In the poem “Kubla Khan” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the narrator offers a multitude of fantastic images linked to a fictional “pleasure dome” constructed by the Mongolian emperor Kublai Khan. Coleridge said he was unaware of the meaning of the poem, claiming only that it was a fragmented memory of a dream, but an analysis of the poem's symbolic imagery through the lens of psychoanalytic interpretation will show that the poem is a study of the nature of creativity and imagination and the dangers associated with it. This interpretation of the poem takes into account Coleridge's personal psychological profile and gives the poem a more generalized illumination of the human condition. Coleridge's first two stanzas describing the magnificent pleasure dome are not just a description of nature as seen by the romantic. idealistic, but also highlight a worrying flaw in this ideal. Gardens, woods and meadows are all depicted as still. They lack the vital energy that manifests itself in a dynamic setting. Rivers are traditionally symbols of life and vital energy, but the River Alph is depicted as flowing in a set course to a measureless, sunless sea, the water it supplies to the lands around it representing only a fraction of its potential. This image represents a state in which one is doomed to stagnation by one's own system of vision and world order (Lawall 813-815). Within this pleasure dome is an abyss described as “holy and enchanted” but also as “wild”. . Generally, underground spaces refer to the subconscious, and this abyss is such a space. As a crack in the earth, it offers access to something much deeper than the surface reality that orderly gardens and soil offer...... middle of paper ...... is a sacrifice that will be destroyed after only a brief period. Works Cited Allen, NB A Note on Coleridge's "Kubla Khan". The John Hopkins University Press. MLN, Vol. 57, No. 2, February 1942, pp. 108-113. http://0- www.jstor.org.library.uark.edu/stable/2911139Bahti, Timothy Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and the Fragment of Romanticism The John Hopkins University Press, Vol 96, No. 5, Comparative Literature, December. 1981, p. 1035-1050. http://0-www.jstor.org.library.uark.edu/stable/2906232Heninger, SK A Jungian reading of “Kubla Khan.” Blackwell Editions. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 18, no. 3, March 1960, pp. 358-367. http://0-www.jstor.org.library.uark.edu/stable/428160 Lawall, Sarah, ed. The Norton Anthology of World Literature Volume E: Kubla Khan. 2nd. New York, NY: WW Norton and Company, 2002. 813-815. Print.