Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 30 -- Down to a Sunless Sea
Coleridge himself attributes a portion of "Kubla Khan" to
Purchas, his Pilgrimage; or, Relations of the World and the
Religions observed in all Ages (1613) in which Samuel
Purchas recalled the 13-th century Mongolian ruler Kublai,
whose palatial estate in Shangdu (Xanadu) was legendary
in splendor.
In Xanada did Cublai Can build a stately Pallace,
encompassing sixteene miles of plaine ground with a
wall, wherein are fertile Meddows, pleasant Springs,
delightful Streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and
game.
Xanadu was much later to become the name of Charles
Foster Kane's fictional estate in Orson Wells' "Citizen
Kane'" (1940). As would have been the case for the
Chinese Xanadu, the film's surrealistic grounds "on the
deserts of the Gulf coast" could likely sit upon karst terrain
(Chapter 39, Karstology), and thus above water-filled
caverns.
Unlike Purchas before him, however, or Wells after, Coleridge follows the river into the earth.
Into the Earth
Coleridge describes the Alph in four geological manners.
As "momently" (i.e. in an instant) flinging itself upward, tossing rocks about, violent.
As meandering in "mazy motion" through Xanadu's woods and dales,
As descending into "caverns measureless to man," and of special interest to us,
As tributary to a "sunless sea."
As each process has geologic possibility, we're tempted to sketch a hydrologic cross-section, the
subterranean portion downward from the cavern, but such a figure produces a fluvial morphology
in disaccord with that of any waterway we know. Within a brief five-miles, there is both the fearful
upwelling and the idyllic riparian countryside. Streamflow incised in deep canyons doesn't
meander; it tumbles. How can a sea be sunless?
Let us begin with the river's name.
"Alph, the sacred river" likely alludes to the Arcadian River Alpheus of Chapter 28, Et In Arcadia
Ego.
"Alph" could be the Greek letter, alpha, the original place.
According to Maud Bodkin's Archetype Patterns of Poetry (1963), "Alph" signifies the modern
need for "something enormous, ultimate, to express what strove unexpressed within
experience."
The Alph could be life itself, "meandering with a mazy motion" being its twists and turns. Such
interpretation, in fact, subsumes the other three.
Literary scholars, of course, dissect the entire poem word by word, but we will confine our
consideration to the line pertaining to subterranean waters,
Down to a sunless sea
Seemingly so simple. Only five words, six syllables.
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