
Public domain
Samuel Taylor Coleridge died in 1834: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text