aid", wrote Swinburne of Kubla Khan, "that such melodies were never heard, such dreams never dreamed, such speech never spoken, the chief thing remains unsaid, and unspeakable. There is a charm upon [this poem] which can only be felt in silent submission of wonder". Even John Livingston Lowes -- culpable, if ever anyone has been, of murdering to dissect -- insisted on the elusive magic of Coleridge's dream vision: "For Kubla Khan is as near enchantment, I suppose, as we are like to come in this dull world." While one may track or attempt to track individual images to their sources, Kubla Khan as a whole remains utterly inexplicable -- a "dissolving phantasmagoria" of highly charged images whose streaming pagent is, in the final analysis, "as aimless as it is magnificent". The earth has bubbles as the water has, and this is of them. During the past fifty years, however, criticism has been less and less willing to accept the view that Kubla Khan defies rational analysis: the poem, it is widely assumed, must have a meaning, and the purpose of criticism is to discover what that meaning is, or might be. Yet despite this decisive shift in the critical temper, there remain some influential voices to argue for the mystery of Kubla Khan. William Walsh, for example, maintains that it is "an ecstatic spasm, a pure spurt of romantic inspiration"; and Lawrence Hanson treats it as an instance of "pure lyricism -- sound, picture, sensation -- clothed in the sensuous beauty of imagery that none knew so well as its author how to evoke". Elisabeth Schneider, too, suggests that a good part of the poem's charm and power derives from the fact that it is invested with "an air of meaning rather than meaning itself". Such opinions, while they are hardly fashionable in the current critical climate, ought not to be dismissed too lightly or seen to be no more than evasions of critical responsibility. On the contrary, they remind us that no...
